My husband’s maternal grandfather, was, per family lore, denounced to the Gestapo in occupied France, maybe even by someone in his own family. He was presumed to have died in Germany. My husband had a childhood memory of someone claiming to have done it, and an old man, maybe the same, telling him to learn Polish. I hadn’t wanted to upset my husband by pursuing it, but he brought it up himself at a family party today. In front of everyone, he googled “Kawucha” and found a Joseph Kawucha who crash-landed in France in 1944. It seemed promising.
Joseph’s plane crash landed not far from where my husband’s family would have been living. He was the right age and was married with one child. But Joseph was a false start; he was Canadian and his family was probably an offshoot of Kawuchas that emigrated from Poland sometime before WWII.
It was tantalizing to think the “cousins” could have met, but real history became more incredible as we went along, fiction was unnecessary. Joseph’s story is worth telling on its own.
But back to the French Kawuchas.
My husband had remembered hearing the name Buchenwald, and there, in French civil records “Deported / Died for France”, was a sole Kawucha, 21 years old and sent to Nordhausen (where Buchenwald was located). Born in Poland, lived in France, died in Germany.
Still, I wanted original sources. Proof. Ironically enough, my first and best evidence came from the Nazis themselves. At the end of WWII, American forces confiscated the very prolific and detailed paperwork not yet destroyed by the Nazis and listed it in the US National Archives.
Edouard wasn’t searchable by name, but by poring over camp records, I finally found his “inmate card” in one of the Buchenwald lists Karp-Kei.
This time, the name of his wife was listed as well as the city where they lived. We had it. His grandfather’s name was Edouard.
We also now knew his inmate number, where and when he was arrested, the names of his parents, and the fact that he had a child, (by deduction, my husband’s mother). His crime was unclear. Being Polish?
Working my way through the German writing, I made some stupid mistakes. His father’s name was Pawel / Paul, not “Waldarb”, which meant “forester”, his profession. Boismorand, also in the “name” field, was the township where they lived.
There was no detailing of Edouard’s fate at that point. Public record showed his death as August of 1944, but I’d yet to find any data, and I worried I might not ever.
All the moves between camps were there. He was transferred to the infamous Mittelbau-Dora labor camp, where prisoners dug tunnels and built V2 bombers. Survival rate there was incredibly low.
I admit I had romantic ideas of him having survived, but they were finally and completely dashed when I found his death records under “Kawncha” instead of “Kawucha”. Edouard survived months after everyone thought. He didn’t die in August of 44; that was when he left France.
When I realized what the dates indicated, I shouted, and my husband came running.
Four days after Edouard was put on a train for Germany, Paris was liberated. I wanted to cry.
That was only one tragedy in a string of bad luck for Edouard. After being worked to near death in Dora, the formerly healthy Edouard was sent to the Boelke-Kaserne “death camp” for the ill and unfit, as the Mittelbau-Dora complex had no ovens or gas chambers. The Germans marked him as having died there in March of 1945, just weeks before Buchenwald’s liberation by the Allies on April 11th.
With one last insult to injury, his body was listed as “unfindable”.
