So we ventured into the deepest, darkest, eastiest bit of East Berlin. So east that they still keep a statue of Lenin there. But they keep other things too. Like dead Jews. Because in the little town of Weissensee there is a magnificent old Jewish Cemetery. Which opened in about 1880 and was, you can imagine, something of an upmarket place for Berlin’s upper echelons of the Jewish world to find their final resting place. So you can see, if you’re going to be there for all of eternity, you’re looking for something solid, something to last, survive the elements and, of course, impress the neighbours. Well, not the neighbours themselves, obviously, but perhaps their family, when they come to visit, say a prayer, place a stone. And people of substance like to leave something to remember. Hence these immense and wonderful family crypts which are scattered all across the place. There are thousands and thousands of ‘normal’ graves too, marked with modest little headstones. Not because those dead weren’t loved sufficiently to build a 6 bedroom house around them, but because it simply wasn’t necessary for there to be anything more than a simple stone.

Yet this was Germany. And every gravestone tells a story. So some family plots just listed the members who never returned from Auschwitz, or Theresenstadt, or Bergen-Belsen. Whereas others were more profound. Where you’d have three named headstones in one combined ‘unit’, and two empty blanks.

About 40% of German Jews fled the nazi regime in the early to mid 1930s. And as the ‘inhabitants’ of Weissensee were affluent and rich, they would have been able to move out of the country. The problem was with the 60% who didn’t leave. Who either simply could not believe that the only nation they’d ever lived in for several generations, the nation they’d fought for in the Great War, the nation where they had been respected, revered, lionised, advised governments, helped the military, that such a nation would abandon them totally. Not just abandon, but persecute to their deaths. Or, they simply lacked the funds to escape. And of that 60%, about 55% never returned.

Either way, those blank spaces hit you right in your very soul.

So now we’re back. Not just back but following one phone call and a four minute drive, we drove straight into a petrol station, no queues whatsoever, and filled two cars with gasoline. I mean, WTF??? My car had 78 miles left in it, Mel’s 32. And now they’re full. Such a relief.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx