Not Anymore

My dad enjoyed traveling. During his university days, and especially during the time when he attended the Sorbonne in Paris, he got around. He had stories of some grandiose and hairy adventures. I didn't really appreciate them until I went to university myself and got a taste of what it was like to step off a train in a brand new city. After I did that, I started to come home and ask Dad about where he'd been.

Dad visited Berlin in 1961, the year that the German Democratic Republic (also known as East Germany) erected the Berlin Wall between post-World War II East and West Berlin. The announcement that the border between the two portions of the city would be closed came without a lot of warning to the people. So it was that Dad found himself on the East side of the city as the tanks and personnel carriers were setting up to prevent anyone from crossing. He had been travelling with a couple of friends (none from East Germany), and these guys found themselves on the wrong side of a wide, emptying DMZ. There were a lot of guns to discourage spontaneous last-minute emigration.

Emboldened, perhaps, by much experience managing sticky situations in foreign languages, Dad and his friends approached the nearest border patrolman and asked for permission to cross.

Oh, did I mention that my dad loved to take pictures everywhere he went? He had a Pentax 35mm (which still works) with which he recorded all sorts of adventures. If there are some tactics in traveling that I would definitely discourage, it's trying to export photographs taken in the territory of a paranoid isolationist regime. The East German patrol did what any such patrol would do: it opened everyone's cameras and pulled out the film. Then, with a finger pointed across the forbidding void of concrete to the West German side, the patrolman let them go.

So, with a breath of relief, Dad and his travelling buddies high-tailed it between the tanks and across the DMZ. They slipped out of East Germany by the skin of their teeth; by the end of that day, the border had been completely closed, inaugurating a twenty-eight-year nightmare for anyone wanted to cross. Even siblings caught on opposite sides of the wall became separated for decades. Workers lost jobs because their factory was on the wrong side of the city; friends and family lost each other, sometimes all the way until 1989, when to the great joy of Germans everywhere the Wall came down.

If Dad hadn't been bold enough to squeeze through when he did, I might not be here today.

And if my dad hadn't put his exposed film in his boot, we might not have any record of the adventure. (More on that when I find the photos. They're somewhere in this pile of inherited stuff.)

I've stood at the Brandenburg Gate and at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. I've seen the space that my dad ran across in 1961. Now it's museums and offices, parks and World Cup fanmiles. It's a different world than where my dad traveled.

~emrys