The Blunks, a poor family with many children lived in Danzig, a German city. On 31st August 1939, behind their house, they experienced the beginning of the Second World War. The eldest son Paul, eager to escape his alcoholic, brutal father, voluntary joined the SS-Danzig Home Guard. After Poland was occupied by Germans, the Blunks had to move to Poland, where they received their own estate. The family lived "in paradise" until the end of the war, when the terrible deportation and murder of the former Polish landowners and the Polish "intelligenzia" began. In 1945, the family had to leave their farm in Adamowo. They fled in the winter with nine children and two horse-drawn carts from Poland as far as Malente, near Lübeck in northern Germany. From 1946, the family lived in an abandoned Air Force barracks. The narrator, Hedwig, got married. She moved with her husband to Hamburg. Hedwig, born in 1927, describes her experiences before, during and after the war as told to her daughter Marion. In 2014 Marion travelled to Poland trying to find memories of her ancestors.
