We decided to move to Germany in 2016, at that time I was 35 years old, my husband was 37, and my son was 13. There was no single reason, we just matured, and the constantly deteriorating economic situation in the country was not happy. Today we are horrified to think what would have happened if we had not decided then, if we had not started collecting documents and would have stayed in Russia. We are worried about our first homeland, but we are glad that we left in time.

We chose Germany because my aunt already lived there, and I had a rough idea of what awaits us in that country. We had heard a lot about medicine, safety and attitude of Germans to people. We decided to move there because my grandfather on my mother's side was a Jew.

German relatives advised us to use the services of an immigration lawyer, and we, of course, listened, although initially we thought to collect all the documents themselves. In the end, still decided that moving to another country - it is forever and it is hardly easy, you need special skills and experience, and in general in Europe it is not accepted bad, but to do what they can do well and quickly qualified specialists.

In the end - everything turned out so smoothly and without problems that I do not even remember what kind of documents we were collecting, although the process took almost a year, but this is the norm for emigration in our Jewish direction.

While we were getting ready to move, we started learning German - in order to get a permanent residence permit it was necessary to pass the language exam at least to the level of A1, and we did not want to understand what was going on and what people were talking about. At first, it was difficult - German is not an easy language, but we tried to support each other, we spoke broken German at home, bought some children's books, to somehow immerse ourselves in the atmosphere.

Once all the paperwork was behind us and our move was approved, the consulate gave us a year to pack and, actually, move to Germany. We sold our apartment, car, garage, dacha, opened an account, packed our bags.

We decided to move closer to my relatives, to Nuremberg. At first, when we arrived, we lived in a hostel for newly arrived foreigners - in Bavaria, like in other regions of Germany, it is not easy to quickly find a good place to live on long-term lease. It takes time to find one - and we had to be prepared for that. My aunt warned me and even offered to stay with her temporarily, but we decided to live separately and, in time, found a beautiful house in the suburbs.

As immigrants on Jewish line, we were given many things for free or at great discounts, for example, braces for my son, who was not yet 18 years, instead of 3.000 euros we put for 200, thanks to the health insurance we got for free.

Getting all the documents for permanent residence already in the country took another three months, but because we were helped at all stages of our agency, everything went smoothly.

My son went to school and quickly joined the team - there were a lot of kids of different nationalities in his class, my husband and I got a job - he in an IT company, I - as an administrator in a flower shop. Life gradually began to get better and today Germany is our home. We are not going to go back to Russia, we associate our present and future with Germany, which took us well and kindly, the way few people treated us back home. Here we feel we are needed. Strangely enough, this is true.

My son speaks German and English fluently and almost perfectly, he is learning Norwegian and plans to go to university in Norway - he is interested in ecology, and this country has wonderful leading universities in this field.