Family Escapes Small Town Xenophobia - By Philipp Wittrock

Insulted, spat at and attacked -- by ordinary Germans. Unable to bear the daily racism, a pastor's family fled from a small town in eastern Germany back to the their former home in the west.

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Reiner Neuschäfer with his five children. The mother, Miriam, is half Indian.

Sometime last year, Miriam Neuschäfer, who has dark skin because her mother is Indian, decided it was time to record the daily instances of racism she and her family were suffering. The 32-year-old mother of five and wife of a German clergyman wrote down her encounters with the citizens of Rudolstadt, a small town in the eastern German state of Thuringia.

"It helped me work through it," she says, "and some day I want the children to understand everything that happened to us."