Berlin is known for a wall. Once a divider, now an overgrown tourist trap.

I wrote “tourist trap”. Of course it’s much more than that. Once again I am in a place with a looming shadow from history; people who died whom we should not forget and people who survived and who are carrying that shadow along with them in various ways. Unlike the Baltics and Poland though, I feel like an outsider here.

But I enjoy being a tourist. I look at the murals and snap photos in the rain. When the raining gets too intense I have to flee into the nearby station where I buy myself a cup of tea and a vegan donut. As I sit down to enjoy my snack, I marvel at the fact of how circumstanses which my parents grew up in seem so distant to me now. And how everything I take for granted now would have seemed so unthinkable not even 40 years ago.

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(This story told in pictures.)