Freedom

 

Dear friends of piano music,

as a child I still saw it, the “anti-fascist protective wall”, the wall between East and West Germany. I was on a bus in Berlin - West Berlin - and saw the Brandenburg Gate and thought:“ how nonsensical - a gate is there to walk or drive through. To close this magnificent gate with a wall and to degrade it to a kind of mousetrap - what stupid ideas people get.“

However, yesterday my husband surprised me with the realization that I wouldn't even exist without the construction of the wall. And of course he is right - my mother would hardly have left her home village in Brandenburg with her parents, would never have left behind the farm, the land, the forest that my great-grandfather planted himself.

But my grandma was a very upright and honest little person who said what she thought, and that was increasingly no longer possible for her in the GDR. So they set out for freedom, shortly before the wall was built. My grandma was pregnant, my mother 6 years old, they had hidden their savings in the head of a doll and so they simply took the tram to West Berlin, where they went to a refugee camp. They waited many weeks, my mother became very ill, then they were flown out and placed in another refugee home. Her baby died there, just 6 weeks old.

It was a hard and rocky road to freedom, but they made it. At first they were very poor, my mother only had one book, and it is thanks to this lack of everything that my grandma bought me a piano when I was 8 years old. My mother, on the other hand, had nothing, instead the children shouted after her on the street "refugee child".

My grandfather, a trained farmer without a farm and with a war wound that made his left hand practically unusable, initially got by with unskilled jobs, worked in a chain factory, but then got the chance to do a secondary school leaving certificate and ultimately became a post office worker. They could buy a house with a garden, the house of my happy childhood, and on Sundays friends and relatives who had also left their homes behind the “anti-fascist protective wall” always came. I think that my grandmother must have been very desperate during these "dark years", but she always had the strength to persevere so that everything turned out for the better. “Man thinks and God guides”, she always said to me.

Apparently, the only thing we learn from history is that we do not learn anything. No! Dear people who populate this planet, please stop building walls! Neither in the hearts nor in the heads, nor anywhere else, please! Just no more walls!

Best regards!

Kerstin

 

Mussorgsky - Pictures at an Exhibition - Il vecchio castello / The Old Castle / Старый замок: https://youtu.be/c98UwpXUemU