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Editor’s note: Janko Tietz, a business writer for Der Spiegel in Hamburg, Germany, is a fellow with the Arthur F. Burns program. He is a contributing writer for the Oakland Tribune.

June 15, 1961, began with a historical lie. In one of his rare news conferences, the chairman of the East German Communist Party, Walter Ulbricht, said, “Nobody has the intention to build a wall,” in response to a question about workers moving between East and West Berlin.

Less than two months later, on Aug. 13, 1961, Ulbricht’s statement was overtaken by reality. Armed forces of the German Democratic Republic, as East Germany was then known, and construction workers began building a wall that closed off East Berlin from West Berlin, and the eastern part of Germany from the west.

According to a West German government commission, Zentrale Erfassungsstelle Salzgitter, Germany had been divided since the end of the World War II, and that division claimed more than 800 lives, because the state shot its own citizens who wanted to cross the barrier.

The commission said that through 1989, at least 255 people were shot to death in Berlin when they tried to flee to the west, the last one — 20-year-old Chris Gueffroy — just eight months before the wall fell. Along the border that severed western Germany from the eastern part, at least 371 people were killed, and at least 189 died while trying to swim across the Baltic Sea to the west.

But the vast majority lived their lives in a country that did not allow them to leave. I was one of those East German citizens.

I was child when I lived behind the wall. And at 11, I was still a child when my family was able to leave the country behind the monstrous wall. I remember this time. It has influenced me to this day.

I was born in November 1972 in Saxony, a southern district of the GDR. There I grew up. My childhood was happy. I did not feel oppressed. I had friends, grandparents, uncles and aunts. We spent holidays at the Baltic Sea or in neighboring Czechoslovakia. I became interested in cycling. In the GDR, the promotion of athletes began very early, so I was 8 when I joined a cycling club and participated in many competitions.

I knew there was a western part of Germany, but it was out of our reach and I didn’t think about it. But it bothered my parents very much. And not only because they could not go where they wanted.

They couldn’t buy what they wanted in shops, because there simply was not much to buy. It bothered them that they had to wait between 10 and 12 years to buy a car, called a Trabant, which was made of plastic and cardboard. It bothered them that they could not speak freely and that they were always fearful friends would betray them to the Stasi, the East German intelligence service.

My parents had friends in the late 1970s who attempted several times to escape. They were caught and jailed, until West Germany, or the Federal Republic of Germany, paid money so they could leave. These friends encouraged my parents to leave the GDR behind. But fleeing that way was illegal and risky, and my parents would have had to leave my younger brother and me behind.

So they decided to try it legally. They applied to the authorities for permanent emigration from the GDR. The Federal Republic of Germany in the early ’80s had loaned several billion Deutsche Marks to the GDR. In return, the Federal Republic of Germany expected that several thousand GDR citizens opposing the government would be allowed to legally move to West Germany.

My parents hoped their request would be approved, but they had to wait four years for it. The request was rejected again and again, and those four years were full of uncertainties. My mother lost her job. We were done with life in the GDR, but we could not leave it.

In January 1984, our request was finally approved. On March 1, we got on a train in our hometown of Freiberg and crossed the border of Saxony in East Germany to Bavaria in West Germany. It was a journey into a new world, a journey from socialism to freedom. We were happy, even if we knew that freedom did not mean we would have everything. Except for some furniture and household items, we had left behind everything and had to start again from zero.

Above all, it was a journey with a painful farewell to our family forever — so we thought. We could never have imagined that five years later the wall would come down.

The rest of our family stayed behind. My uncles were not allowed to visit us. Neither would my friends. My parents were not allowed go back to their old home. Even when my grandfather died in 1986, my father was refused permission to return to bury his own father.

We could only write letters, because no one in our family had phones, with only a few exceptions. In the GDR, the people not only had to wait many years for cars, but also for phone lines.

In my new surroundings in the south of West Germany, I was still torn between joy and sadness. I could understand that my parents wanted to leave the country, but I was also sad to not be able to see my old friends again, to no longer practice my sport at my club, or to no longer be able to spend the weekends with my grandparents.

When the Berlin Wall was brought down on Nov. 9, 1989, it was a day of double joy. On the one hand, there was hope that all people in the east could live freely in prosperity. On the other hand, our family was now back together — not in the same place, but accessible at all times.

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