This small, worn out toy monkey looks like an ordinary albeit well-loved toy, but it's nothing short of extraordinary. It escaped Nazi Germany, and 80 years later, helped a war-torn family come together.
The toy monkey belongs to Gert Berliner, who lived in Berlin in 1930s as a young boy. When the Nazis took control of the city and started rounding up Jewish men, Gert's parents managed to help him escape from Germany through an underground railroad operation:
In 1939, at the age of 14, he had to say goodbye to his parents, Paul and Sophie Berliner. He boarded the train in Berlin, bound for the city of Kalmar, on the Baltic Coast. He had a small bag and there wasn't much he could bring. But stashed away in his suitcase was the toy monkey, his talisman ...
Orphaned when his parents were murdered in Auschwitz, Gert thought that he had no family left. From that point on, wherever Gert went, the toy went with him. Eventually, it ended up in a museum in Berlin as a war memento.
And that's when the toy monkey changed Gert's life one more time ...
Read what happened next over in the story by Uri Berliner, Gert's son, over at NPR.
(Image: Jacobia Dahm/NPR)