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Remembering when freedom rang
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This past Monday, people in Berlin were enthusiastically celebrating the 20th anniversary of the day the Wall came down. And well they should. Nov. 9, 1989, marked the end of a terrible scar across a grand European capital and the segregation of millions of people between captive and free. The dismantling of the Wall signified the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. The Iron Curtain was now open; the population poured out of East Berlin and into the West, and the Cold War, as we knew it then was over.
I was there. Not Nov. 9 but some six weeks earlier, when I had extended a holiday to Paris and Nice by then going on to visit friends from here who were on sabbatical in West Berlin.
Berlin itself has quite a story. Originally the capital of Germany was able to survive as a bastion of freedom, in spite of the Soviet effort to blockade the city after World War II, by dint of the remarkable Berlin Airlift in 1948. At that time, all manner of goods and foodstuffs were supplied to the Berliners by U.S. Air Force pilots landing loaded cargo planes every 30 seconds.
Then in 1961, the Soviets came with cement and barbed wire and put up a wall, cutting the city in two. East Berlin came under the heel of the Soviet totalitarian regime and suffered the disastrous effects of the Communist planned economies. West Berlin pulsed with the excitement of unrestricted goods, a thriving economy and freedom. Many East Germans lost their lives in all sorts of imaginative but failed attempts at escape. There was even a museum on the West Berlin side of the Wall, in which such victims were memorialized.
Rather than flying from Paris to Berlin, which would have been the quickest way to make the trip, we opted instead to fly to Hamburg, a completely rebuilt industrial city on the North Sea, and take the train across the border into East Germany and finally to West Berlin. We wanted to experience the isolation of West Berlin within the East German "Republic."
As we were about to cross the border into East Germany, the police entered our compartment and sternly asked us questions about the reason for our visit and studied our tickets and passports. From our windows, as we moved east, the countryside appeared poor and underpopulated. Farm equipment seemed old fashioned, when there was any. And when we approached the outskirts of West Berlin, the train cars were walled in by high cement barriers topped with barbed wire so that no one might jump onto a departing train.
We planned to visit East Berlin on Friday, the day before I was to return home. We took a bus as close as we could to Checkpoint Charlie, then walked across a barren quarter of a mile, all the while aware that cameras were trained on us, until we got to the small hut that housed the border police. After our documents were again studied, we were denied entry.
"Could you tell us why?" we asked the guard timidly.
"Yes," he replied. "The 40th celebration of the founding of the East German Republic starts tonight. Premier Gorbachev is joining President Honecker for the parade. No one is allowed to cross over from the west."
Terrifically disappointed, we walked back across the no-man's-land to the nearest telephone, where my friend, who could speak some German, cleverly called a tour bus company and asked if they were going into East Berlin to see the museums that day. With great luck, we bought the last two tickets and actually crossed over in the bus at Checkpoint Charlie.
Police came into the bus with German Shepherds, who were decidedly not household pets, to ask each of us in turn our name, origin and purpose for the visit. They asked the same questions three times, and if anyone looked nervous or evasive, they were taken off the bus. They also had a long pole, of perhaps 20 feet, with a mirror on the end that they passed under the bus to check if anyone was holding on to the underside of the carriage, trying to sneak into or out of East Berlin.
I'm glad to have experienced that stress. It makes me all the more grateful and appreciative of our freedoms then and now.
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