August 9, 2022 Today I am starting a blog to share notes about the project I am calling What Becomes Treasure. I leave in 5 days for Germany. I am flying to Berlin via Amsterdam and will take a train to my mother's home town of Schwedt (now a large city) which is NE of Berlin on the border with Poland, along the river Ode. I have wanted to return there ever since I spent three days there in 2018. My first visit was in 2015 when I traveled to a number of places in Europe, wanting to stand on the coordinates of the places my mother wrote about. I thought that if I went myseslf to Warsaw I could learn what had actually happened to her sister after her last postcard in 1942. I needed to visit Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia where my grandmother was a prisoner. It was the trip that allowed me to tackle the Holocaust and it's affect on me. The end result was the dance film "In the Shadow". The visit in 2018 was initiated by the wonderful women from the Stadt Museum of Schwedt. Frau Groden asked if our family would like to have a stone laid in memory of my Aunt Maria. There are many such bronze cobblestones throughout Europe (according to my son Yusef who has traveled for his work in alternative energy). They are called Stolperstein - look it up. This was eventually scheduled in November of 2018 to coincide with the memorial activities that take place in Schwedt (and in other parts of Germany) on the anniversary of Kristallnacht - this one being 80 years after that terrible night in 1938. As part of my visit, I offered to teach a dance workshop and share my film. The visit was so much beyond anything I could have imagined. (to be continued)

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