In a recent conversation with Mrs. dW, the 87-year-old former housekeeper of friends of mine in Germany, she mentioned the many refugees, who have recently arrived in Germany. Having been one herself, she added, she well understands their plight. She continued and made some statements about there being too many refugees for the country to cope with and that other solutions will have to be found. But she seemed to have true empathy with the current wave of homeless people.

Her family had originally come from Silesia, after it had become part of Poland in 1945. I asked her to recount her story and how she ended up in Southern Germany. She was 14 when her mother, with three children, was forced to give up their farm in Silesia and forced to leave and move to Germany. She and her siblings went to school and her mother started working as a farm hand for a local farmer in the community to which they were assigned in (East) Germany. In 1951, as a 19-year-old, she fled the DDR and moved West, bringing her mother over sometime later. There are, of course, hundreds of thousands, millions in fact, of such stories all over Europe.

She was 15 years old, in the summer of 1946, food was scarce at the time and one of the girls in her school had invited all her classmates to pick and eat berries in her parents’ farm. Only that refugee children were told that they were not included in the invitation. More than 70 years have passed and this hurt of being excluded has not been forgotten.