Josef Gassner

I have walked this street thousands of times, but it never truly belongs to me. The cobblestones remember footsteps that should have never been. Tourists come with their cameras, their curiosity, their hushed voices. Some shake their heads in disgust, others, the ones who disturb me most, arrive with something close to reverence. I avoid looking at them. It’s easier that way.

Braunau, Austria, is my home, though I have often wished it weren’t. I was born here on May 8, 1945, the day the war ended, but for my mother, the war had ended months before, on a bitter January morning when my father was taken from her. A resistance fighter, they called him. A traitor, his executioners had decided. I never knew him except through my mother’s stories, and later, in the silences she left behind when there was nothing more to say.

I am eighty now. An age that still surprises me when I say it aloud. And I still live on the street where Adolf Hitler was born. That name is a weight this town will never shake off. People come here for it, stand outside the house, take their photographs, whisper as if in the presence of something sacred. It disgusts me. My father fought against what Hitler created, and yet, even after all these years, there are those who still admire him.

The world has changed more times than I can count, and yet some things refuse to disappear. They creep back in through cracks in history, whispered in dark corners, disguised as patriotism. It isn’t just here, not just in Austria. It spreads everywhere, an old disease in new clothing. I see it on television, hear it in the words of people too young to remember what their grandfathers lived through. Sometimes, I think they do not want to remember.

I have grandchildren now. When I look at them, I wonder what kind of world they will inherit. Will they be taught the truth? Or will the past be rewritten yet again, polished clean of its horrors, made palatable for those who prefer myths to history?

I still live on this street, though I have long made peace with the fact that it will never truly be mine.