Deep Connections by Silvia

Silvia has carried out extensive studies of her family's history in Central Europe.

All across our world, people face the Covid-19 crisis and live through each day with courage, love, compassion, wisdom and creativity. They nurture all of these human virtues of the heart and mind to stay connected to their loved ones, and to protect them, in every way they can. It is in our shared human nature to also form such bonds of empathy with strangers, often in acts of caring at great personal risk.

Innumerable stories of the present global moment bear powerful witness to these human strengths. They reach me daily through phone calls with people dear to me, social media, and newspapers, close to home here in Aotearoa and from across cultures and countries around the globe.

These stories have heightened my sense of connectedness to my ancestors, in webs of relatedness and descent stretching back over centuries. My father painted a self-portrait when he was 33 years old and I am very fortunate that he gifted this to me. When I look into his expressive face and into his strong, dark eyes, it is as if my ancestors are also present through his portrait. In this time of Covid-19, I am asking myself what did my ancestors have to live through during the epidemics of their lifetimes?
What happened to my ancestors in Vienna during the plague epidemics about four hundred years ago has not been passed down.

There is another story that I have inherited through my grandmother's storytelling. During the First World War, her mother volunteered as matron in one of the large military hospitals in Vienna. She cared for the injured and those who had contracted the highly contagious Spanish Influenza sitting at their bed sides.

Towards the end of the war, in another corner of Vienna, my father’s father was close to completing his medical studies and was enlisted to join the Austrian army as a medical officer in a desperate last-stand campaign on the river Danube.
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But he was saved by the Spanish flu. Not long before he was due to ship out, he came down with the disease and was declared unfit for service. He recovered after some time, and about a year later he met my grandmother and they were married. It was then that he met his mother-in-law who had stood by so many patients of the flu epidemic and the war.