Stories
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The weather was clear, puffy white clouds hanging in a blue sky, a little cool, late September or early October. The country was rolling hills with a lot of cultivated farm land. It was completely unspoiled, no advertising, no signs, no industrial waste lands, housing complexes or of the modern spoils one sees in the west. There were only small farms scattered hither and far in the distance. Occasionally there were seen people working in the fields a long way off. They wore a native dress that was probably traditional for hundreds of years. Sometimes there were old fashioned tractors and other times horse drawn carts. Those transiting drivers such as myself, were not allowed to stop except at designated rest stops. While there were many side roads off the Corridor, and it was tempting to take a turn-off, say a little journey back into time --- only we warned --- if one got caught it could mean prison.
While in Berlin I spent a couple of days looking at the wall from the West Berlin side. It was almost always of brick and block about twenty feet high. Sometimes the wall abutted a building and the building became an agent of the barrier, with all the windows and doors bricked up.
There were watch towers, spot lights and tubular barbed wire topping the walls.
Every so often one would come across a memorial of drooping flowers in various
forms of vase and pottery and sometimes graffiti like paintings on the wall to commemorate someone having been shot and killed trying to escape at that particular spot.
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