windows display collections of both black-and-white and color pictures of the wall, and some display color slides as well. Since the wall has become Berlin’s premier sightseeing attraction, a great many tourists visit Potsdamer Platz in the course of each day, but scarcely anybody goes there after dark, and when I arrived all the stores but one were closed. The single light came from what was once a small shop and is now being used as a headquarters for the police on border duty in the area. Inside, a policeman was eating a sandwich and reading a newspaper. Another policeman was standing out on the street, and a third was sitting in a small wooden observation tower, from which he could survey the square. No other people were in sight on the West Berlin side of the wall, nor, I discovered when I had climbed a few rickety steps to a stand looking into East Berlin, were any in sight on the other side. Beyond the wall, one sees the customary barbed-wire barrier, then a high metal fence topped with barbed wire, then a row of tank traps, and then another barbed-wire barrier. At the far side of the square, one street was illuminated. The other streets converging on the square, and the square itself, were dark. There were no sounds, no movement. I recalled that the Berlin correspondent of the London Times, a woman who has lived in Berlin all her life, had told me the day before that she had recently seen a rabbit run across the eastern part of Potsdamer Platz—a sight that would once have been about as likely as seeing a rabbit run across Times Square. It didn’t seem hard to imagine now. A military truck came down the one lighted street and turned off into one of the dark side streets. Apparently, it was time to change the guards, for two Vopos materialized out of the darkness on the right side of the square and then two more on the left side. A fifth and sixth came out of the shadows almost directly ahead. They walked across the square and turned the corner where the truck had stopped. Presently, what I took to be the new shift came around the corner, walked into the center of the square, and then individually disappeared into the shadows at its edges. The Army truck backed out of the side street and drove off in the direction from which it had come. Again Potsdamer Platz was deathly still and completely deserted except for the six hidden Vopos. As I stood peering into their eerie domain, a streetcar came down the illuminated street and stopped at the far side of the square. It was the end of the line. Nobody got off, and nobody got on. The streetcar soon started back again, and disappeared in the distance.♦