Her absence appeared to him a black hole, the all-consuming negative pole in the life of Peter Wawerzinek. How could his mother have treated him this way, deserting him as a small child in the GDR when she fled to the West? Passed around various children´s homes, the young boy remained mute until his fourth year. Painfully shy, he sought solace by listening to the birds, lying on his back, tweeting and chirping as he imitated their calls.
But where was his home? Where were his roots? Where did he belong? He didn´t discover he had a sister until he was 14 years old. No one had thought to tell him, not even his unbeloved adoptive mother. As a border guard in the GDR, he attempted to flee to the West, but turned back just as he had passed the frontier fence. Did he really want to meet those who had abandoned him and broken off all contact with him?
Throughout his life Peter Wawerzinek had struggled to come to terms with his motherless existence and with the question of why his mother abandoned him as an orphan in the GDR. When, many years after the wall had come down, he visited her, the larger-than-life image he had constructed of his mother throughout the intervening decades failed to match reality. It was to be their one and only meeting. This is the shattering account of a motherless child struggling with his loss.
