I discovered the huge sweep of history my grandmothers had witnessed and their differing perspectives given their ages, classes and backgrounds. My grandmothers both survived to end up in displaced peoples camps in Germany after the war. They eventually resettled in Australia where they met each other, the events of the war still threatening their fragile new lives for decades to come.

When I learnt my Grandma Milda fled Riga in September 1944 without her husband, pregnant, and with her one-year-old son, I couldn’t imagine how she survived her encounters with soldiers. “[They] started spitting and screaming in Russian. Who owns this [teddy] bear? I froze. Suddenly, the soldier tossed the bear up in the air. I watched it go up, flung like a rag against the grey sky. The soldier aimed and fired.”

I will be forever grateful for the time I spent with Grandma Milda and the deeper conversations I had with Nanna Aline when I became a young adult. Our granddaughter-grandmother relationship evolved to enable us to traverse hard territory, including an unexpected pregnancy, adoption, shame and violence. Nanna Aline and I kept going as she turned 95, 96, 97 … still sharp and able to reflect on the arc of her life. We became adept at moving between light and dark topics. When it all became too much, we’d listen to music.

“Ah, just put on that Old Linden Tree. And get us both a little something to drink,” she’d say. We’d get tipsy, surrounded by dozens of silver and wooden photo frames of grandchildren and great-grandchildren and marvel at how it had all turned out.

Life often feels like it’s hurtling forwards at warp-speed. We face tidal waves of information, upheaval across a changing globe, and an epidemic of loneliness as we strive to maintain connections. Our grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles can tell us all they’ve witnessed – both momentous events and the beautiful details of the small things that have mattered most. It can be a life-affirming and intoxicating combination.

We can also often piece together more than we think from the hints, memories, papers and photographs waiting to be explored. The process of pausing the onwards rush of life to sit down and ask for my grandmothers’ stories was a chance for me to stop, look back and find the remarkable tales hiding in plain sight before it was too late.