Departure from Romania to Germany

In 1953, the seven-year-old Karl Reinerth, his mother, and his little sister, made a train trip from Romania to Germany that lasted almost four weeks. They belonged to the German minority in Romania and were lucky enough to be granted a family reunion in the Federal Republic of Germany, where Karl’s father had already been waiting for them for four years. The train route wound through Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the GDR until they were dropped off in a region called Göttingen, and placed in a large refugee camp called Friedland. “The name seemed kind of odd to me since our mother used to be called Friede in the place we came from,” he recalled. In Friedland, they were able to make contact with Karl's father by telephone for the first time. He picked them up at the train station in Stuttgart-Kornwestheim. “As we stood on the platform, we saw my mother and my father falling into each other’s arms and kissing quite passionately. Then they were coming back to us together and I still remember that my sister asked: ‘Who’s that man? The man who embraced our mother so much?’ And I said: ‘That’s our father’.”