When my mother-in-law told me, “When I landed in Canada, I could smell the freedom,” I wasn’t prepared for how hard that sentence would hit me. It wasn’t part of a long, emotional story. She just said it, almost in passing, like it was a memory she’d never fully unpacked. But I’ve carried those words with me ever since. That sentence is all she ever really gave me.
She was born in Berlin in 1937. She lived through the war, not as a soldier or policymaker, but as a child caught in one of the darkest chapters of the twentieth century, hearing the air-raid sirens, seen buildings collapse, and watched her city burn. Then, of course, the division, the Cold War, and the Berlin Wall—concrete proof that even after the bombs stopped falling, freedom was still a distant thing. By the time she left, she wasn’t running from war. She was escaping something more quiet but no less suffocating: the weight of control, surveillance, and unspoken grief.
When she finally came to Canada, she didn’t talk much about what she left behind. She didn’t describe the ruins, ration lines, or how the city slowly adjusted to being split in half. But she did say that. She said she could smell the freedom. I think about that sentence all the time. It wasn’t just poetic—it was literal. She could feel the air change. That’s how deeply a lack of freedom can root itself in your senses.
Timing Regrets
I regret that I never asked more. Especially while my father-in-law was still alive, he grew up in Portsmouth, England—just across the Channel, but in an entirely different world. He would have seen the war from a British perspective: the Blitz, blackouts, victory broadcasts. I imagine his memories were shaped by pride and endurance. He probably would have told me stories if I’d shown interest. I didn’t. And now he’s gone.
His silence was different. It came not from trauma, perhaps, but from modesty. Or it is because of the British tendency not to make a fuss. Either way, I missed hearing what war looked like from his side. I had both perspectives in my family: one from the heart of Nazi Germany, the other from the country that stood up to it. And I waited too long to care.
I’ve been watching more documentaries lately, reading more history, and digging into the Cold War and the story of Berlin. I understand better now what the Wall meant, how families were torn apart, how trust was eroded across generations. And I know now that even if my mother-in-law had wanted to talk about it, she might not have had the words. Some pain resists language. Some survival stories are told in silence.
You Could Smell the Freedom
But she gave me one sentence. One perfect, devastating sentence. And that might be enough.
Because when someone who grew up in rubble and shadow finally steps into sunlight, when they arrive in a place where they can breathe freely for the first time, it makes sense that they wouldn’t describe the journey.
They’d close their eyes.
And say, “I could smell the freedom.”
I’ll never forget that. And I’ll never stop wishing I had asked more, listened sooner, or realized what history I had sitting across the table. But now, I write. Because sometimes the only way to honour the silence is to break it.