Childhood Memories in Edirne

Edirne, Turkey. November 2009

My dad was born in Edirne, Turkey. No one knows exactly the date or the year. At 1944, when he was about 12 years old, following his Zionist passion, he left his family in Edirne and came to Israel. His cousin did the same a few years before him. We learned very little about their lives in Edirne as kids, no matter how much we had tried to inquire. But one story we all remembered, saying goodbye at the train station to families they had never seen again.

When I came to Turkey the first time and found myself at the old train station in Istanbul, I had mistakenly thought that this is where he had seen his dad in the last time. I sat aside and cried like a baby. Only later did I find out that this was far from being the right location..

My dad and his cousin refused to go back to their home town for many years but we have finally managed to convinced them last year and joined. All their kids. 65 years have passed but within a very short time they started to speak Turkish which they thought they had forgotten. They run around the streets looking for shreds of their childhood and finally, in one fogy morning, we went to the train station. That always seemed to me as the most emotional spot of their lives. It was the place where they had realized the meaning of their decision for the first time, the place where they said their last goodbyes, to families they were not going to see again. One can hardly imagine such a moment.  

When we got to the station, us the young generation, felt like we were stepping on stones of their painfull memories so we walked carefully. We couldn't bring ourselves to leave the place and took quite a lot of photos. But when we have finally managed to get over our excitement and look at my dad and his cousin,  we saw that the excitement was entirely ours. They didn't seem like the place meant to them what we thought it did. Looking at them from the side I thought that this is where their childhood ended and their journey began.