The Prussian Lands: Königsberg, Schneidemühl

I stood in front of my father’s childhood home on Gartenstraße in Schneidemühl East Prussia once the breadbasket of Germany where "milk and honey flows". I saw the garden where he used to play and walked along the small river, just as my father once did when he was a child.

I stood at the gate of the abandoned barracks on Kanonenweg in Königsberg. On the left, on the raised ground floor, was the apartment; and I saw the kitchen window from which my mother often climbed out as a child. Holding on to the window frame, she would call out:
“Take me down, or I will let myself fall.”

A soldier was always immediately at hand and helped my mother down.

Just as my mother had once told me, I walked from there to the Oberteich, where she used to eat ice cream. I watched the people there and listened to the bells of Königsberg Cathedral; the same bells we had always listened to at Christmas on the old vinyl record.

And as I remembered the moist eyes of my grandparents, I felt their deep longing for the “land of dark forests".