Nora Krug is an award-winning writer in the United States and Europe. She was born in Germany but lives in New York on a daily basis. A few years ago, she bought a photo album at a flea market that was said to depict German crimes in Bydgoszcz. This prompted the writer to decide to visit the city in December.
Nora Krug’s grandfather was an activist in the Nazi NSDAP, and her uncle served in the SS. This family background has led her to devote considerable attention to researching Nazism, the impact of totalitarianism on ordinary citizens, and the difficult legacy borne by Germans as a result of World War II—a legacy that also affects her personally.
At the beginning of December, an interview with Nora Krug was broadcast on the German public radio station Deutschlandfunk Kultur. In it, she describes how she bought a photo album in Berlin’s Wedding district containing several photographs of executions carried out at the Old Market Square in Bydgoszcz. It took the author years to determine that the photos were from Bydgoszcz. In the podcast, Krug presents a narrative according to which, in September 1939, the Germans prepared a diversionary operation in Bydgoszcz against Polish troops, which then served as a pretext for subsequent crimes against Poles. In the broadcast, Krug does acknowledge that, according to her knowledge, Poles were said to have killed innocent Germans in retaliation, but the overall tone of her narrative clearly places responsibility on the German side.
The writer is trying to determine how these photographs were taken, since at that time taking photographs could even be punishable by death. Was the photographer one of the Wehrmacht’s propaganda photographers? Krug also announces that she wants to learn the history of the victims of these executions.
For this reason, she was to visit Bydgoszcz in December, after the broadcast. Time will tell whether this visit will result in a report or a book in the coming months. “I want to find out who the victims were and what we owe them. How can we make them visible to the reader?” she said in the German program.
