Somewhere in the 70’s in East Germany, Bangladeshi student Naimul Karim managed to ask a beautiful, young German fellow student out for tea.

They talked, and they talked some more and they discovered other things that they could do together and one thing led to another … you know how it goes!

Naim and Christine got married and a year later, they were graced with the birth of a boy.

They named him Jawed.

Jawed was born in Merseberg in 1979 .

This was the time when Berlin Wall still stood high.

Some say that due to xenofobia, Naimul Karim wanted to leave East Germany. But leaving the country was not that simple.

While as a Bangladeshi citizen, Naimul Karim was free to travel anywhere, the same was not true for his German wife Christine.

However, one day at the end of the summer 1981, Naimul Karim bundled Christine and his two year old son Jawed on to a train for Amsterdam, pretending that they are on their way to visit Bangladesh.

The train stopped at Frankfurt,the Karims got off and they never looked back.

Aided by a West German policy that happily welcomed anyone who successfully scaled the wal , albeit figuratively in this case, Naimul Karim and Christine finished their studies, eventually getting their Ph.D.s in chemistry in this little town called Kaiserslautern between Frankfurt and the border with France.