On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff sends this memoir of her own experiences on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
November 9 — Freedom at last! A Day of Memory
by Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff
I’ve noticed that I often seem to end up in places where history is made or about to be made. Tehran in 1979, Baghdad in 1982/3, Kuwait in 1990, Tripoli in 2001 — September 11, no less.
But I was privileged to experience firsthand the divide between East and West in Berlin in 1988.
Born in 1971, I was a child of the Cold War, of the 1980s, of ICBM’s, and of all too frequent reports of crippling food shortages in Moscow. When I attended third and fourth grade in Vienna, I remember welcoming a Polish girl, Katharina, to our class. Her family had fled from the riots in Warsaw (No problems at all with integration, by the way).
I took AP History in my final two years of high school in Austria. As the focus of AP History lay on the rise of Hitler in the 1930s, the curriculum included a weeklong field trip to what was then West Berlin. It was November 1988, a full year before the wall would finally be torn down.
My classmates and I traveled by bus from Vienna through Czechoslovakia and Poland into East Germany, with lengthy and tedious waits at the borders. The border crossing that has remained with me ever since was the one from East Germany into West Berlin. Long lines, and a thorough check of passports, since my classmates and I were suspicious: a group of students from many diverse countries, some holding diplomatic passports due to their parents’ status. The weather was as dreary as the surroundings.
As we drove into West Berlin, down the Kurfürstendamm, to our youth hostel, I noticed the stark contrast of East Germany and Germany’s soon-to-be capital. Lights, modern cars honking, bustling Christmas markets, capitalism in full swing. And the next day I saw the complete opposite. We rode Berlin’s underground, feeling the effect of the city’s division when the train wouldn’t even slow down at certain stops along the way. We walked along the notorious Wall, and arrived at Checkpoint Charlie.
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The mosque attended by Martin Couture-Rouleau — the late Canadian convert to Islam who ran over and killed a soldier last month — was vandalized by an person or persons unknown, who threw a piece of concrete through the front window. There were three other acts of vandalism against mosques in the area.
