A journey to Gießen, Germany, the hometown that lived in my Nana’s stories, and what it meant to finally stand where she once stood.

 

Today my Nana would have turned 88 years old.

Last year, I became the first of her grandchildren to visit the hometown in Germany where she grew up. Growing up, my Nana told me so many stories about her childhood in Gießen, Germany. She grew up during World War II and lived with her grandparents in an apartment there. She told me about gardening with them in the garden next to their building and walking across the Lahn River to get to and from home. I had heard these stories so many times that I had created an entire picture of Gießen in my head, even though I had never been there. My Nana eventually met my Tata while he was stationed in Germany. He was a young Mexican American man from the United States. She was a young German woman. Two people from completely different cultures and completely different lives somehow found each other, fell in love, built a family, and eventually she immigrated to the United States.

Germany, though, was always part of her.

She would go back to visit her family, and when she came home, all of us grandkids would gather around her bed while she unpacked her suitcase. We would wait impatiently for the German chocolates, candies and little goodies she had brought home for us.

In August of 2024, I called my Nana. I told her that my husband and I were going to Europe. We would be taking a river cruise through Switzerland, Germany, France and the Netherlands.

And when the cruise was over, I told her, "Nana, I'm going to Gießen."

I was finally going to see it.

The river.

The streets.

The apartment.

The place behind all of those stories I had listened to my entire life. None of her grandchildren had ever been there before. I was going to be the first. But on February 3, 2025, three months before I left for Europe, my Nana passed away. And suddenly, going to Gießen felt completely different. Because the entire time I had imagined getting there, I imagined calling her. I imagined standing in front of her childhood home and saying, "Nana, I made it."

On June 5, my husband and I boarded a train from Mainz to Gießen. I barely spoke. When we arrived, we had about a 25-minute walk from the train station to her childhood apartment. It was raining. And I cried almost the entire way. It felt like the longest walk of my life.

And then...there it was. The white apartment building I had heard about my entire childhood. And right beside it was the garden. The garden she told me about. The one where a little girl named Ingrid once gardened with her grandparents. Suddenly, these weren't stories anymore. They were real.

 

Across the street was a bakery, so my husband and I went inside to get out of the rain. We ordered a pastry and sat near the window. And I just stared across the street at that white building. Then I called my mom, her daughter. And we cried together.Because more than anything in that moment, I wanted to pick up my phone and call my Nana.

I wanted to tell her:

"Nana, I made it." I think that's something travel has taught me that I didn't fully understand before.

Travel isn't always about checking another country off a list. Sometimes we travel to celebrate. Sometimes we travel to rest. Sometimes we travel because we're curious about the world. And sometimes we travel because a place holds a piece of someone we love. That day in Gießen didn't bring my Nana back. But for a little while, I got to see the world through her eyes.

I walked the streets she walked.

I saw the river she crossed.

I stood beside the garden she remembered.

And I finally understood the place that had lived inside so many of her stories. So today, on what would have been her 88th birthday, I keep thinking about that rainy day in Germany.

And I hope somehow she knows.

I made it, Nana.

Happy birthday.