on the tombs. I had always thought, while growing up in small-town Canada, that names like Cohen, Schlesinger, Rappaport, Kissinger, Oppenheimer, Goldstein, Bernstein, Himmelfarb, Rosenthal and Loewenstein were North American names. After hearing about the Holocaust and learning what a Jew was from my best friend, a Jew, when I was sixteen and had moved to Vancouver, I began to understand why such names sounded German. I had thought that they were German names that somehow people had boldly insinuated into the powerful English and American language without succumbing to the ridicule or harsh, deliberate mispronunciations that I, audibly and perpetually a German, lived with. They were the names of successful immigrants. Now here they were on the stones of a Berlin graveyard.

Large parts of the cemetery havebeen rebuilt and refurbished—saniert, as the Germans call this activity—after falling into disuse and having no survivors to attend the graves, and Ilonka told me the local borough, in co-operation with the small Berlin Jewish community (now about 60,000 strong), were responsible for the reclamation. Much of the multi-acre site had not been saniert, and one could see tumbled stones, fallen pillars and marble slabs all jumbled together on the ground and being taken over by ivy. Once when Ilonka and her husband came here—something they did every year or two—they met a man who could hardly speak, was disabled and, it soon became apparent, was a camp survivor looking for ­evidence of his family. Thomas and Ilonka scrabbled with him through the dense ivy and the increasing