"On the lined pages of my notebook, I wrote about the city:
the domes of our Hauptsynagoge, the walls of the Kaiserburg.
It was not how I meant to begin.
Avram. I looked up and saw him. He asked to sit down.
When I told him my name, he knew it.
He had been in Berlin,
at the Opernplatz, where the Nazis made a bonfire of literature.
He said: 'I heard Joseph Goebbels call out your name.
I saw them throw poetry into the fire.'
He told me that he was a journalist.
It was the year when writing for German newspapers
was becoming difficult for Jewish reporters.
I spoke about the sudden feeling of being unwelcome
in the place where I had lived all my life.
We walked together across the Hauptmarkt.
It was dark. Our hands touched lightly.
'We cannot stay here,' he said.
'Wir können nicht hier bleiben.'"
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