Berlin is a defining part of my life, something I realized last week as I watched the jubilant celebration at Brandenburg Gate.
This city has drawn me to it 10 times since childhood. Part of it is a family connection.
In recent years, it is increasingly the city itself. I've come to love it for its spirit, diversity, courage and its willingness to be honest and make visible its past.
Horrific things happened in Berlin and great things, too. A miracle occurred there in 1989. The Berlin Wall came down without war. It kindles hope in my heart.
In my early 20s, I lived a year in West Berlin as part of a college work-study program.
That year I had a dream I have never forgotten. I was walking around the city at the end of a war. It lay in burning ruins. A tall wall ran through it. I knew all that was important to me was on the other side, but no one knew how to get there. As I walked, I realized the wall extended, unbroken, around the world.
What I remember most about Aug. 13, 1961 -- the day the East German communist government started building its 28-mile wall around West Berlin -- is my mother crying and her fears for her mother and younger sister who lived there.
I'd met them once -- in 1957, a year after my father died and my mother took my brother and me there with the idea of moving permanently. Mountains of raked-up rubble still filled whole city blocks. The future of Berlin was so uncertain. We stayed only four months.
Berlin's devastation and The Wall left deep imprints on my heart and filled my head with life-long questions. So has the Holocaust. How do we right history's wrongs? Can we?
During my visit last year, I noticed two bronze tiles in the sidewalk. Each bore the name of a Holocaust victim, a birth date, a "murder" date and name of a concentration camp. These bronze memorials scattered across the city mark buildings were Jews lived or hid that were raided by Nazis.
On the building next to my grandmother's I saw something new this year -- a photo of several people and a placard informing me that four Jews were hidden in an apartment there by the tailor who employed them. All survived the war.
Berlin is a new city and an old one, a city of ugly truths and beautiful ones, too.
It has long been a physical gateway from Eastern Europe to the West. Today it is another kind of gateway -- symbol, a role model, a re-minder.
I finally understand my dream of long ago. The gate was not in the wall, but the heart.
Associate editor Loraine Anderson can be reached at landerson@record-eagle.com or 231-933-1468
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