Tourgasm with Pecos, part III: Głuchołazy (Bad Ziegenhals)

On May 30, 1928, my grandfather, Heinz Grüttner, was born in a small town of about 8,000 on the German-Czech border. His mother was an 18-year-old girl named Maria (nee Grundei) who, about nine months earlier, had started a relationship with a man named Franz Grüttner. Together, the three of them started a life together in the town, called Bad Ziegenhals.
Much like Germany itself, this small town had seen its ups and downs. At the time, it was the end of the “Golden Era” for the Weimar Republic, Germany’s post-WWI attempt to establish a free and liberal democracy. Civil conflict and inflation were rising. And this town was also in a trough.
Like the boom towns of Eureka, California, and Skagway, Alaska, Bad Ziegenhals was built up thanks to gold. In the 16th and 17th centuries, this green valley town near the foothills of the Giant and Jizera mountains became the hotspot for those trying to strike it rich. For a short period, the town ebbed in popularity and commerce. Gold was limited, though, and the attention paid to this town after other, neighboring towns were found to be closer to the action ceased.

During the 19th centuries and the advent of better roads and trains, the rich in Europe started to travel. Tourism at the time was devoted to spa resort towns where the healing powers of the naturally occurring hot springs acted as the snake oil of the time, curing all that ailed you.

Bad Ziegenhals’ locals picked up on this notion and exploited their own city’s hot springs to wealthy foreign travelers, once again building the city up to its gold rush popularity.

Money and visitors flowed in and it seemed this town could once again be put on maps. However, World War I and the ensuing recession halted those dreams and put this boom-and-bust town into an accustomed, disheartening gloom.

When Heinz was little and growing up in this town, he did the things normal kids did. He went to school, played outside, and occasionally griped about going to church. During the winters, when the snow on the nearby mountains looked too tempting to pass up, he skipped school with his brother and friends, waxed down his skis, and trudged up the desolate mountain, probably getting a good four or five runs in before dinner. During the summer of his childhood, he’d play soccer near the high wall that separated Germany from Czechoslovakia, periodically kicking the ball over the wall by accident and hoping that the Czech kids would toss it back. When he was older, he worked on a farm in the mountains, having to haul fresh milk and produce down into his town. He probably got into a fight, kissed a couple girls, and had a pretty normal life.
There was another side to Heinz’s life, though. His first memories of moving pictures most likely surrounded the ascent of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in 1933. This was big news not only in this fortified Prussian frontier town where German Army border guards were most likely a common sight, but around the world, where the furor for Der Führer was just starting to grow.

In the mid- to late-1930s, when Heinz was in his formative years, the growing strength of the German Army heartened many proud Germans in this town, as this meant security from foreign invaders. He probably felt that. No more worrying about the nearby Czech and Polish contingents.

There’s also no doubt that the antagonizing older children in the town bullied younger kids like Heinz if they weren’t “cool” and down with the increasingly militaristic and anti-Semitic doctrine the Hitler Youth organization was putting out. Whether he was wrapped up in the fanciful idea of the Aryan superman or whether he was drafted into it, my grandfather became aligned with the Hitler Youth doctrine around the same time the war started. He was probably taught weapons training, survival strategies, and basic assault routines. He was probably also roughed up by older boys who believed tormenting the younger kids would either harden them or weed them out.

Eventually, around the time the American and Russian cross hairs on Hitler’s regime were just starting to come into focus, he was promoted to the level of a real soldier and was tasked with experimenting with a new type of airplane called a glider. With a flight pin and a slap on the back, this young 16-year-old kid from a small town on the German-Czech border was now a glider pilot.

Practice he did. But whether he flew any actual missions before the end of the war, I don’t know. I do know that after the war ended and the Germans were expelled from their homes by the invading Russian Army, he gave up his soldier status and moved west, meeting my Oma several years later at the Fliegerhorst Kaserne in Hanau, Germany – only about one hour away from Wiesbaden.
Today, Bad Ziegenhals (which translates into Bath Goat Neck) is called Głuchołazy. Like Wrocław there are no German speakers left. There are only Poles. One of the first stops in the town was the cemetery. Although I don’t know for how many generations my family had been living there (was my great-great-great-great-great grandfather a gold miner?), I was hoping to find a headstone or some sort of marker with the name Grüttner or Grundei. But there were only Polish graves from the 1940s on.

As this town served no significant purpose during the war, many old buildings still remain – derelict today only because of abandonment and poverty.
The church my Opa went to is still there, I’m told by his sister, Anneliesa, who now lives in Mülheim a.d. Ruhr, about two and a half hours north of here. As is the school and the building they grew up in. In fact, other than the damage caused by 50 years of communist neglect, things are probably the same. Anneliesa, who is younger by about four years, said she has a school friend who still (or again?) lives in the town. Although we attempted to call this friend to see if she tell us more about the lives of the little Grüttner kids, she wasn’t available. Perhaps next time.