Hey! I wanted to scream. Stop that! First, I wouldn’t. That would be dumb. That’s what they wanted. Second, I couldn’t. My heart was banging so hard, I couldn’t have gotten my mouth to work anyway. And the police guard was shoving me so hard, my floppy hat nearly toppled. Looking back, I must have looked suspicious in my big orange hat and leather coat. I guess they thought that’s how the Liberals were dressing in 1969….
You were scared every time you went through the Wall: every train trip, every crossing by car. Police are police everywhere, but here, they were…cold. They made you wait in this little cabin, because they knew waiting annoys people, who then get impatient, and then maybe say something or become aggressive, which, of course, would give them a reason to arrest you. I always had butterflies in my stomach because I was never sure what was going to come.
As a foreigner, you would go through Checkpoint Charlie. But as West Berliners, from where my sister and I lived, we would take the underground or the metro to Frölichstrasse.
It’s a very eerie feeling when you take the metro and it slows down, creeps along, and you see the soldiers in their gray uniforms with their guns standing there beyond the glass windows. If you were above ground, the stop was at a round concrete building called the Palace of Tears. Because that’s where people had to say good-bye, and you weren’t sure if you would see each other again.
We would go early in the morning, and all day I was constantly looking at my watch. You needed to be aware of where you were and how long it would take to get back. Because if you missed the curfew…you could end up in the police station.
I had a couple friends in the East. One was a student from Dresden. And so to see her, I would have to get to the border then have to show a Personalausweis, which was an ID that looked like a small passport: a gray booklet with your picture in it. After showing it, everyone had to exchange five marks. For sure, the Eastern mark was not worth as much as the Western mark. It was usually one to four, so you couldn’t buy very much, really, for the five.
Sometimes I waited three, four hours to get through the border on one side. I had the same coming back, so forget just a quick trip. And you could only be there for a full day, to midnight. We would go early in the morning, and all day I was constantly looking at my watch. You needed to be aware of where you were and how long it would take you to get back to Frölichstrasse Because if you missed the curfew, you might not be arrested, but you could end up in the police station, for sure.
And the file they kept on you, because they kept paperwork on everyone who went across, would get bigger and bigger…. ~Rosi McIlwaine
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