One of my goals when I lived in Germany was to go to Berlin to see the Berlin Wall. I vividly remember being in New York City with my family and reading on a building ticker about the Berlin Wall going up. I remembered my high school German teacher (Mrs Rangel) telling us in the early 60's that there were still World War II bombed building shells in Berlin. I thought that surely by the late 60's I would see no evidence of World War II.
Lesson #11 The people of Germany still felt very much the affects of World War II. My good friend Helga told me of being so hungry after the war that she and a group of children swarmed a wrecked train that had food on it. I learned that the German people appreciated the CARE packages Americans had sent.
Lesson #12 The Berlin Wall was a result of the Peace terms of World War II but, it wasn't a continuous wall---sometimes it was a river, barbed-wire, a building bricked up. It's purpose was to keep East Germans from crossing in to West Berlin which was their gate to freedom. In the photo above you can also see the bombed-out shell of a building.
Lesson #13 I had arrived in Berlin by airplane. Although I didn't have much trouble crossing in to East Berlin at Checkpoint Charlie to take a tour, visit a museum and get a transit visa, going home in West Germany by car was very challenging. We left West Berlin, had to travel through East Germany in order to reach West Germany. Because I was traveling with a Berliner, we were suspicious. We were taken to separate interrogation rooms while the car was dismantled looking for people being smuggled into West Germany. It was a VW Beetle---how many people could we have smuggled across the border? I learned not to fool around with a dictatorship like East Germany---it was very scary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Wall
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