Geislingen: Does the past exist, if no one remembers it?

Europe 2022

ENN RAUDSEPP

On the morning of May 22, bypassing Stuttgart, the regional capital of Baden- Württemburg and its largest city, also the headquarters of Mercedes-Benz and Porsche, we took the most direct route to Geislingen an der Steige, the small town where I had spent nearly three of my earliest years in a refugee camp after WW II.

(“Steige” can be translated as “steep incline,” and is a reference to an important trade route from the five lower valleys up to the plateau of the Swabian Jura mountains that has connected the Rhine Valley to the Mediterranean since the fifth century.)

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The Geislingen cemetery where a memorial commemorates the 154 Estonians whose life-journey ended there. The monument, designed by Estonians, was erected in 1949, the year before the camp closed.