The Berlin Wall

Yesterday, I saw that it was the 50th anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall.  The Berlin Wall has a special fascination for me, as it was part of the beginning of my interest in history. I never particularly liked history. History involved memorization of meaningless dates and events and had no room for the imagination. However, as the daughter of a soldier, history found me.

 My father was stationed in Germany when the Berlin Wall came down. I was 12 when the wall came down and was vaguely aware that something big had happened. I remember going to craft shows and seeing people buy the bits of graffiti covered concrete from the Wall. One of my more vivid memories of the time was of a refuge family that came to our church. They were from Romania, and they had two young children, a boy and a girl. Their car was strange, unlike anything I had seen driving on the autobahn, it honestly looked like it had been driven off of a movie set. I remember at a church picnic that the girl's mother had made a beautiful daisy chain for her (strange sometimes what you remember) and that the children were shy. I knew that we did not share the language but language was never really a barrier for children at play. (I was living in a foreign country, and did not speak German, so playing was a universal language.) It was not till much later that I began to realize what this family had going through. But all this happened when I was an oblivious 12 year old.

It was not until I was a senior that I realized what I had experienced. I was doing research for a paper on World War II, when I came across a picture of Hitler addressing a group of soldiers in a large stone amphitheater. I looked at the picture closely and realized I had been there! I had sat about 20 feet from where Hitler was in the picture and watched fireworks on the Fourth of July just 5 years earlier. It was at that moment that I realized how really, real history was and with that realness came an intense fascination. I had met and experienced a part of history. From that moment on I had a much deeper appreciation for what happened in the past.

So, every time I hear about the Berlin Wall, I think of that small Romanian family with their odd car and a beautiful daisy chain.