Earlier in March, in the warm spring sunshine, an older, colder Berlin was remembered. In June 1939, 16-year-old Ilse Philips boarded a Kindertransport train bound for London. Her parents Hugo and Flora waved good-bye to her at the station. Three years later they were murdered at Auschwitz and Ilse vowed never to return to Berlin.
But on Sunday, at the age of 88, she came back — accompanied by four generations of her family. Last November I stumbled upon seven glinting, new Stolpersteine along the street from my apartment. An astonishing twenty thousand of these brass “stumble stones” have been planted among the cobbles of 280 German cities, engraved with the name of individuals who were pulled from their homes and murdered during the Nazi years.
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