Ocnus.

Net

Dysfunctions
The Night Berlin Wall Tumbled
By David Dastych Canada Free Press 9/11/09
Nov 9, 2009 - 4:55:03 PM
http://www.ocnus.net/artman2/publish/Dysfunctions_2/The-Night-Berlin-
Wall-Tumbled.shtml

Motto: "A stone from the

broken Berlin wall
Whispered last night;
Don't look at me with such hatred
My wounds are the mark of history."
(From an anonymous poem "Berlin Wall")

Warsaw, Poland: That night, November 9/10, 1989, I slept in a Communist

prison unaware of what had happened in Berlin. It was my third year in a
special prison ward at Barczewo Penitentiary, near Olsztyn in North-Eastern
Poland. In 1989, and especially after the historic parliamentary elections of
June 4 marking the regime change in our country, prisoners called the
"enemies of the state" were treated more liberally. We had access to
newspapers and a TV set, to religious services and we could meet each other
and talk. Compared to a strict regime I had to endure in the Warsaw Central
Jail, at its special ward for political convicts where we were deprived of any
news media and completely isolated for many months of the investigation,
this prison really merited its popular nickname: "Barczewo Hilton."

On June12, 1987 when President Ronald Reagan made his famous speech at
the Brandenburger Gate in West Berlin, I was kept in confinement for the
third consecutive month with no access to any news, Polish or foreign.

Ronald Reagan was the U.S. President then and on that day he appealed to a
new, elected in 1985, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev:

"General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for
the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here
to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this
wall!" And then he added a few prophetic words: "As I looked out a moment
ago from the Reichstag, that embodiment of German unity, I noticed words
crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: "This wall
will fall. Beliefs become reality." Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it
cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand
freedom."

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The Berlin Ghetto

The erection of a wall in Berlin was a big surprise to all. Still on June 15,
1961 the communist East German leader, Walter Ulbricht, declared in a
press conference: "Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten!" (No
one has the intention of erecting a wall!).But two months later, after many
phone calls to Nikita Khrushchev, on Saturday, the12th of August 1961, the
leaders of the GDR attended a garden party at a government guesthouse in
Doelnsee, in a wooded area to the north of East Berlin, at which time
Ulbricht signed the order to close the border and erect a wall. The records of
these talks between Ulbricht and Khrushchev indicate that the construction
of the Berlin Wall was an idea that came from the Soviet leader.
At midnight, the Police and units of the East German Army began to close
the border and by Sunday morning, 13 August 1961, the border with West
Berlin was closed. At first there were only barbed wire entanglements and
fences, but then over a longer period a barrage of reinforced concrete walls
was extended to 156 kilometers (97 miles), encircling West Berlin and
dividing the city on a length of 43 kilometers (27 miles). Turrets of the armed
guards, minefields, complicated system of barriers and chain fences, iron
gates separating railways and roads divided East Berlin from West Berlin for
the next 28 years to come. With the passing of time, the Berlin Wall was
protected by self-shooting devices, strong search-lights and ultra-red
sensors. But still people tried to force it by ingenuous tricks or just bravery.
But many of the escapees lost their life when they acted on a natural and
very human instinct "a quest of liberty." During the 28 years of the Wall's
existence, over 5,000 attempts to escape were noted, and the confirmed
death toll of the victims reached 136.

One of the victims was Peter Fechter, 18, wounded by guards at an attempt
to escape and bled to death without being helped on no-man's land. In a
short story about that boy, its author pretended Peter wrote his own memoir:

"If you come to Berlin, you can see the spot where I died. I was only eighteen
years old when, on the 17th of August 1962, I tried to cross the Berlin Wall
into West Germany, with my friend Helmut Kulbeik. He made it into the
West and survived, whereas I was shot in the stomach and lay dying in the
sand in the death strip, shouting Hilfe! Hilfe! until I had no breath left to
shout with. Hundreds of people stood in the West by the wall, shouting
"Murderers!" at the guards who had shot me, although I was not yet dead.
Had one of them come to help me, perhaps I would have survived, and there
would have been no murder. Instead I slowly bled screaming to death while
they shouted. Neither my screams or their shouts did anything to save me
(...) In life, I was a brick-layer. I built walls. But on that day in 1962, nothing
would have made me happier than to tear down the wall that tore me and
my country apart.
For the first time I visited East and West Berlin in summer of 1960. Then,
after 1961, I came back many times looking at the infamous Wall that
reminded me of the high walls surrounding the Warsaw Ghetto during the
Second World War (in fact, I only could look at the pictures of these walls

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and watch films about the Warsaw Ghetto but its view stayed on in my
memory forever).

Poking the Wall

My several visits to East Berlin before 1989 could have ended badly. In the
first and second half of the 1960s, after coming back from the United States,
I got in touch with some young East Germans (I was also in my 20s then)
who carefully planned an escape to the West. During some visits to East
Berlin, we "inspected" the frontier installations. One night, near the passage
to West Berlin at Heinestrasse, I stepped on something that caused alarm in
the area. Guards were rushing to the place of the intrusion, but we managed
to escape by a fast car waiting with a running engine near by. On another
occasion, traveling on a city surface train (S-Ban), I tried to stop the train at
a place where there was still no wall but some barbed fences. The emergency
brake in the wagon did not stop the train but it signaled "danger" to the
guards. We couldn't stay on the train until the next stop, so we jumped out
of it when it slowed down, and escaped -- unfortunately back to the Eastern
side. After "poking the wall" several times, we were discouraged to try to
cross the frontier in Berlin, and my German friends had to wait for freedom
until 1989, when they were allowed to leave the FRG Embassy in Warsaw
and traveled by a special GDR-train to West Germany, after an agreement
reached with the East German government. I also had to wait, but until
the year 1990, when -- after being freed from prison --I made my first trip to
the West after 19 years, exactly to the (already united) Berlin.

Yet, in the past years many Berliners and other East Germans got out safely
by using all kinds of tricks and various vehicles. I remember a story about a
young West German, who came to East Berlin to "ex-filtrate" his Eastern
girlfriend. He used a low sports car, got his girl in to lay on the floor and
sped up under bars at the Heinestrasse checkpoint busting his car's rooftop
but reaching the West side without any injury. This and some more escapes
by cars caused the frontier guards to adopt concrete-enforced zig-zagging
throughways at the checkpoints. But the ingenuity of the freedom-loving
escapees was always a step forward from the frontier guards' engineering
improvements. People dug long tunnels or used undiscovered cellar passages
and sewers, some constructed hot-air balloons to fly over the wall, and
Thomas Krueger, a sports pilot, flew a Czech-made Zlin light aircraft to the
RAF Gatow airfield in West Berlin. I don' t remember the name of a
sportsman, who jumped over a lower section of the Wall in a pole vault. Still
another man, an engineer and experienced swimmer, swam over the sea
frontier to the shore of the Federal Republic from a beach in East Germany.
One even bolder attempt to cross over the GDR-FRG land frontier was made
by an operator of a bulldozer, using its thick steel shovel as a bullet-proof
shield.

But only a small number of the escapes were successful. The last escapee to
be shot while trying to flee to West Berlin across the Berlin Wall on February
6, 1989, was Chris Gueffroy. But the last to die was Winfried Freudenberg,

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who died in the crash of an improvised balloon aircraft by which he crossed
the border into West Berlin on March 8, 1989.
There is a Memorial in Berlin to all the victims of the damned Wall.

The crucial night

I would love to be in Berlin on the historic night of 9-10 November 1989 but,
alas, I was still confined to prison at that time. In "Barczewo-Hilton" we had
newspapers and a TV and during the months preceding the fall of the Berlin
Wall we could follow the events. I also made notes in a diary to
commemorate the unusual and happy events that turned the page of history
in Europe.

There are some conspiracy theories about the collapse of the Berlin Wall and
of the East German Communist regime. On last Saturday and Sunday, I
watched some television documentaries about these events. In a new
documentary, produced by Jens Nicolai, "The Fall of the Berlin Wall -- from
Divided Germany to Reunification," the German post-war history was
presented in a credible way. As to the events preceding November 9, 1989
the documentary reported:

"By East Germany's 40th anniversary celebration in the autumn of 1989, the
rage and discontent among the population had reached critical mass. After
the decades of fear and intimidation, the masses dared to protest openly.
The communist regime scrambled to keep the situation under control. At a
press conference on November 9th, 1989, the politburo announced new
travel regulations. The East German people heard it on live television and
streamed to the checkpoints along the Berlin Wall. There was no holding
them back. Toward 22:30, the border guards at the checkpoint on
Bornholmerstrasse opened the gates. It was one of the happiest moments in
German history. But things could have come very differently."

Helmut Kohl, then the Chancellor of the FRG, was visiting in Poland when
the Wall tumbled and he rushed to Berlin, happy and completely surprised.
Earlier in October 1989, the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, participated
in the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the German Democratic
Republic and warned its supreme, Erich Honecker, that those who are late
(at reforms) would have to pay. Poland's military and state leader, General
Wojciech Jaruzelski, disclosed in his recent (November 8, 2009) interview to
an Italian daily "La Repubblica" that Gorbachev phoned him many times in
fall of 1989. seeking his advice to calm the rage of Soviet top generals over
the nearing fall of the Berlin Wall, a sure collapse of East Germany and the
crumpling of the Soviet zone in Eastern Europe. Jaruzelski said that the
Soviet leader trusted him as he was the only military man on top of the
Communist party and state at that time. U.S. President George W.H. Bush
was also deeply involved in talks about reunification of Germany, both with
Gorbachev and Kohl.

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In a debate, organized by the Adenauer Foundation in Berlin, before the 20th
anniversary of the November 9-10, 1989 events, all three former leaders of
states -- Bush, Gorbachev and Kohl -- admitted that there was no
"conspiracy" in 1989 or earlier, leading to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and
to reunification of Germany in the next year. To the contrary, the
negotiations between Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl were tough and
difficult, backed by a support of President Bush (to Kohl) and of General
Jaruzelski (to Gorbachev). All three former leaders concluded that the Berlin
Wall fell in the consequence of German people's pressure for reforms and
change, their quest for freedom and peace.

On the crucial day, November 9, 1989, a GDR Politbureau member Walter

Schabowski announced new travel regulations allowing East German
citizens to freely travel to the West. Before any official regulations were
issued, thousands of East Berliners took their cars out and drove to the
checkpoint on Bornholmerstrasse. After some arguing, the border guards
opened the gate about 10:30 p.m. and crowds of people moved Westwards,
stopped by nobody. The news spread quickly and in the next few hours
crowds of people started to jump on the Wall and dismantle it at many
places. The "flood" of people opened the frontier, and the later events led to
the reunification of Germany.

All that couldn't be possible without the success of the Solidarity Movement
in Poland and the regime change in Poland after the elections of June 4,
1989. Lech Walesa in his recent interview to SPIEGEL ONLINE (published in
English), said that "It's good that Mikhail Gorbachev was a weak
politician"(this is the title of the interview). I don't agree with him. Gorbachev
was a wise politician and he could properly judge on the consequences of the
toppling of the Berlin Wall. It took the wisdom of many politicians, military
leaders and also of intelligence chiefs, including the Top Three (Bush,
Gorbachev and Kohl) to avoid a dramatic conflict, even a war about the Wall,
and to guide Europe and the world to a peaceful end of the Cold War.

But Lech Walesa was right when claiming that: "The first wall to fall was
pushed over in 1980 in the Polish shipyards. Later, other symbolic walls
came down, and the Germans, of course, tore down the literal wall in Berlin.
The fall of the Berlin Wall makes for nice pictures. But it all started in the
shipyards."

On Monday, November 9, 2009 in Berlin Lech Walesa will push the first one
of a thousand (or more) of the symbolic dominos, commemorating the great
efforts of the freedom-loving people who pushed the Berlin Wall and the
Communist dominos down.

And still let me recall one more story about ordinary people in East Berlin,
who crushed the Berlin Wall:

"Luckily by chance, my father and one of his cousins approached the

concrete of the wall and was close enough to touch it. Then my father had

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just one wish, to take part in changing history himself. So in a blink of an
eye, he climbed on his cousin's shoulders with a splitting maul in his right
hand. With a tight grip and immense energy he started smashing the
splitting maul into the wall. Just like any other German revolutionary, he
was actually destroying the wall. The lumps of the wall taken out by my
father's splitting maul were falling on the ground. The wall was losing its
matter and was weakened moment by moment by both the emotions and
physical strength of the people."

Because "We, the People" are the sovereign and the hard core of the
changing history. I can't add more.

Source: Ocnus.net 2009

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