Truth in my family's memory is like a multi-faceted diamond - sunlight lets it burst into a fire of golden sparkles and glitter, neon light cloaks it in mysterious bluish haze, while the faintness of the night turns it into a bland piece of glass.

Growing up I believed that my father's family was German. My father alluded to ancestors from Worms or Augsburg. And never failed to mention a distant cousin in Berlin, an actor. There was no reason for me to question him.

On my twenty-first birthday my father gave me leather-bound document folder, containing my birth and baptism certificates and other originals documents. He completed the collection with copies of various documents from his side of the family as well as my mother's family, a genealogical compilation going back four generations. With this genealogy starter kit, he also handed over first doubts regarding our heritage.

According to documents on my father's side, I discovered that my father and my grandfather were not German. According to their baptism certificates they were Austrian. Birth certificates were missing in the compilation. Being asked, my father curtly told me there was no difference between Austrians and Germans. They were all the same, according to him. He explained, that following the "Anschluss"¹in 1938, the Wechsler family automatically became Reichsdeutsche. As the Austrian government didn't signed a peace treaty until the very mid-1950s², the family never changed back to their original nationality.

Even though my father’s explanation didn’t make much sense to me, other stories regarding his family did. My father remembered, that his great grandfather and grandfather used to go to back and fro between Vienna and Alexandria. He explained, that they were traders and preferred spending the winters in Egypt and the summers in Vienna, where they owned a house on the Ring³. At some point of time his grandfather, was born in Vienna according to my father, decided to settle in Alexandria permanently, where his son, my grandfather, and my father were born. For this reason, I assumed my father’s family originated from Vienna and did not question any further.

After my father's death I was finding it increasingly difficult to answer the question from which part of the world my family originated. Despite what I knew, I had a gut feeling, that some important components to the Wechsler family story were missing.

A distant cousin, the granddaughter of my grandfather’s sister had drawn up a family tree online. Like me, she wondered about "the mysterious Wechslers" and their background. She had come across a Familienbüchlein(family book)⁴in which Polish was recorded as her grandmother's nationality. She found this equally puzzling as I my father's claim to his German-Austrian nationality.

Thanks to regional online databank I had consulted previously, I knew that my great grandfather Hermann Wechsler married my great grandmother Eugenia Engelhardt in Vienna and that Hermann was Jewish. With the help of Viennese genealogists, I obtained a copy of their original marriage entry as well as birth entries for two older siblings of my grandfather, whose existence I had been previously unaware of. According to these documents my great grandfather was born in Alexandria not Vienna.

A further document I received was a Knabenregister⁵(military role) listing the unknown elder brother Bruno. The register contained birthdates and parents’ names as well as a column with the heading zuständig nach(responsible for) and a column for remarks. As Jaroslau was entered into this column next to Bruno Wechsler’s name, I thought the column contained the name of the registrar as Jarosław is a Slavic first name. The column for remarks contained the abbreviation "pol." in Bruno’s entry.

Shortly afterwards, I located my great grandfather Hermann’s Estate in the National Archives of Great Britain. The file contained a letter from my grandfather dated 1923 in which he wrote: "I, the undersigned, Otto Wechsler, Polonese subject, 23 years of age, ...". This passage validated the entry in my cousin’s Familienbüchlein.

However, in 1949 my grandfather changed his story. In a further letter which was part of the estate, he wrote: “at the present date I the said Otto Wechsler have no nationality for the reason that my father belonged to a city which was transferred to Poland. I did not make an option to acquire Austrian or Polish nationality and I therefore remained without nationality. I hold a local certificate of identification."

The second letter I found at first seemed to contradict my grandfather’s letter from 1923. An Austrian historian which I consulted, suggested that the family may have held a Heimatscheinfrom a Polish town, accounting for Gisella’s Polish citizenship. He suspected that their statelessness may have resulted in their nationality being revoked at some point of time rather than my grandfather “forgetting” to sign an option for Austrian citizenship.

Unable to speak to my father or uncle, both deceased, I turned to my aunt, their sister to shed some more about the nationality issue. She confirmed that the Wechsler family were stateless after WWII and showed me her "Laissez Passier"⁶passport issued by the Egyptian government to prove it. According to her the family had Austrian roots.

She told me, my grandfather had burned all vital papers referring to nationality on the outbreak of WWII, as he was afraid the information contained in these documents may infringe his children's scholastic careers. After the war he therefore had no papers to prove his pre-war nationality and he spent the late 1940s and 1950s collating documents such as baptism or death certificates to reestablish the family’s national identity or at least enable them to procure some form of documents, allowing them to leave Egypt.

For reasons unknown, neither my grandfather, nor his sons obtained birth certificates. My aunt recalls she never understood why official birth certificates containing the vital facts they needed to prove their nationality, were not amongst the documents, they retrieved. Fed up with explaining to officials that she had no birth certificate, she obtained a copy from the Egyptian authorities during a visit to Alexandria, Egypt. The certificate was issued in Arabic. I asked her, if her nationality was recorded in the certificate, which she confirmed this and told me it was Polish. As she had never been told of her Polish background, she had assumed, that it was a mistake, as they had also misspelt her middle name and hadn’t given it another thought.

This document was the final proof, that the family officially held Polish citizenship at least until 1937, my Aunt’s birthyear, contradicting my grandfather’s denial of opting for Polish citizenship in his second letter. Her Laissez Passer Passport and immigration cards issued for my grandfather, uncle and aunt confirmed that they were stateless in 1958. My father’s Certificate of Citizenship confirmed that my father had become a German Citizen in 1956 yet gave no clue to why he was eligible for citizenship.