Undine Whande stand for. When he spoke out about this, saying ‘these methods are like Hitler’s’, he was persecuted by the East German intelligence forces, the so-called Stasi. When he got word one day that he would be arrested that night, he rounded up his family and fled the country for West Germany that very night. Tawana also has a great-grandmother. As far as we know, she did not stand up and protest when her Jewish neighbours began to disappear. She was a person who read the philosophers. She never studied but knew so much. She would stay up late at night with her grandchildren to discuss the meaning of life. She brought up her own children during war times. She was raped by a Russian soldier when the front lines broke and Germany was conquered by the Red Army. She contracted syphilis from the rape, which she survived, but she carried the scars and passed them on to her children. When she died in 2002 she had lived through five different political dispensations, the monarchy and Kaiserreich, the feeble Weimar Republic, the Nazi-era Third Reich, the communist regime of East Germany, and finally West German democracy. Who were these great-grandparents, in the transitional justice sense? Perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries, collaborators – products of their time – and perhaps also victims. Their children, my parents, were war-children, deeply psychologically damaged for life. In our generation – the grandchildren of the Holocaust – the trauma manifested itself in various further psychopathological patterns such as anorexia and depression. Even while our parents tried to prevent a trans-generational transfer of memory through silence, exactly this happened – they passed on the emotional matrix of those painful memories, for their children to make sense of. What does it look like on the African side of Tawana’s ancestry? Her Zimbabwean grandfather was born in the early 1900s. He was a selfmade man who in his youth cycled to South Africa, bringing back cattle and goods. Based on his own wit and guts, he became a successful rural trader. He experienced oppression and indignity at the hands of the colonial powers. As a young man, he was abused in his working situation inside the family that employed him, experienced things he could not speak about for fear of being killed in retribution, as well as cultural taboos. He later supported the liberation war and has since passed on, so we do not know what would have been his stance in the current dispensation. Tawana’s grandmother fled the bombings of the Rhodesian warplanes with a baby on her back and another at her hand. I recall vividly our two mothers sharing stories on being bombed during our wedding dinner. They instantly 10 International Conference on Transitional Justice, Zimbabwe