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NORTH VANCOUVER resident Renate Tonn, 51, said auf Wiedersehen to her former home-town of West Berlin last month, comfortable her decision to emigrate to Canada in

1957 was a good one.

“T went back wanting to see if I could live there again,’’ said Tonn of the trip she made to her homeland.

The 750-year-old German cul- tural centre had by 1957 not yet recovered from the crushing destruction sustained at the close of the Second World War and was no place for a young woman with dreams for a better future.

Said Tonn: ‘‘When I left, there was no work to be had. | wanted to become a millionaire in five years and live happily ever after. I always wanted a house, a pool, a car and a German shepherd. I had all of that until my husband died in 1974,”

The new West Berlin, driven by the energy of close to two million people living in a bright, capitalist enclave, surrounded by East Bloc austerity, has changed forever for Tonn.

“The people don't smile and they’re aggressive. There are so many young people and no work. You go outside and it seems that people are always in a panic,”’ she said.

Tonn still has an aunt and uncle living in the city.

An artist, her uncle Alfred Trenkel, has left his mark on the new city with 37 statues scattered throughout Berlin in public parks and housing project green spaces.

‘My uncle says that if you put two rats in a cage, they'll multiply and multiply until they kill each other.’’

Born into the totalitarian cage of Hitler’s Germany, as a child, Tonn

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lived through the terror of final defeat at Berlin May 2, 1945,

**‘My mother had taken us to stay with my grandmother in Westpreusteun during the war, but we fled back to Berlin to my mother’s apartment when the Rus- sians came."* :

At one point, walking shoeless on the trek back, Tonn’s family passed by a concentration camp. ‘“We didn’t know what it meant at that time, but we couldn't unders- tand why we couldn’t take some shoes from a large pile of shoes ly- ing near the camp,’’ she remembers.

First stop on Tonn’s escape from Berlin to Canada in 1957 was an immigration camp at Halifax. “‘We were asked where we wanted

to go and we told them we wanted —

to go to Vancouver. We were told that the German girls behaved so badly in Vancouver that they didn’t want any more. But we in- sisted.””

Tonn made it to Vancouver after a two-night, three-day cross-coun- try train trip and ended up work- ing for a family as a domestic.“‘The government paid my trip here and i had to guaran- tee that I’d work as a domestic un- til I paid the fare off.’’

Of the $40 a month she earned, $20 went to the government every month until she met her husband, also a Berlin expatriot. a year later she cashed in on her Canadian dream.

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GERMAN-CANADIAN cit- izen Renate Tonn learned that you can never go back. The North Shore resident recently returned from her birth place, Beriin, only to reconfirm that her decision to come to Canada was the right one. Here, Tonn displays a favorite souvenir from her trip — a sculpture by her uncle still living in West Berlin.

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