As a16 year old I got my first chance to travel overseas – on a school trip to Russia, also stopping in Berlin, Helsinki and Copenhagen. This was the summer of 1973. The Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. Berlin was still split between East and West, Thinking back, it was a crazy trip on which to take a bunch of English schoolboys.
Our first stop was Berlin – which in those days was a symbol of the Cold War. It’s most infamous feature was the Berlin Wall which stood as a barrier between East and West Berlin from 13 August 1961 until 9 November 1989. We now know that at least 140 people were killed at the Berlin Wall or died under circumstances directly connected with the East German border regime, including people attempting to escape, border guards, and innocent parties. However, researchers at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum have estimated the death toll to be significantly higher.
But we didn’t know that then – only what we’d seen in spy movies and tv shows. We were taken on a coach tour around West Berlin, and even got to see a border crossing into East Berlin – not one of the high profile ones at the Berlin wall – this one was just over a bridge in a leafy suburb. We probably weren’t supposed to take pictures of it but we all did, popping out from behind a bush.
Probably the most memorable part of our stay was our visit to the Berlin Wall itself. We were taken to Potsdam Place, where the wall cut through what was once a large open area.
What you could see from a little observation post was pretty bleak. This was the ‘no man’s land’ between the wall in West Berlin and the wall in East Berlin, which you can see in the distance. In between – barbed wire and anti-tank barriers. A very stark reminder of the different ideologies of west and east.
But from there, as if to emphasise the difference, we were taken to Berlin’s famous Kurfürstendamm which felt very western and cosmopolitan, and saw the church that Berliners refer to as ‘the hollow tooth’ – der hohle Zahn – after it was bombed in 1941. Its real name is Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche – the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.
We were supposed to cross into East Berlin at this stage, but there was a huge rally of of a communist youth organisation so that didn’t happen – but as our train chugged through East Berlin that night, we saw thousands of young people surging through the seats.
And we were actually chugging – we were being pulled by a genuine Russian steam train – because that was where we were heading next. But that story is for another day.
