This is a picture of my great great grandfather Heinrich Gimkiewicz  (with impressive beard) and his wife Helene taken in Berlin in 1881.

I have come to know a little about Heinrich through a self-published book by a cousin, Keith Kaye, a urologist who lives in Minneapolis.

Keith translated and published the diary Heinrich kept while serving as a non-commissioned officer during the Franco-Prussian war, a largely forgotten but bloody dispute that took place in Western Europe between July 1870 and May 1871, won by Prussia thus unifying the various German states.

The diary was bequeathed to the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg by Heinrich’s granddaughter Helga, It was here that I studied various degrees between 1992 and 1998, emerging, finally with a Bachelor of Arts in 1996 and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Management in 1998.

All that time, I had no idea a diary was kept by the University library detailing the daily marches, battles and ruminations of my distant paternal descendent.

When I began reading the translated diary entries I was at first bored. Heinrich details his movements from one town to the next, the long marches or train rides, complaints about the cold, waiting around for orders and details of the various civilian billets where he stayed in occupied French towns.

The names of towns and army commanders meant very little to me.

But as I read and persevered, I found Heinrich to grow more interesting and to see things in his personality that reminded me of myself.

It became apparent to me that my great great grandfather enjoyed a drink, preferably an alcoholic one (as I do) and sometimes drank until he was “tipsy”.

He writes of a stay in Rheims on November 12, 1870:

We stay here today, and so we try to get to know the town. Provisions are quite bad here, but there is lots of wine…

On November 16, in the hamlet of Coucy la Ville between La Fere and  Soissons:

It is quite nice here, there are lots of apples; the people make a pleasant drink out of them. It is available in quantity, and we like it very much, there being no wine.

And later, in Roumare on December 28:

I go and get my baggage, we prepare our meals and sit together until 10pm, having a good time. There is enough cider, each day we drink a considerable amount.

He was also fond of exploring the towns that he visited and had an appreciation of architecture, food and the hospitality and the customs of local French people, even if they were the ‘enemy’. However, unruly Frenchmen are not tolerated and one, he reluctantly admits to slapping.

He is also more than a little mischievous and I surmise – not always that honest  – with his diary entries – particularly when he visits a Rouen brothel:

It happens on February 16, towards the end of the war when he is billeted in the home of a cotton manufacturer. Heinrich writes that at 6.30pm he eats dinner with his landlord, “who is a very friendly man” then goes out again “this time on a less moral path”.

We want to have a look at a French brothel. There are many here. The first one is the Maison Stephan, which is high-class. The second one is a normal one. We return at 11pm.

No description is given of what he did for four hours, but we can guess. His fondness for the ladies reveals itself on a number of occasions with glowing descriptions of local landladys (one is”an aristocratic woman called Madam de Savers” who is “very friendly”) and the daughter of one of his landlords.

Rouen was a special place for Heinrich in the war. He writes of its bustling life after the armistice is declared and that “in all the places and in all the cafes it now becomes obvious  that this beautiful city belongs among the greatest in France”.

I would whole heartedly agree. My wife and I visited Rouen in the summer of 2010, staying in a little shoebox apartment above shops on the main road. Our landlord was a small, dark-skinned moustached man, who spoke not a word of English. We cooked tinned Cassoulet on a portable gas burner in the evening after exploring the exquisite, historic town in the day.

Now, I wonder, if I tread on the same cobbled stones as Heinrich did all those years ago as he explored the various districts and drunk in its cafes and restaurants.

Heinrich also writes intriguingly of the Yom Kippur service for Jewish soldiers, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

A proud Prussian man willing to die for his country, Heinrich could not have known that this war, which unified Germany, would create some of the circumstances that led to the First World War in 1914 and later the Second World War, where German Jews were betrayed and murdered in their millions by their homeland.

He writes of the Yom Kippur service in St Barbe on October 6:

…all in all there were 400 men of our denomination there.  It was Rabbi Blumenstein who came especially from Mannheim…it was moving. Most of us had probably never prayed as intensely as we did today.

My favourite extract – and where I feel a strong connection with my great great grand father – comes towards the end of the campaign, when Heinrich’s regiment reaches the town of Fecamp, on the Atlantic Ocean:

Now we are to see the ocean. We are led there one platoon after the other, it is a gorgeous view…with its huge waves…a clear difference from our eastern sea. This mighty sea with its waves which exist in such height only here, surrounded by high white chalk cliffs is really indescribable and unforgettable. This great view truly compensates for all our strains of the last days and we are grateful to our captain who kept his promise.

With the war over, Heinrich returned Berlin and married Helene 10 years later. They had four children.

The family move to South Africa in 1899 was most likely sparked by a wave of anti-Semitism surging through Europe at the time and the prospect of making one’s fortune amid the gold fields of the Witwatersrand.

Heinrich’s daughter Else would later marry an Austrian-born geologist and mining engineer called Bruno Schlesinger in 1907 and I would emerge into the world in 1973, a chubby child with a curly mop of hair to carry on the Schlesinger name.

Heinrich ran a toy shop in  the centre of Johannesburg with merchandise imported from Germany. A photo outside the store shows him to be a dapper dresser in three-piece suit and hat, bearded with fob chain dangling from waist coat.

Sadly, anti-German feeling in 1915 following the sinking of the British ocean liner the Lusitania  forced Heinrich and his family into veritable hiding as mobs attacked anyone of German descent. Being unable to import German goods, he lost most of his customers.

Heinrich died in 1922 aged 75, 10 days after his wife Helene apparently of a broken heart. They are both buried in Johannesburg’s Brixton Cemetery.

– I think I would have enjoyed sharing a glass of wine with him. Or maybe some Cider.