As late as in the autumn of 1989 I wanted to travel to the Soviet Union on the Freundschaftszug (annual train service to allow East German children to holiday in the Soviet Union), so I got on the train to Moscow at Ostbahnhof. When we got to the Polish border and the customs officer wanted to see my ID, I couldn’t find my wallet. It must have been stolen at the train station somehow and this meant the end of the journey for me. Back in Berlin, I first had to request a temporary passport as a replacement document. Then when the wall fell, the entire family went to Berlin to pick up our Begrüßungsgeld (welcome money). After queuing at the bank for a long time, I showed my temporary passport and the woman at the counter said: “I’m sorry, I can’t accept this.” I must have looked extremely shocked, because after a brief discussion she gave me the money after all. We then went to a hardware store to buy tiles with the money. One year before, we had started to renovate my parents’ house and the bath would now have a mid-height backsplash made from real Western tiles. When we had loaded up our Trabant and wanted to set off, my husband suddenly got concerned. The car was so dangerously overloaded, that we got friends to come help us by loading half of the tiles in their Trabant. Back at home, we looked at the bathroom again and decided after some discussion to tile the entire room after all – so up to the ceiling and not just mid-high. So we drove to our local builders’ merchant in Vorpommern with the whole load of tiles and consigned the Western tiles so we could later exchange them for double the amount of Eastern tiles. The period after the Wende was a difficult time for us and took a lot of strength. But we got through it. The house was renovated and the floor-to-ceiling tiled bathroom is still there.
»The car was so overloaded, that we got friends to come help us by loading half of the tiles in their Trabant.«