“Lost Property” was inspired by the current refugee crisis in Germany. But I also wanted to draw parallels with the refugee crisis in post-war Germany. In 1945, Germany was in ruins and yet it had to accept and assimilate ethnic German refugees kicked out of their ancestral homes in, for example: Poland, USSR, Czechoslovakia, Baltic States, Rumania, Hungary and Yugoslavia. The numbers are staggering: some estimates put the number of refugees as high as 14,000,000. Many of these never made it to Germany. Between 600,000 and 2,500,000 refugees died en route through disease, violence or malnutrition.
One elderly lady (let me call her Frau X) told me her story. She arrived (aged 6) in Breuberg in the Odenwald in 1946 with her mother and her twin sisters (her father had been killed in Russia in 1943). She arrived in Breuberg because that what where the railway line ended. At that time, the railway helped service the tyre factory that had been used to supply tyres for the German army. Frau X stayed 6 weeks in Breuberg and then she moved on. She made a good life for herself in the Frankfurt area but in 2015, aged in her middle 70s, she expressed a desire to go back to the place where her life in Germany had started.
We spent time walking round the town but she remembered nothing. We went to the tyre factory (now owned by Pirelli) but she still recalled nothing. Then we visited Breuberg castle above the town – but no, she still remembered nothing.
Later that afternoon we went for coffee and cake in a cafe in the centre of town. Frau X looked around her. She looked at all the local people and, as time went by, she grew dark and silent. Quite out of the blue, she said:
“I don’t like these people.”
“What’s the matter with them,” I asked.
“They are cold, hostile.”
She got up and hurried out. Clearly, at last, some buried memory of that time all those years ago was rising to the surface and she did not want to confront it.
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