Berlin with its boundaries is disturbing and perilous, yet also magnificent. Around the City perimeter, there are always the white crosses at chosen crossings along the wall. Beside the canals. In the blasted places: no-man's-land, unchanged since 1945. Each placed in remembrance of one who fell attempting to make it to the West. Was it for freedom? Adventure? Family?
I think of Horst. Who is he really? I don't even know. He lives in a dark place in my dreams. But one thing I cannot deny: in the dark East, the stars paint the sky through the night.
Most older Berliners love U.S. soldiers. We the children of Americans who saved them from the Soviets in the Spring of '45. An older lady who works with Anja, Gertie Schlotterbeck, was 15 in that hardest of years 1945 and had shaved her head and hid in her attic when the armies came through. She told us once that she had never recovered from watching soldiers' graves being dug in her yard as the fighting passed through her neighborhood.
Horst walks remote stretches of the Wall, probing the concrete borders of his impatient and quietly desperate life, retreating sometimes when his walks cause notice by those in their towers. They watch. He waits.
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The Wall Crossers
Non-FictionStep into the captivating world of "The Wall Crossers," a spellbinding tale set against the backdrop of Cold War-era West Berlin in 1971 and 1972 to the latter half of the 21st century, from Berlin to Bhutan. This narrative weaves together the lives...
