The most enlightening encounter I have had with this double bind was when I met my octogenarian friend Susan and heard the story of her German children's books. She was kicked out of her grammar school in the German-speaking Czech town of Troppau because of her "non-Aryan" background when the Nazis occupied the Sudetenland in 1938. Ever since, Susan had been worried what would happen to the books that her mother had packed for her when the two of them — and only the two of them — were able to flee to England. They included children's classics, such as Erich Kästner's Emil and the Detectives, a book that children in Germany (and not only in Germany) read to this day. 

Susan took these books with her whenever she moved, and they finally ended up with her in America. When I had dinner with her one night, I saw a stash of boxes filled with books and asked her what these were. She told me how concerned she was about what would happen to them after her death. Who would want a dusty collection of children's books, their spines broken, written in German? I didn't have to explain why I wanted them. I just had the very visceral feeling that I wanted to give them a new home in Berlin — because they would remind me of my friend and because I knew how dear these books were to her. It just seemed the right thing to do and felt entirely natural. 

Even though I have read Susan's autobiography, we never spoke about the horrors of her past — not for fear of upsetting the other person, I believe, but because our friendship isn't defined by this chapter of history, which happened long before I was born. Our connection was neither weighed down by the past nor oblivious of it. We were able to form a friendship, however unlikely, divided by half a century, consisting of civilised conversations over tea. 

The Central Europe from which Susan fled all these years ago doesn't exist now. In that sense, her giving me her children's books doesn't indicate an important moment of closure, but rather a way in which a fraught past can appear in one's life in a way that's both matter-of-fact and subtle. I am aware that this is largely to do with an acceptance and kind-hearted curiosity on my friend's part that not everyone can be expected to muster. 

This is both the opportunity and the danger we face: that after all these years, the lessons to be learned depend on those who want to hear the questions that give rise to them.