By lilly_en_route
🕊️ Between Königsberg and Punjab
A Granddaughter of Vanished Homes
I was born far from war and borderlines —
one might even say into comfort,
into the quiet hum of post-war wealth,
coming from a white German tax advisor family.
But I carry war and borderlines in my bloodstream
like secret ink.
They rise in dreams, in grief I cannot name,
in the strange way history catches in my throat.
On my maternal side, my grandmother’s people fled Königsberg
with pure German on their tongues,
and suitcases that whispered of porcelain, Prussia, and pain.
On my paternal side, my grandfather died when the Partition
cut his past in half:
his wealth lost, his legacy shattered
somewhere between Uttar Pradesh and Punjab.
I was not there.
One could even say I was oblivious to it my whole life.
But something in me remembers.
Though I live in Germany and only know one side of my roots well,
my soul seems to have been born in the in-between.
Between post-war Germany and India/Pakistan,
between silence and song,
between memory and the longing to belong.
