A nice person in my hometown Braunschweig, to whom I described my walk to work during the three years I was articled to an insurance company - the longest, incidentally, I have ever worked for one employer in one place - sent me the above photo of the location of a refuge for old men which I used to pass every day.
The building, a "Herberge zur Heimat" or hostel for journeymen, which when I walked past had already degenerated into a doss house for the destitute, was demolished in 1971. All that's left is a fence around what is now a small park wedged in between two busy roads where at one time lived men who perhaps through no fault of their own had fallen on hard times and who had to live out their lives depending on charity.
Those were lean years with so many to be pitied all around us, that those of us who at least had a roof over our heads and just enough to eat, could barely spare the "Mitleid" or feeling of pity for those less fortunate. And yet, as I would walk past there each morning and see some lodger leaning out of a window on the ground floor of that doss house, I felt I had to acknowledge his humanity with a short wave.
I was far too young then to know what it must be like to be old and forgotten and dependent on charity - perhaps I may even have felt arrogant enough to think that this could never happen to me and, thankfully, it never did but I am no longer arrogant to think that hard work alone saved me - and I certainly was in no position to help them.
That building is now a park and the men I once waved to are long dead, but misery and misfortune are still around us, however invisible it may seem at times. Whenever I see any of it, I allow myself to be moved by it and give them a wave and, if asked, a crisp banknote because none of us will ever know if not one day, "There, but for the grace of God, go I."
