On this day in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down after 27 years. I was there before and after the Wall came down. Here are my personal pictures from 1976 and 1990.
Needless to say, the Berlin Wall plays a part in my new book "Back in the DDR". Here's a short excerpt from the book...
***
We took a taxi to our appointment.
Dad asked the cab driver to drop us a few blocks away so that we could walk and
see the sights. I could see Checkpoint Charlie from where we were, but Dad
brought me to a platform in front of the wall, about a hundred yards away. We
climbed up the stairs to the platform, and from that point we could see over
the wall into East Germany. I felt a chill up my spine as Dad described what I
was seeing.
“The
guards there walking back and forth are on duty. See them in front of that
building over there? 24 hours a day they have guards walking back and forth,
scanning the area, making sure no-one makes a run for it here. Not that
anything is likely to happen right here, anyway. People who try to escape have
learned not to do it at the checkpoints. Checkpoint Charlie is amongst the most
heavily fortified places anywhere along the wall.”
He
pointed to the space in front of the guards.
“The
grass field there looks pretty innocuous, doesn’t it? But the hundred yards or
so between the buildings in the East and the Wall is loaded with landmines.
Everyone knows it, and no one dares go near it.”
It looked like a soccer field with a few
giant white stone markers placed about twenty meters apart.
“But let’s say you make it magically past
the guards and the landmines and get to the wall. That tower over there,” he
said. “Can you see those men in there with binoculars? Those are the snipers
that Major Dacey was telling us about. They have incredibly powerful
searchlights that scan the Wall all night long. The tower is within rifle range
of the wall. Anyone who gets to the wall can be shot down before they climb it.
There are towers like this up and down the wall. Down the river a way, there
are even a few stories about snipers shooting people after they get into
West Berlin.”
I could see the binoculars trained on us.
They were watching us.
“But let’s say by some miracle you make it
all this way and they haven’t seen you and you’ve somehow gotten a ladder or
some way to climb up the wall. Look at the top of the wall itself.”
We could see it perfectly from this perch.
It was only a few yards away from us. The top of the wall was covered with
shards of glass.
“That’s why almost no-one tries to get over
the wall,” he said. “They try other things. They strap themselves to the
undercarriage of cars heading back into the West. They build secret
compartments into trucks or trains bringing goods back and forth from East to
West. They build tunnels to get underneath the wall…”
I looked at Dad. Dad nodded. We didn’t need
to rehash the obvious tunnel-blunder moment.
“But here’s the important thing to remember
about all this, Rudi,” he said. “A country that needs to build a wall to keep
their own people from leaving is not a country at all. It’s a prison. Keep that
in mind when you hear them tell you about the utopia of their socialist state.
I’ve heard it all a million times, and we’ll hear it again today. Don’t say anything
to dispute them. We are under orders not to engage in anyway. We’re just going
to give Onkel Otto these family pictures in my rucksack, tell him stories about
his family, shake his hand and return to safety. Do you understand?”
I
nodded.
