My journey in Berlin started many years ago, before I was born in fact. My journey in Berlin started when my grandfather’s ended, when he left Berlin in 1936 on the Stuttgart – the last boat out of Germany that did not require documents, which docked in Cape Town, South Africa, allowing him and many other Jews a life.
When my grandfather’s father put them on a boat to South Africa, his brother went to Israel (then Palestine) and started a family of his own there. Many years later, and a few generations later, some members found their way back to Germany, and so I have a long-lost German cousin with not only our age in common …
Touching down in Berlin was like touching down on the rawest and most emotional part of me. I arrived with my German passport, my blonde German features and not a word of the language, having never been there before. It was the strangest sensation to arrive in Germany as a German but under this pretext. Hearing the bus driver speak to me in the harsh yet comforting language and looking at my reflection, noting my blonde hair, in the window made my eyes well with tears due to a connection to the place that was not overtly explainable nor tangible. I was overcome with emotion as the tears eased down my face and I thought of “what if” and all the possibilities in life that never were. Seeing my grandfather’s home city made me connect to a part of myself that could only be brought out through seeing a part of him – where he was born and where he lived till the age of four.
