Imagine the ancestral beginnings: Spreewald, place of rivers and forests, Wends and Sorbs. The Devil once lived there. Iced over, the evil one looked on as his oxen were unable to plough this cold, barren land. Fatigued, the beasts gave up, staring ahead, numb. The Devil gave a thunderous, angry roar. In terror the oxen fled this way and that, plough flailing behind. The Spree broke up into rivulets and ditches, home of the ancestors. Ancestors.

The earth finally thawed, water rippled over rock and through green valleys. But still, hunger, measles, sickness, the waterman, Wodny Muz, ruled. Lurking at the bottom of pools and streams, he waited to pull down the Wendisch-Sorbs, to consume them, obliterate them. Gudmainz and Kockott, Mattack and Piater, Zehmke, Lentz, Kaschula and Noack – Sorbian ancestors from Wjerbna. Then they left that Slavic land.

The Crimea, 1856

I’m told there was war. Dug in deep until they could go no further, that's how they died. Clad in flimsy clothing, barefoot, they fought the Russians in the cold of winter. Holes dug at night, they climbed into the frozen earth, hoping to wake up and find it all a bad dream. It was not. Many died like that in the Crimean War. In the mornings only a few crept from their snow-clad crevices. As German Foreign Legionnaires they sold their souls to the British. Soon it was over and they were no longer German or Wend – they belonged to the English in 1857. Unable to return home, many chose the colonies. I, Christian Kaschula, aged twelve, was one of them. My Pappa, Matheus, together with my Mamma Anna and four siblings, Mathes, Mathus, Maria and Marianne, boarded the Wandrahm, bound for British Kaffraria in South Africa. That's when I left my youth behind, sun still rising.

Wendisch-Sorbs and Germans, thrown together as if born of one nation. This was no longer a time for Spitzbuben, rogues, and Nemski, the dumb ones, unable to speak Wendisch and follow Wend ways – in time only the memory of namecalling hauntingly remained as the unspoken, a forgotten people.