…around the palace complex and since I was the only English speaker who turned up it was a private tour.
The guide was a Syrian guy who had come to the GDR in 1984 from Syria to study and had stayed on, taking up tour guiding when he couldn’t get a job as a physicist. I talked to him at some length about his family members who are still in Syria and he was very upset and very concerned.
He said he couldn’t reach his mother for weeks but now he has talked to her and knows she and the rest of his family is ok. He had plenty of ideas about who should be helping and how they should be doing it!