When Judith Enders was a young girl in the dying days of the old East Germany, she would walk her dog in the forest, where she would often encounter young Soviet soldiers fishing at the local lake.
“We couldn’t really talk and mostly communicated by gesturing, but we clearly liked each other,” Enders said, recounting how the soldiers — who were occupying her country — shared their catch with her dog and gave her little chocolates, whose wrapper featured the iconic Russian bear Mishka.
Today she teaches political science at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences Berlin. “We saw them as our friend, our big brother,” she added, with a smile that indicated how naive that was.
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