The Berlin Wall

It was November, 1989 and the Berlin wall, constructed in 1963 to separate east and west Berlin, was finally coming down. This would allow families to reunite who had been separated by threat of death, for over 25 years.

Don had queasy feelings about the Germans and hesitated to go.  But by February, he was ready and we piled the kids into the car and went to join the ‘wall peckers’. 

Armed guards who the day before shot anyone venturing into ‘no man’s land’, (the space between the Berlin wall and the smaller wall on the east side), and today were acting as tourist guides.  The look of confusion on their faces did not escape me.  They just couldn’t smile.

We came equipped with our chisels and hammers.  That wall was never meant to come down. It was hard.  We enthusiastically did our bit at chipping away at it to gather our treasured pieces into our own little bags. The strangest phenomenon occurred. People with spray cans would spray the walls and before the paint was dry, men in business suits and attache cases would appear.  They had chisels and tools in their attache cases. They began immediately to chip away at the freshly painted parts of the wall. It all seemed so strange. We deserved the title they gave us, ‘the wall peckers’ as the bits came off in small pieces and we could but chip away at it. We managed to get a few jars of the hard stone as our loot. 

We visited east Berlin and passed through Check Point Charlie.  It was just a little white building, but had quite a history after the war in its special role as a check point between east and west Berlin.  I thought it was a big mistake when they removed it when it really belonged in a museum. I thought it was a mistake too, that the Germans completely removed the wall.  Parts of it could have kept the wall peckers coming for years. But it was removed in its entirity save for a small section very quickly within a few months of the declaration that it was to come down.

At Check Point Charlie, we were given passes to go into east Berlin.  I think we were supposed to hand them back in but I ended up keeping mine.  Back at the farm, I framed it. We went to a restaurant in east Berlin.  It was dreary and poor and hadn’t yet adjusted to the freedoms and plenty of the west.   When we ordered coke, the staff said they had some but it was just for the staff and they wouldn’t sell it to us. This reflected the mentality that they had to live with, hoarding and miserliness.  It was evident that not only was coke not easily acquired, but they didn’t realize yet that they could get all the coke they wanted.