Life Less Ordinary is the podcast from the BBC World Service,

bringing you extraordinary personal stories from around the globe.

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My name's Joe Lamville and you're listening to the BBC World Service.

I'm in Berlin in Schernaberg in the southwest of the city.

It's a multicultural neighborhood that has a lot of charm with its tree-lined streets,

cafes and boutiques, a mix of old and new Berlin.

Before the war, it was a swinging hub of the city's culture and intellectual life.

Myelinaditrich lived here, so did Albert Einstein and the film

director Billy Wilder. It also had one of the largest Jewish populations in Berlin. My mother lived here as a child. Her father was

Jewish, a German journalist, and her mother was English. They were all lucky to get

out of Germany before the Nazis crushed Berlin's vibrant communities

and murdered its Jewish population in the Holocaust. The city is full of memorials to the Jews who lived here, monuments and museums that tell the story of an atrocity that ripped the heart out of Berlin. I'm getting as close

as it's possible to get to the world they lost by visiting the flats that they once

called home, the kitchens they cooked in, the bedrooms where they slept. I don't

actually know exactly where my mother lived, but this takes me a step closer to

imagining her life and the lives of the thousands of ordinary Berlin

families who were suddenly cast out of society just for being Jewish.

So we're here in our Altbow

Vornung, or old apartment, or on the second floor.

Hugh Williamson is showing me around the flat that he shares with his wife

anchor Hassel. He's originally from the UK. For the documentary I'm meeting Berliners who've

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