ReimundKrohn
Well-Known Member
Pleased to meet you too! Yes, tracing roots there has been extremely difficult, and both my fathers father and mothers father are from this area.My father was born in Sczeczin, at the time called Stettin, as a 12 year old fled to the Ruhr with family and emigrated to the US in the sixties. He was very proud of the Pommern area. Can’t find a lot of the Krohn name info over there due to losses during the war. Nice to meet you.
The names of 81 Krohns are recorded in the halls of Yad Vashem. Some of these men were WW1 vets, having served faithfully under the Kaiser (how quickly things can change, and a good citizen can be turned into an enemy of the state). On top of that, this part of Europe changed hands numerous times, and quickly. Originally an independent region of a people and language now rendered nearly extinct (Kashubian), Pomeranian borders shifted many times throughout the Middle Ages and later, right down to the close of the war. Not only Poles and Prussians and Germans but Swedes and Danes and even the French (under Napoleon) ruled there. In fact, I have digital copies of the citizenship rolls Napoleon had taken when he granted Jews residing there full citizenship in exchange for registry (for purposes of taxation and the draft). This required the taking of a family name, and there are two Krohn families on those rolls…. Those same records were later used by the Nazis to ferret out the descendents of those first families (each page officially stamped by the Swastika, seized by the state for just that purpose). Pomerania was, consequently, the very first region declared “Juden-frei”. In Feb of 1940 1300 of the Jewish descended families in Stettin were rounded up in the middle of the night; even from the hospitals and nursing homes - even those who were “fully aryan”, or Christian - and loaded on a train bound for the Lublin area. From the train station they were force marched in -20F weather 30 km to the ghetto in Lublin proper, through snow two feet deep. 70 succumbed to the cold enroute, even children.
It is a part of the world I should still like to see, if I could. I have seen the pictures of graves and towns there where family has resided - not pictures from family, as all that was lost - but what I have uncovered through digital sleuthing. Records, articles, images, of a time long past that we will never again see. A “forgotten nation”, to quote one author (Kriwaczek).
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