Little did I know…

7 years ago – on Oct 2, 2014 – I dropped off a special person at Frankfurt airport. After we hugged goodbye, I felt called to wander around the airport a bit more. Frankfurt airport has been my “home airport” since my early childhood. Therefore, I thought I knew every inch of that airport. As it turned out, I didn’t, because I was guided to an area that I had never noticed before: the prayer section, which provides separate praying rooms for all major denominations. Although I am not Jewish, I was drawn to the Synagogue and as soon as I entered, a cell memory was (re)activated that – at the time – I just couldn’t make sense of.

After spending quite some time there, an inner voice suddenly appeared that gave me very clear instructions to leave for Berlin. Now. To write my book. Mind you, I had no business with Berlin back then and actually rather disliked the city. But I listened, got my car from the parking garage and headed for Berlin right then and there.

The drive from Frankfurt to Berlin should take about 5-6 hours. I left Frankfurt around 1pm and arrived in Berlin at 7am the next morning. What happened in between is still a bit of a mystery to me but one that I will never forget. I was guided by spirit and open and trusting enough to follow. Although I was physically sitting in the driver’s seat, it wasn’t me operating the car, let alone picking the roads… Instead, I was led to what seemed to be random and remote places at first, but after a while it dawned on me that that wasn’t the case as every single stop held some significance to Germany’s Nazi history…

At some point, I was in the city of Erfurt and it was literally like somebody grabbed my steering wheel to make a sudden sharp right turn, which brought me directly to a memorial site on the grounds of the former company “Topf & Söhne”: the company responsible during the NS regime to build the cremation equipment needed to burn huge quantities of bodies. As a “treat” to their engineers, their office windows pointed directly to Buchenwald concentration camp so they could always see the big piles of smoke as a reminder of the “great and important work” they were doing. The memorial site still provides “that view” from the desks. Needless to say, this stop was more than disturbing.

Well, I won’t go into more details but the trip continued this way with lots of detours and stops and finally I arrived in Berlin in the morning of Oct 3, 2014 – which happens to be “Tag der Deutschen Einheit” (Unification Day) – Germany’s major national holiday since the country’s unification in 1990. So today – Oct 3 – marks the completion of my 7 year cycle in Berlin. The day I arrived here, I sat by the river and journaled about my experiences. As I was filling the pages, the formerly distant cell memory returned and started to lift the veil to my past Jewish life in Berlin. At that point, it was only an inkling, but it opened the path that kept unfolding over my last 7 years here – but this time I found my family in Berlin and did not have to leave them behind… 🙏