Vienna.

The city Vienna is a city I like to visit, especially the part where museums are located. The Secession building with its roof covered with little golden leaves designed by Otto Wagner is beautiful! Around 1900 there was a great cultural boom. It was the time of Freud, the famous psychiatrist, and artists such as Adolf Loos and Gustav Klimt.

One day my husband and I ended up in a park in Vienna. We were tired and wanted a drink. Almost all seats were taken, so we asked an elderly lady and gentleman if we could sit at their table. That was allowed and we soon got to talking. It turned out that they came from America. We talked about Vienna, about the beautiful places, the buildings, the people. They had previously lived in Vienna. She had been a psychiatrist with a private practice, and she still spoke about it with nostalgia in her voice. Her husband was not bothered by that homesickness. They had escaped from Vienna just before World War 2 broke out, because they saw the war coming and they were Jewish. He was an inventor and had served in the United States Army. There he had felt completely accepted for the first time, which had been very liberating for him. Their children lived in America and he did not want to live in Vienna under any circumstances. She continued to have difficulty with it and talked about the fact that there were also very good memories of her life in Vienna. This split, leaving and having to leave everything behind, I think many emigrants know this. Also the nostalgia for what once was, while the reason to leave, to have to leave, was a development over which they themselves had no influence. If you are born Jewish you can't do anything about it, can you? So many people have to flee again and again because of threatening political circumstances, also this time in Ukraine. Is that very thought of by the perpetrators?

Margriet van Engelen.