I found the photo below, and the article to which the photo was attached, in the Sonntags Zeitung - 5 November 2017. The Sonntag's Zeitung is a weekly evangelical publication, and it appears in our postbox every Friday. Several of its articles have grabbed for my attention because the stories they tell could, with some imagination, be turned into novels. But first, let's look at the photo. The picture below left shows little boy (Rolf Nussbaum) with his mother (Hedwig) and grandfather (Josef Nussbaum) on the iron bridge in Frankfurt in 1938. At that time, the Nussbaum family was one of the best known in Frankfurt. Some of them managed to escape to Uruguay. For many years now, The City of Frankfurt has invited the descendants of these refugees to come back to their old homeland with their families to find traces of their forebears.
The photo above right shows Rolf's son Patrick on exactly the same spot in 2012 on which his forbears stood in 1938. I can't help but wonder what is going through Patrick's mind. How does he feel? Is he moved to tears or is it just a great big bore and he is missing his wife and children? We writers can be inspired by such pictures and tackle such themes as memory and reality, how the past exerts its influence on the present or what might happen to people who live in the past without facing the future.
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