Sons / Söhne

A story about five sons and their lives.

A German-Polish family story stretching from the post-war period to the present day.

Brothers Klaus, Wolf, Friedrich and Rainer Paetzold were born close to Danzig in West Prussia between 1938 and 1944. Fleeing the Red Army in 1945, their mother managed to escape to the West with her two elder sons. She left her two younger sons with their grandparents.

Directly after the war ended, their mother returned to Poland to search in vain for her two missing sons. Following months of imprisonment, she finally returned to Germany in 1947 with what she believed to be her youngest son Rainer. But in 1959, when it emerged that her real son was living with a foster family in Danzig, it became clear that there had been a mix-up concerning ‚Rainer‘. In 1977, the real son settled in what was then Western Germany.

In 1955, the second-youngest son, then 13 years old, was discovered living with foster mother in Warsaw under the name Stanislaw Loskiewicz. He is still living in Warsaw today.

Their mother died in 1998.