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Frank Höhne / SPIEGEL history
Not for a moment in his life did my father's prison years end the day he was released from prison.
He was taken prisoner by the Soviets and was imprisoned in Bautzen after the end of the war.
Still, that's not just his story.
It is the story of the aftermath of a war on the following generation.
The stories told by my father, Rolf Justin, born in Schwerin in 1927, who died in 2000, are inextricably linked to my memories of him.
Dark years of imprisonment unite us.
The writer Jorge Luis Borges opined that truth is not what happened, but what we think happened.
There is history, what is in books, what research records.
And there are the stories that families tell about the past.
Stories that are not always identical to those of the historians, but which develop a life of their own through experiences, memories, through life.
Just like my father's story.
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