On March 6th, Club member Lothar Trinogga talked to us about a recent visit he made to trace his ancestry.

Lothar was born in Leverkusen, a city to the North of Cologne, Germany. His great grandfather was a farmer only 20 miles from the Russian Border, near the town of Treuberg (East Prussia), renamed Olecko (Poland) after WW2 when the area was divided between Poland and Russia. This made tracing people and places much more complex.

The old farmhouse was gone, but from photographs he was able to identify the location precisely, and he found a neglected family graveyard with gravestones for his great grandparents.

Lothar related the amazing escape of his father, a soldier fighting for Germany in WW2, from an advancing Russian army. He walked 1000 kms alone, south to Cologne, arriving in an emaciated condition unrecognisable to Lothar’s grandfather. All his father’s colleagues died in the Russian prison camps.