Leichte Sprache
DGSI was born in Berlin in 1928 and until our emigration to Santiago, Chile, in December 1938 my family lived at Kaiserdamm 27 in Charlottenburg. The house was not destroyed in WW2 and on my first visit back to Berlin, due to the very gracious lady who lived there, I was able to see again the apartment which I remembered so very well. On a subsequent visit to Berlin with my husband, we found that a section of the building was being converted to a hotel, called Hotel Brandies.
In August of last year, 2008, my husband and I celebrated our 60th wedding anniversary. We decided to celebrate this milestone by inviting our children and grandchildren to visit my hometown, Berlin. We hoped to be able to rent rooms at the Hotel Brandies and to get rooms in the very apartment in which I had grown up seventy years before. We contacted the hotel many months before our visit and told them our story, that I had lived on the first floor and that we wanted to reserve all the rooms we required on that floor. The hotel management was very understanding and provided us with those rooms.
I can hardly describe the emotions we all felt spending memorable days in my childhood home. It was incredible. Also incredible was the fact that my school (Leistikowstraße) and the playground (Karolinger Platz) still existed unchanged, and my grandchildren enjoyed taking a photo of their grandma in the sandbox that I had often told them about.