November 9. 1989

20 years ago today....

Maybe it wasn't big news here, but at the time I was in 9th grade and living in Eindhoven in southwest Holland.

It was the day the Berlin Wall came down. Or rather, the day people started climbing all over it and wacking it with hammers. For months before that, people had been pouring into West Germany from East Germany via Hungary, which had opened it's border. This was in the news daily. I remember people partying in the streets and neighbors crying with joy (if they had relatives or friends in Eastern Europe or were just happy about it) and fear (I remember there was some fear that Germany would now reunite and cause trouble again). I remember watching tv with my family for hours and watching people climbing on the wall from both sides. I was 14 but I'd already had a whole year in Holland of intense modern European history, and my parents (especially my Mom) talked a lot about the cold war and why we couldn't go visit places in Eastern Europe very easily. My Mom had gone on at least one road trip with her family through Eastern Europe in the 60s (an epic journey from Beirut to France in a Volkswagen Bug) so I remember her telling us about it. I definitely understood that what I was witnessing was a really big deal.

A few months later we went to visit Berlin and I got to whack on the west side of the wall and cut off my very own piece with a rock hammer, with the still present guards pointing their machine guns unenthusiastically towards the wall from the other side. Even though big changes started that night, change took time on the Eastside. When we crossed the border, I remember we went through a creepy set of metal doors that seemed to only be open going one way. Economically, things were clearly still pretty dire in East Berlin. We also went to the Checkpoint Charlie museum, which I remember loving because it was full of stories of people who did all kinds of wild things to try to cross to the west. I think that was the first time that I was consciously aware of being a privileged person, who had opportunity and freedom that many in the world didn't have. I became aware of what people were willing to risk for what I took for granted and never questioned. I knew this conceptually before, but I think this was my first real life exposure to this reality.

Maybe the best memory of that trip to Berlin was standing on the Wall on Easter morning, right where we saw people climbing on the wall on that November night a few months before. I haven't been to Berlin since then, but I understand that the wall and Checkpoint Charlie have been completely dismantled, which seems like a reasonable and healthy thing for Germany to do. I'm glad I got the chance to see it and experience all that change and excitement a little bit closer than I would have been able to here in the US.