Sigrid Jekutsch with her two younger brothers in the early 1940s. Source: Dylan Mohan Gray family photo. Some rights reservedThis is a photo of my mother, born Sigrid Jekutsch, as a small girl with her two younger brothers, Reinhard and Friedrich-Karl, near their childhood home, the beachside hamlet (pop. 844 in 1939) of Groß Kuhren, Ostpreußen (East Prussia), on the Baltic coast.
My mother was born into a well-off family in a notably harmonious, reasonably prosperous, multicultural and multilingual corner of Europe. Lutherans, Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Jews lived alongside one another, speakers of German, Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Yiddish, Belarussian and Russian. The charming, cultured city of Königsberg, which had joined the Hanseatic League in 1340 and been a centre of European intellectual life even before the Albertina University was founded there in 1544, was located closeby. The 18th century had been dubbed the “Königsberg Century of Enlightenment”, and the city was an internationally-renowned centre of philosophy and mathematics, home to brilliant minds such as Kant, Herder and Hamann...
My great-grandmother was Jewish, and following the maternal bloodline my mother and her siblings were considered to be Jews as well, though raised very much as Lutherans like their father and grandfather. My grandmother, the oldest of sixteen children, had incensed her wealthy landowning parents by marrying the ‘unsuitable’ teacher of the family-run school, though later this union proved more than fortuitous, as in his position as a high-ranking Luftwaffe (air force) officer he was able to obtain false documents for numerous members of the family, thus helping them avoid persecution (and worse) under the Nuremberg Laws. Nonetheless, my mother remembered being the object of occasional anti-semitic slurs and remarks, such as when once when she was perhaps all of five years old she saw the local ferry she took to get home beginning to pull away from the riverbank as she approached, and called out to the boatman, whom she knew well, to wait for her. “Stop squealing like a bloody pig, you filthy little Jew,” came the not-so-friendly reply.
