When the Berlin Wall came down, my mother was there.

 

One of the photographs we included in Scattered Lives shows her standing inside the breached wall. Years later, that photograph still captures something the history books cannot: what it looked like to stand inside a moment that had seemed impossible only a short time before.

 

She also brought home a small piece of the Wall. It still sits in her hutch among her art and keepsakes, painted on one side and rough concrete on the other.

 

It is a small object from a very large moment in history, but that is often how history survives in families — through photographs, objects, stories, and the things someone thought to bring home.