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She researched her grandfather's life story and wrote a book about it.
On Saturday Julia Gilfert read from it in the Thomahaus.
© Elfriede Peil
Julia Gilfert wrote a book about her grandfather, a victim of National Socialism.
She now read from it in Dachau on Remembrance Day.
Dachau – Julia Gilfert reads from her book “Heaven Full of Silence”: how her grandfather died in a mental institution at the age of 32.
On the occasion of the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of National Socialism, she was a guest at the Ludwig Thoma House at the invitation of the city of Dachau.
Around 60 visitors came to the reading.
Julia Gilfert talks about her dream the night before her 18th birthday
She reads in a gentle but clear voice.
She reads in such a way that everyone listens spellbound.
It is absolutely silent in the hall.
You don't dare cough.
Julia Gilfert talks about her dream the night before her 18th birthday.
Then she sees her grandfather Walter Frick in front of her.
He looks good, with a white bow tie and a fine shirt.
She never met this man.
All she knows is that he died at just 32 years old.
In 1941. And now in this dream he congratulates her on her 18th birthday, the first in the family.
In 2011.
This encounter won't let her go.
And she talks about it “in this special place, on this special day,” as she says.
In Dachau.
On January 27th, the day of the liberation of Auschwitz, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
So far, survivors and contemporary witnesses had spoken on this day.
According to Mayor Florian Hartmann, this is hardly possible anymore, so now the “second and third generations have their say”.
In times when anti-Semitic positions are spreading across the population, the fight against racism and nationalism must be waged even stronger and more decisively.
Even through such memories.
For a long time, Walter Frick was not an issue in the family
Julia Gilfert reports on this.
She asks her father: “What actually happened to your father?” He would have been in a hospital in Berlin and died there.
About what?
You don't know that.
But Julia Gilfert wants to know.
She looks for and finds folders and postcards from her grandparents in the attic at home, rummages through archives, has an entire diary of her great-aunt transcribed and read by steno, and talks to scientists.
And after years of silence, the family is finally talking about Walter Frick.
He was born in Zweibrücken, Palatinate in 1908, was a composer and conductor and married the soprano Luise Frölich.
They have two children.
After a few successes and happy years, my career goes downhill.
Walter Frick doesn't get the job the opera house promised him.
Applications to other institutions remain hopeless.
When he suffers a nervous breakdown, his sister Hedwig's husband, high-ranking SS officer Armin Beilhack, forcibly commits him to a mental institution in Bernau near Berlin.
At the time of the Nazi euthanasia program, it was a certain death sentence, as Julia Gilfert writes.
He dies there after six months.
While the death certificate claims the cause of death was depression and exhaustion, it can be assumed that the true cause was an overdose of morphine (or a comparable drug).
The author does not want to watch helplessly that such inhumanity could happen again.
She quotes Erich Kästner: “You can’t wait until the snowball has turned into an avalanche.” For Julia Gilfert this means: “We have to be loud together.
This creates heat and causes the snowball to melt.”
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