keys and locks from the German border land

I watched an interview with a lock picker on BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14924443 and was very touched by his philosophical view of lock picking - as a key to unlock human history. And it reminded my experience at Silesian Museum in Goritz where I visited recently.

Gorlitz is a German city bordering Poland. The museum is devoted to the region called Silesia, a former German territory before the war. Silesia became a part of Poland after WWII when the borders were redrawn by the victors. All the Germans who inhabited Silesia were expelled and relocated in other parts of Germany or emigrated to other continents such as US and Canada. The Poles who were also expelled from their eastern territory - nowaday Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus - moved in.

Goritz was a western edge of Silesia and remained in German territory (at that time it was Eastern Germany). The museum was established after the German Unification and tells the story of Silesia which is no longer German but ringers in memories of many people who left their land of ancestors.

One area of the exhibition especially caught my eyes - numerous keys and locks, which were donated by people who left their homes in Silesia in 1945. When they were expelled they thought it was temporary and that they would be moving back after the war ends. So they locked their houses and took keys with them while fleeing with nothing more than their suitcases and toys. A lock to a library of Breslau University was also exhibited. One of the university employee locked the library and took it with him upon evacuation. The cold war ended, and the border stayed the same. Silesians' dream of going home faded. The museum exhibition explains that when people were getting old and realized that they are no longer going back home, they brought those keys and locks to the museum and had a sense of relief and closure. I thought it was a sad but beautiful story.

If you look around the world, how many are those people with keys which don't unlock their houses anymore? The daily conflicts in many parts of the world keep producing such people yet still.