Stories
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One evening from my camp-site, I got on my scooter after dark and began driving toward the center of the old pre-war city. Instead of becoming more lively as a normal metropolis, I began to notice that there became less activity, lights and neon on the streets. There began to appear whole blocks of vacant lots or bombed out rubble from the last world war, and soon there was no lighting at all but it was dark like as if I had driven into the countryside. Suddenly I saw a flash-light waving me down from only about fifty feet ahead. In the dark there was a little wood guard shack on the side of the street. I stopped. A West German guard came over and said that I could go no further. It was then that I looked ahead and saw an East German square concrete block house squat and sunken right in the middle of the road. There were no lights on the outside which was completely dark. Again it was windowed all the way round and brightly lit from the inside, so that one could see three guards seated low down so that there shoulders were about on the same plane as the pavement of the road. It was an eerie surreal scene, all the more so since I had stumbled into it completely unexpected.
I decided to spend a day in East Berlin itself and look at the wall from the inside. I went through 'Check Point Charley' which was a famous transit point between the segregated city. Again I had to register with the military authorities on the west side especially as when I planned to return. And again I negotiated the tank traps and block walls.
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