ALEKSANDROW KUJAWSKI, Poland, Aug 24, 2008 (AFP) - Six decades after World War II, the wounds of the conflict are still raw in much of Europe.
One of those trying to heal them is Gustav Bekker, 71, a Polish-born German whose own history is a snapshot of the painful era.
Bekker's father, an ethnic German shoemaker, was killed by Poland's communist security forces in 1945. His body was never found.
"Maybe he's in the garden next to the mill where German civilians were held, or maybe in a quarry," Bekker told AFP in near-perfect Polish.
For the past decade Bekker, who lives near Dresden in eastern Germany, has returned regularly to his former homeland in a personal drive to reconcile long-time enemies.
On Saturday in Aleksandrow Kujawski, his old home town 200 kilometres (120
miles) northwest of Warsaw, unveiled a memorial to his father and dozens of other ethnic Germans killed there.
Bekker has already put up a similar memorial in nearby Potulice, the site of a camp where he was held as a child, and at Nieszawa, where ethnic German civilians were drowned by their Polish captors.
Moves to remember German war victims are rare in Poland.
The country remains traumatised by the Nazi occupation which claimed five million lives, including the three million Polish Jews who perished in the Holocaust.
Many Germans, meanwhile, remember hundreds of thousands of compatriots who died as millions were expelled from territory in eastern Europe lost after the Nazis' defeat.
Bekker's memorial project is a symbol of unity in mourning.
He paid for the six-metre (20-foot) cross, a local craftsman made the
German- and Polish-inscribed plaque, the mayor covered the construction costs and local resident Malgorzata Cilke offered part of her garden next to the mill.
The memorial plaque does not cast blame, reading simply: "In memory of the innocent German victims who lost their lives in 1945 in the mill".
"I didn't need the word 'murdered'. This is fine," said Bekker.
Cilke, 62, whose own father was held in a German concentration camp, said even the chosen wording would have been impossible before Poland's communist regime fell in 1989.
"In communist propaganda, calling Germans 'victims' was banned. Only Poles could be victims," she explained.
"We need to remember all the victims, to reveal the hidden truth, even if it's hard and shameful," she added.
The Bekkers were typical ethnic Germans in what had been the borderland of the German Empire and Tsarist Russia, which carved up Poland in the 18th century.
Aleksandrow Kujawski, on the Russian side, became part of newly-independent Poland after World War I.
Everything changed in 1939, when Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler invaded Poland.
"Before World War II, we were Polish citizens who had been living in Poland for generations. So we'd never voted for Hitler, and we never asked him to come here," said Bekker.
By default, ethnic Germans became citizens of the Nazi Third Reich, which classed Poles and Jews as "subhumans".
Some backed the Nazis, but not all.
However, as the Soviet army swept the Nazis from Poland in 1944-1945 and imposed communist rule, ethnic Germans were labelled "enemies of the people"
and detained.
The eight-year-old Bekker was forced to wear clothes daubed with swastikas, and was abused as a "little Hitler" by Polish children when he was sent to work on a farm.
"Every German was seen as a Nazi occupier and responsible for wartime
atrocities," explained Andrzej Ciesla, the town's mayor.
Bekker's father was arrested in January 1945 by a Soviet officer and the Polish communist police and sent to the mill.
"The guards at the mill were drifters, criminals and drunks who had free rein," said Ciesla.
Bekker said: "At night, the guards picked their victims. On February 14, 1945, it was the turn of my father and another German, who somehow survived."
Bekker, his mother and sister were held until 1948 in a former Nazi camp at Potulice, where several thousand German civilians died of ill-treatment, hunger and disease.
They were stripped of their Polish citizenship and expelled to their "homeland" in Germany.
"To the end of her days, my mother kidded herself, hoping my father was still alive somewhere in Siberia. She thought the Poles would never have been able to kill that humble shoemaker whose shoes many of them wore," Bekker said.
Polish historian Witold Stankowski said tens of thousands of ethnic Germans perished between 1945 and 1950 in 1,035 Polish camps.
But he underlined that millions died in the 5,800 camps and Jewish ghettos set by the Nazis in occupied Poland.
Bekker also wants to pay homage to Polish victims.
Back in Dresden, he is planning a memorial to a group of Polish women from the anti-Nazi resistance who were guillotined there.
