My grandfather's half-brother, and my great-uncle, was Peter Kornicker, born in 1917 in Breslau to my great-grandfather Georg and his first wife, Herta (née Cohen). His mother died in 1919 when he was just a year old. Peter was lined up to work in the family law firm, but with the situation in Germany growing increasingly difficult he left Breslau in 1937, travelling to the Netherlands to attend a…

A recent attempt to learn more about the fate of my great-grandparents, Georg and Else, led to the Arolsen Archives and the discovery of a Red Cross Enquiry made by my grandfather in 1946, when he was 20 years old. This is a single-page tracing request with scant information, and yet is a deeply human, personal document that carries within its bureaucratic form a suggestion of my grandfather's gri…

I recently re-read Robert Roberts' classic, The Classic Slum. There's a passage in the text that I've included below that I think stands as one of the most quietly devastating pieces of moral realism in twentieth-century British writing – an example of working-class self-critique that reveals how deprivation, fear and ignorance can deform empathy, yet also how individual acts of kindness can quiet…

My great-aunt Barbara (Bärbel) was 16 when she wrote this piece and would have recently begun her studies at Stamford High School, following her escape from Nazi Germany via Kindertransport in May 1939. Her and my 14-year-old grandfather arrived at Harwich on 18 May 1939, having travelled from Breslau, presumably via Berlin and the Hook of Holland. They stayed a few days at the Butlin's holiday ca…

Just off Ślężna in Wrocław, between the University of Economics and Aquapark, is a strange topographical feature that rises 140 metres above sea level in a city that's otherwise very flat. Wzgórze Andersa is laid out in four tiers, has a kind of parkour gym near the bottom, a pump track at the top, and when you get up close you can tell that the entire hill is formed of millions of broken bricks. I…