Visit To The Berlin Wall: An Experience Time Cannot Erase

A 1962

November 14, 1989|By SYLVIA JETER COOKE

They're dancing atop the Berlin Wall these days, sitting and singing and riding bicycles. As of early last weekend there were 18 holes knocked through the barrier and jubilant East Berliners are streaming into the West.

I remember the way it was in April 1962 when I flew into Berlin through jammed air corridors. Threatening Russian MiGs often accompanied flights of military dependents in those Iron Curtain days.

I had seen countless outraged articles accompanied by grim pictures of the Berlin Wall in American newspapers as well as condemning television coverage practically every day before I left, but I still wasn't prepared for the noxious impact of actually seeing it.

The wall was ugly, slap-dashed together out of anything the East Berlin government could lay hands on - bricks, stone, cinder blocks, other man-made materials all with morter slopped between them. It was tall and thick and uneven with vicious barbed wire and jagged broken glass strung across the top. This monstrosity sealed off streets, ran parallel down alleys, neighborhood and business streets. It appeared to divide single buildings.

The real gut-wrenching aspect of the wall, however, were the West Berliners who would appear like ghosts just to stare at it bleakly. There were places where they could see into East Berlin by standing atop a close-by benign wall, a ground rise, a second story window.

And there were similar spots on the other side where East Berliners could look across. Hundreds of families were divided and in the ambiguous secret way such messages travel, members would meet on opposite viewing spots and wave to each other.

Sometimes these men and women just stared somber and motionless, tears rolling unchecked down their faces.

I particularly remember a family on a Sunday afternoon working carefully to get a black-clad grandmother to the top of a playground slide ladder. They supported her while she wept and waved to the other side where a young mother held up a tiny infant.

"Her first great-grandchild," the family told me. "She wants so to see it."

They were all crying and I cried with them.

My husband, Charlie, was an Army officer working for intelligence then and part of that unending string of military vehicles that kept Checkpoint Charlie open.

You may remember we kept an American vehicle in East Berlin at all times so they couldn't close it for good (also noting troop changes, tanks, etc.). The behavior of the East Berliners often touched him. At stop lights they would smile furtively then look away uneasily, sometimes touch the car as if for hope. If the windows were down they whispered encouraging words in English or German. Once an old man, tears in his eyes, grabbed Charlie's hand and hung on to it as long as he could.

I signed up for a tour into East Berlin from the Berlin Hilton being told as we started, our chances of getting through Checkpoint Charlie were slim. Most of the time they arbitrarily turned the bus away, but this drizzly, cold day we got through. We were grilled on not leaving the bus unless given permission, not getting off the beaten path and not taking any pictures. "Cameras will be confiscated if you do," we were warned.

The many buildings "finely reconstructed since the war" were mostly facades with nothing behind them. Fallen tiles lay everywhere. There was little in shop windows and few people on the streets. None were smiling. It was like being trapped in the middle of a grim '40s black and white futuristic movie.

This was almost 28 years ago, but I still vividly remember walking along that wall. And now, in these happy days, I have some humble advice for western leaders on the way to Malta: Smile and give 'em credit, but keep your eyes open all the time!

*Sylvia Jeter Cooke is a free-lance writer living in James City County.

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