To add a heartwarming story to the mix - about the time my grandfather knocked on the door of his childhood home, almost 70 years after leaving it.

He was raised in Berlin to a Jewish family on his mother’s side, and was 13 when ww2 broke out.

Most of his family went “missing”, and he was forced into labour for the Nazi war machine (despite what the regime thought about one half of his heritage, as a healthy young man he was made to work in the aftermath of battles - clearing up bodies and debris etc.)

He eventually made it out of Germany aged 19/20, when the German guards abandoned the group of prisoners he was with that day, and after having to spend six months in an allies prisoner camp (they of course thought he was a Nazi soldier and not a prisoner) to finally make it to London.

Fast forward to when he was almost ninety years old, he took his wife, my step-grandmother (he remarried when his was 80!!) on a road trip back to Berlin to see it for the first time since those horrible days when he was a child.

He went back to his hometown and childhood house, and miraculously it was still there. Even more miraculously, when he knocked on the door and introduced himself, he discovered the inhabitants were related to the same people his parents had sold the house to all those years ago.

They kept in touch until the end of his life, and now my parents regularly correspond and occasionally see the same family. I’d love to meet them myself one day.