August 15/16 Here I am, after a long day of travel, in Berlin. It's getting to be the wee hours of the morning but after crashing for a couple of hours I am now wide awake. What better time to write? I want to go back to the birth of this project - Schwedt in 2018. When I offered to lead a dance class/workshop while in town for the laying of Maria's Stolpersteine I knew almost nothing about the city or the people there. Thanks to Anke Grodon from the Stadtmuseum, I was put in touch with a couple of people working in the performing arts in Schwedt (Waltrud Bautsch and Thomas Maucher). I arrived with my husband in Schwedt in the afternoon after a long day traveling by train from Munich and nervously waited at our hotel to get instructions about where to go to meet Thomas and his group of dancers. Finally I went outside to do my pacing and after a while saw a small group of people approaching in the near dark - a man and some young girls. As they got closer I could see that they were looking for the hotel entrance so I took a chance and asked: Is that Thomas Maucher? Indeed it was and they came to make a small group by me and one by one, each handed me a flower and greeted me formally, introducing themselves. A good thing that my mother taught me something about these old customs. We stood in the light of the Asian food restaurant below the hotel and I answered their questions about my family history, made arrangements for the next day. I was overwhelmed with their kind gestures and went back upstairs with all my flowers. Of course, Dan didn't know quite what to make of it all. ----- The following day, after leading a class and teaching bits of the choreography I had used in the film, the participants and I formed a large circle and Thomas asked each one to say something about it if they wanted. It got quite emotional when one of the musical theatre students (with a somewhat goth look about her) thanked me for coming from the U.S. to their "little" town and for being so brave. This floored me. I never felt I was being brave but she was not the only one who made that comment. The next evening, after the film screening and a little panel discussion with the audience (where my cousin Simon saved the show with his "kindergartener's German"), as Dan and I left the theatre complex, an ordinary working man stopped us to compliment the courage to make and show the film. ----- So here I am, planning to go back to a place that most likely has it's share of far right wing sympathizers and was, according to my cousin Peter when he was alive, someplace one needn't vist since in the 1960's it was still boasting that it was "Juden Frei" - full of skin heads he said. The idea of this part of Germany being prone to such ideas was confirmed by the sweet 19 year old who sat next to me on the flight from MSP. She is also the daughter of an immigrant (from Togo) and she wonders, like I do, why people think that they should stand in the way of new people coming into their lives. ----- What will it be like in Schwedt now? I have wanted to spend more time there ever since that 2018 visit but the Corona virus pandemic caused a long wait. My communications with Thomas lead to the idea of exploring what it is like to be forced from your home as my mother was and relate that to the reality of modern day refugees. Today I read in the Doctor's Without Borders newsletter that there are now at least 100 million refugees worldwide. This is 1% of the world's population and the author pointed out that she gains hope from knowing that for every one refugee there are 99 people who can do something to help. Think about that!