When Daniel and Victoria Van Beuningen first toured their future home, a quiet villa in the Polish city Wroclaw, it had been abandoned for years, its windows sealed up with bricks. But something about its overgrown garden spoke to them. They could imagine raising chickens there, planting tomatoes and cucumbers. They could make something beautiful out of it, they thought — a place where their children could run and play.
They moved in knowing very little about what happened at the villa before World War II, when Wroclaw, formerly Breslau, was still part of Germany; or what occurred there during the war, when Soviet forces held the city under a brutal siege; or even what became of the house during the war’s aftermath, when hundreds of thousands of local Germans were forcibly resettled from what was now Polish territory. All their neighbors could tell them was that the villa had once housed a Communist newspaper.
Still, the couple wanted to know more, and their inquiries eventually led to the Meinecke family in Heidelberg, Germany, elderly siblings who said they were born in the home. Over a long afternoon, they showed the couple pictures of the place from happier times before the war, but they also offered the Van Beuningens a surprising warning: The couple might find the remains of some German soldiers buried in the garden. Maybe a few, maybe more; they couldn’t be certain.
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