PittsburghAfterDark
07-07-2006, 01:42 PM
I don't think anything in my lifetime will compare to the overwhelming changes that took place in Eastern Europe in the fall of 1989. I was just a teenager in college at the time and remember watching the images of the Berlin Wall coming down and being completely dumbfounded by the speed at which Communism fell. The joy on the faces of all Germans, Berliners in particular, was something to behold.
In 1982 I spent a large portion of the summer in West Germany with a family my father had met when he was in the military. In an unlikely twist we have remained lifelong friends with them, both of their sons came to the U.S. as exchange students for a year and both were present for a recent family wedding. They're, for all intensive purposes, cousins and family.
During that summer we saw many German cities, mostly in the West as travel to the East was very difficult for Americans and West German nationals. This was the height of the Cold War. We were all spies.
On our trip from West Germany to West Berlin we had to cross a few hundred miles of East German territory. There were only three highways that crossed the East from the West. Even though they were all in East Germany they Communists had demanded the West Germans pay for the roads to connect to Berlin and maintain them. They were, however, policed by East German police, military and the dreaded Stasi, a quasi FBI-CIA-Secret Police organization that really had no Western equivilent.
When we crossed the frontier we were given a time stamp card by the border guards. When we crossed the checkpoint into West Berlin we were required to present them again. If the trip took more than 4-5 hours you would be detained and questioned, possibly even held until representatives of the American or West German embassies and consulates came to have you released.
I want to say, the border was extremely threatening looking at our crossing point. There were lots of wide open fields and warning signs planted in all of them. "Minen" was printed on all of them. You can guess the translation. The border was encased in double, in some cases triple, chain link fences 15-20 feet high seperated by 5-10 meters. The tops all were laced with conertino or razor wire.
The guard towers were another 15-20 feet above the imposing fences. The tallest being roughly 50 meters high. There was no architectual difference between them and what you may recognize from footage of supermax prisons here. Speaks volumes to the relative strength of the Communist/Socialist system.
Once in West Berlin I was struck at how magnificent a city it was/is. New York, Paris, London and Amsterdam had nothing on this place. However when you'd get to sections of it you'd see it, the Berlin Wall. It was an ugly ediface to the failure of the Communist system that could ever be designed.
We went to the Checkpoint Charlie museum (British, American and French checkpoint from West to East.) and saw the history of the wall being built, how people had escaped and yes, how people had died trying to reach freedom in the West. When crossing over into East Berlin through CC we were stopped by the Russian, not East German, but Russian soldiers. Not even the Soviets trusted "their" Germans enough to guard this hotspot of East/West flashpoints during the Cold War.
At one point we had already surrendered our passports for inspection by the Soviet army, possibly the KGB as well. Another soldier appeared and asked for our papers while we were waiting. Not being able to understand our passports had already been taken for inspection my father handed him his U.S. Steel employee ID card and my mother gave him a Pennsylvania drivers license. My brother and I both produced our local library cards. Believe it or not, despite 3 seperate forms of ID for 4 people, the soldier was satisfied. Our library cards didn't even have photographs on them but the fact that they had names and numbers on them seemed to be enough.
Once in East Berlin we went to see what few sites there were worth seeing. It must be noted, we were forced to exchange 50 West German marks per person (Roughly $20 in exchange rates at the time.) for worthless East German currency. This turns funny later on in the day.
We went to the capital, to see the war memorials the biggest of which was a tribute to Soviet soldiers that dwarfed any monument you can imagine. The Soviets made the East Germans pay for it and lay an apology plaque at the base for starting WW II. Since the wall fell the Germans refused to maintain it. It then went into a very strange state of being overgrown like an almost ancient culture you'd find in a jungle.
For lunch we ate at a restaurant in a residential neighborhood as opposed to a main thuroughfare. The reason was simple, all East German restaurants had the same items on their menu and all had the same price. There was no good or bad restaurant, they were all the same and all equally bland. I think the event that struck me most that day was the utter amazement and fascination by passers by to our cars. By western standards they were nothing. A 4 cylinder Fiat no bigger than a VW Rabbit and a Datsun station wagon. To the East Berliners they might as well have been spaceships.
At the end of our alloted 5 hour "visitation period" in the East we decided to spend our money before it became worthless going back West. Try as we might we couldn't spend it at a restaurant. The prices were fixed to the wages of East Germans and we had pretty much exchanged a month's worth of an average workers salary.
So we went shopping. Now the Communists have an awfully strange idea of what passed as "world class" shopping facilities. The best store in the country, and we were told the Eastern Bloc, was a 6 story K-Mart like stores. No, not the nice new Super K-Marts but the most barren, run down, must not have received a shipment of anything since 1991 type K-Mart complete with flickering lights, chipped tile and crappy fixtures. We couldn't find much to buy and couldn't even find anything we would want.
Imagine having $50 and not being able to part with it. Not a problem we can relate to as Americans.
Running out of time we decided to get nothing. Instead one of the German boys and myself took off running through an underground tunnel under a main square to get back to our family meeting points. Think two running 12 year olds wouldn't have anything to worry about in a national capital? We were shouted at by a East German policemen to halt, to the sound of a clicking AK variant. We did. My German friend explained to him that we were late meeting our families and our day visas were going to expire. He let us go. Thank God. Otherwise? Call the embassy, your kid is being detained for running in a public place.
Shortly before our familes met up we were sitting around waiting. Just the 4 kids, 2 from each family. We all ran into the same problem, we couldn't spend our money. A woman with a baby in tow was passing by our small group. Our Germans said that even by East German standards she was poor. We gave her all of our money. Probably around 200 East German marks if memory serves. She was dumbfounded that 4 kids were giving her this much money. She said she didn't make that much in 6 months.
Imagine that. Imagine getting stopped by someone on the street that may hand you $15,000. That's what we did and to us it meant nothing. That was our good deed for the day.
Crossing back over, the Germans had another checkpoint from the Americans, the father of our host family was strip searched. We were held up for another hour and a half by the Soviets who inspected the trunk, ran a mirror under the car, tapped the gas tank (Another way people had escaped. False gas tanks.) and of course, asked for our papers 3 seperate times at three stops going through the checkpoint. I was honestly scared we weren't going to be allowed through.
Once on the Western side, in a story repeated to me countless times by family in the last 20 something years, I jumped out of the car pumped my arms in the air and screamed "We're free! We're free!". To which my dad said, SHUT UP! they have our license plate number and we still have to recross East Germany to get back to the West.
It's that three days in Berlin and my day in East Berlin that have forever imbedded in my brain that socialism/communism can never be trusted, never respected, never just an alternative to capitalism but a force of pure evil that mankind has yet to fully learn from. I thanked God Ronald Wilson Reagan was meeting with the leaders of Britain, France and West Germany to propose strengthening defenses against a, thankfully, never realized Soviet/Warsaw Pact threat.
I had seen the face of a prison state as a tourist and hated it. I couldn't possibly imagine what 100's of millions lived with for 70 years.
I thank God that Europe is finally free from the terrifying images embedded in my mind as a young American boy.
In 1982 I spent a large portion of the summer in West Germany with a family my father had met when he was in the military. In an unlikely twist we have remained lifelong friends with them, both of their sons came to the U.S. as exchange students for a year and both were present for a recent family wedding. They're, for all intensive purposes, cousins and family.
During that summer we saw many German cities, mostly in the West as travel to the East was very difficult for Americans and West German nationals. This was the height of the Cold War. We were all spies.
On our trip from West Germany to West Berlin we had to cross a few hundred miles of East German territory. There were only three highways that crossed the East from the West. Even though they were all in East Germany they Communists had demanded the West Germans pay for the roads to connect to Berlin and maintain them. They were, however, policed by East German police, military and the dreaded Stasi, a quasi FBI-CIA-Secret Police organization that really had no Western equivilent.
When we crossed the frontier we were given a time stamp card by the border guards. When we crossed the checkpoint into West Berlin we were required to present them again. If the trip took more than 4-5 hours you would be detained and questioned, possibly even held until representatives of the American or West German embassies and consulates came to have you released.
I want to say, the border was extremely threatening looking at our crossing point. There were lots of wide open fields and warning signs planted in all of them. "Minen" was printed on all of them. You can guess the translation. The border was encased in double, in some cases triple, chain link fences 15-20 feet high seperated by 5-10 meters. The tops all were laced with conertino or razor wire.
The guard towers were another 15-20 feet above the imposing fences. The tallest being roughly 50 meters high. There was no architectual difference between them and what you may recognize from footage of supermax prisons here. Speaks volumes to the relative strength of the Communist/Socialist system.
Once in West Berlin I was struck at how magnificent a city it was/is. New York, Paris, London and Amsterdam had nothing on this place. However when you'd get to sections of it you'd see it, the Berlin Wall. It was an ugly ediface to the failure of the Communist system that could ever be designed.
We went to the Checkpoint Charlie museum (British, American and French checkpoint from West to East.) and saw the history of the wall being built, how people had escaped and yes, how people had died trying to reach freedom in the West. When crossing over into East Berlin through CC we were stopped by the Russian, not East German, but Russian soldiers. Not even the Soviets trusted "their" Germans enough to guard this hotspot of East/West flashpoints during the Cold War.
At one point we had already surrendered our passports for inspection by the Soviet army, possibly the KGB as well. Another soldier appeared and asked for our papers while we were waiting. Not being able to understand our passports had already been taken for inspection my father handed him his U.S. Steel employee ID card and my mother gave him a Pennsylvania drivers license. My brother and I both produced our local library cards. Believe it or not, despite 3 seperate forms of ID for 4 people, the soldier was satisfied. Our library cards didn't even have photographs on them but the fact that they had names and numbers on them seemed to be enough.
Once in East Berlin we went to see what few sites there were worth seeing. It must be noted, we were forced to exchange 50 West German marks per person (Roughly $20 in exchange rates at the time.) for worthless East German currency. This turns funny later on in the day.
We went to the capital, to see the war memorials the biggest of which was a tribute to Soviet soldiers that dwarfed any monument you can imagine. The Soviets made the East Germans pay for it and lay an apology plaque at the base for starting WW II. Since the wall fell the Germans refused to maintain it. It then went into a very strange state of being overgrown like an almost ancient culture you'd find in a jungle.
For lunch we ate at a restaurant in a residential neighborhood as opposed to a main thuroughfare. The reason was simple, all East German restaurants had the same items on their menu and all had the same price. There was no good or bad restaurant, they were all the same and all equally bland. I think the event that struck me most that day was the utter amazement and fascination by passers by to our cars. By western standards they were nothing. A 4 cylinder Fiat no bigger than a VW Rabbit and a Datsun station wagon. To the East Berliners they might as well have been spaceships.
At the end of our alloted 5 hour "visitation period" in the East we decided to spend our money before it became worthless going back West. Try as we might we couldn't spend it at a restaurant. The prices were fixed to the wages of East Germans and we had pretty much exchanged a month's worth of an average workers salary.
So we went shopping. Now the Communists have an awfully strange idea of what passed as "world class" shopping facilities. The best store in the country, and we were told the Eastern Bloc, was a 6 story K-Mart like stores. No, not the nice new Super K-Marts but the most barren, run down, must not have received a shipment of anything since 1991 type K-Mart complete with flickering lights, chipped tile and crappy fixtures. We couldn't find much to buy and couldn't even find anything we would want.
Imagine having $50 and not being able to part with it. Not a problem we can relate to as Americans.
Running out of time we decided to get nothing. Instead one of the German boys and myself took off running through an underground tunnel under a main square to get back to our family meeting points. Think two running 12 year olds wouldn't have anything to worry about in a national capital? We were shouted at by a East German policemen to halt, to the sound of a clicking AK variant. We did. My German friend explained to him that we were late meeting our families and our day visas were going to expire. He let us go. Thank God. Otherwise? Call the embassy, your kid is being detained for running in a public place.
Shortly before our familes met up we were sitting around waiting. Just the 4 kids, 2 from each family. We all ran into the same problem, we couldn't spend our money. A woman with a baby in tow was passing by our small group. Our Germans said that even by East German standards she was poor. We gave her all of our money. Probably around 200 East German marks if memory serves. She was dumbfounded that 4 kids were giving her this much money. She said she didn't make that much in 6 months.
Imagine that. Imagine getting stopped by someone on the street that may hand you $15,000. That's what we did and to us it meant nothing. That was our good deed for the day.
Crossing back over, the Germans had another checkpoint from the Americans, the father of our host family was strip searched. We were held up for another hour and a half by the Soviets who inspected the trunk, ran a mirror under the car, tapped the gas tank (Another way people had escaped. False gas tanks.) and of course, asked for our papers 3 seperate times at three stops going through the checkpoint. I was honestly scared we weren't going to be allowed through.
Once on the Western side, in a story repeated to me countless times by family in the last 20 something years, I jumped out of the car pumped my arms in the air and screamed "We're free! We're free!". To which my dad said, SHUT UP! they have our license plate number and we still have to recross East Germany to get back to the West.
It's that three days in Berlin and my day in East Berlin that have forever imbedded in my brain that socialism/communism can never be trusted, never respected, never just an alternative to capitalism but a force of pure evil that mankind has yet to fully learn from. I thanked God Ronald Wilson Reagan was meeting with the leaders of Britain, France and West Germany to propose strengthening defenses against a, thankfully, never realized Soviet/Warsaw Pact threat.
I had seen the face of a prison state as a tourist and hated it. I couldn't possibly imagine what 100's of millions lived with for 70 years.
I thank God that Europe is finally free from the terrifying images embedded in my mind as a young American boy.