Talking with survivors

There is so much I want to know, which is why I joined this site. My grandfather is a nearly 93-year-old, Army veteran. My grandmother is a just-about 90-year-old German native. My grandmother, fortunately, did not experience the trauma and tragedies the rest of her family did because she was sent to care for cousins in Denmark. This causes her so much grief, because while she was full, healthy, and protected in Denmark, her parents and siblings were losing everything, being beaten, raped, and murdered by the Polish and Russians. I believe she suffers survivor's guilt because of this.

She seldom talks about it, and I don't blame her. But ever since I was nine-years-old, and she "shared" (it was more of what I now consider a PTSD type outburst) a brief bit about things she had seen, I have longed to know more.

Does anyone have tips as to how one can gently approach the topics and questions? I hate to upset her in any way. And I am fairly certain I will never know, but I would like to know what our family went through.

I was hoping to get somewhere the last time I visited, and I did hear a few things I hadn't before. It was interesting, to me, to hear her say that she learned more about her country after moving to the States than she ever did while she was there. She said she never knew about the camps or what Hitler was doing to the Jews. She knew about the ghettos because her father used to toss sacks of flour and potatoes over the fence when she was a girl.

I wish I could, at very least, find other accounts of Germans who were in camps in Siberia by the Russians. Or whose homes and families were destroyed as theirs was.

 

Here are a couple of topics that should provide you some useful guidance:

Veteran Interview Question Guide

Questions I Should Ask