I’ve written about my grandparents before, especially last year when we had the opportunity to trace some of Granny and Papa’s steps from their early years in their native Germany, when we took Zach and Zandra on their 15 trip. You can find some stories of our adventures last year (which share the stories of my grandparents) here, here and here.

I got a text from Zach earlier this week in the middle of the day telling me he had found a one hour  interview with what he thought were “Gran’s parents” and wondered if I had seen it? I didn’t know anything like that existed!

He said, “It’s either another Paul and Erika Busing who emigrated from Germany due to the war met at a place which started with T and both went to uni, or it’s them.”

Lo and behold, it was them.

Apparently, “the interview with Paul and Erika Busing was conducted on August 31, 1989 by Dr. James Kelley in Rengsdorf, Germany and is part of the Bagby Videotape Archives of Early Christian Resisters to the Hitler Regime. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum received a copy of the interview from Dr. Kelley on May 29, 1996.”

Zach was doing research for a couple of assignments on WWII and the Holocaust for school, and had decided to try to look them (Granny and Papa) up to see if anything was written about them, when he stumbled across the video. He was shocked that no one in the family had seen it before. When I sent an email out to the family, some said they had known that Granny and Papa had done several interviews like this, but no one had seen the recording. I suspect it was recently put on the internet as I had done some research before our trip last year and had come across some of my grandfather’s writings, but nothing like this.

Hearing their voices, and seeing their faces and mannerisms made me cry as I quickly played it as soon as Zach told me about it. I texted Zach that it made me cry and shiver, and he responded, “Yeah, I knew it would. I can’t believe I found that. I wanted to see the tears in person crap.” Lol. There are always plenty of tears from me, Zach.

I love that in the video, they tell parts of their story in their own voices, and we hear their thick German accents (“They sound so GermanT”, Zach commented, and Josh said “Granny is like a German Gran!” (haha Gran – but I do see it!!)

I have heard most of the stories before (and many are recorded in Granny’s book), but to have them tell the tale is priceless. It’s also priceless to see Papa holding his chin, scratching his head, sitting far back in his chair, and seeing him wiggle his ears (no, he doesn’t do that on the video, but I could so picture him turning to me and wiggling his ears, then winking, calling me “Kindergarten girl” and then taking my picture:). Granny’s laugh, her eye roll when she is thinking and talking and how she often looked at Papa as she was responding, to get his agreement and check in to see how he was feeling. All simply priceless!

I laughed outloud at about 11 minutes in when the interviewer called Papa, Herr Busing, and he quickly said, “By the way, please don’t call me Mr. Busing, my name is Paul”, and then Granny piped in “Ja, and mine is Erika.” They were such down to earth people.

I miss them so much.

While this video won’t mean much to many, I decided I absolutely needed to document about it on my blog so that I could save the link (as I try to figure out how to permanently download) and remember how we found it.

Here it is:  https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn513451

Families really are forever.