Welcome to Kind World from W-B-U-R. I'm Erica Lance.

Julie Lindahl was born in Brazil.

Her mother's German family had moved there in 1960,

and she moved a lot while she was growing up.

Wherever they were though, she always sensed that something was wrong.

The feeling that my sister and I always had was that there was this corpse that was lying in the room that was covered

over with a blanket and nobody wanted to uncover it. As a young girl Julie began

to sense that that corpse might be her grandfather. He had died when she was very young, so she barely knew him.

But she came to believe there was something about her grandfather, some secret, that haunted her family.

Something that none of them felt they could talk about,

that they felt so tortured and burdened by,

and they just didn't know what else to do with it, except toss it. tortured and

burdened by and they just didn't know what else to do with it except toss it on the on the kids

Family gatherings were full of anger and Julie and her sister escaped whenever they could.

She would run into the room next door, shut the door and get out a face crayon and paint her face with it and write all kinds of expletives on it and looked at herself in the mirror just to get it out of her system.

Julie also carried this inexplicable shame.

I had this feeling around me that I had done something so bad that one just couldn't even talk about it.

Not talking about the corpse in the room, weighed on Julie. By the time she was in her 40s, she was struggling with depression.

Lying in my bed with all the curtains shut, unable to stand up and my husband came to me and said, you know, I think you need to seek help.

Do you need to see a psychiatrist or what do you need?

And I said, I need to go to the German federal archives.

That's what I need to do.

...