to Berlin

December in central Europe is a dreary time of biting cold, wet air. I have such vivid memories of this -- dating back to my childhood years in Warsaw. Of hardened snow along the curb, forcing you to find a trampled path over banks of it, just to cross the street. Of dark afternoons. Of my mother taking me skating for the first time, on the patch of ice by the market. Double blades, fastened to a laced-up brown shoe. The feeling of night at midday, with people crowding streets, moving quickly to keep warm. Of thick drapes hanging by entrance doors in stores, to keep the cold air out. Dim street lights, wool coats, sometimes with fur collars. Hot tea with fruit compote to sweeten it.

But that’s Warsaw. What’s Berlin like?

My earliest visits to it where passing through ones.  In the 1960s, you could not fly from Warsaw to, say London or Amsterdam (to connect to New York, where my father worked for a half dozen years) without stopping in East Berlin. We would disembark and sit in the rather empty wait area. Tables with stained coverings, glasses of tea, German announcements over the loudspeaker. I was a postwar child and the German language sounded menacing, harsh.

Later, I passed through Berlin with longer pauses. Once, I vacationed with my family in East Germany and Berlin was our jump off point. We were allowed to spend an afternoon in West Berlin, even though at the time (1969), the wall separating the two parts to the city was at its most guarded moment. West Berlin was glitzy and commercial. East Berlin was an expanse of vast spaces and monochromatic buildings.

The last time I was in Berlin was in 1975. My sister and her then husband needed someone to drive a car for them from Paris to Warsaw and I volunteered. I was studying in the States, but I spent every free month in Europe – mostly Poland, and this offered a chance to take a slow poke through both West and East Germany.

I’ll long remember the corridor road that linked West Germany with West Berlin. If you can imagine it: a passageway, with an imposed hostility on both sides (relations between East and West Germany remained strained then). We stayed in West Berlin for a few days before crossing over to the East. And again I thought it offered little beyond the commercial avenues filled with the kind of stores you’d like to see in the East – cheap and plentiful stuff. Lots of stuff.

The road linking Berlin with Warsaw remained poorly maintained – even as it was, at the time, just about the only real highway in all of Poland.

So, what’s Berlin like now?

We’re spending many hours at the Paris airport (worse fates could befall us than sipping endless espressos and eating numerous pain au chocolat). The morning flight to Berlin is cancelled. The weather is to blame. You guessed it – freezing, wet, dreary. You expect it in Berlin, in Warsaw. This time it’s made its way to Paris too.