 those days, the East German border guards were neither as alert nor as ruthless as they have since become, and East Berliners could talk through the improvised barrier to relatives and friends, and even exchange parcels with them. Once the East German authorities realized that their coup had succeeded, however, they lost no time in stiffening the flimsy barricade with concrete. In addition, they not only ordered East Berliners not to go near the wall but insolently warned West Berliners against approaching within a hundred metres of it, “in the interests of their own safety.” To try to make this stick, the Vopos started firing warning shots whenever small groups of West Berliners congregated near the wall. The Western commandants thereupon dispatched troops in battle dress to the sector boundary, and kept them there until the East Germans stopped trying to enforce that injunction. By then—about a month after the border was sealed off—East Berliners had been forbidden to wave in the direction of the wall, even if they were blocks away from it. (As recently as this July, eight East Berliners were taken into custody during one day for waving.) At former crossing points, where large numbers of West Berliners hopefully continued to gather, the East Germans erected high wooden screens, completely blocking the view into the “workers’ paradise.”
On August 13th, the East Germans also began a systematic evacuation of dwellings situated on or near the border. Private houses were demolished to make way for a so-called “death strip,” or no man’s land. Searchlights were installed to illuminate the death strip at night. Hundreds of East Berliners owned small plots of land along the border, where they had cultivated gardens and, in many cases, had built small cottages of some kind for use on weekends. The garden areas, too, were levelled and bulldozed by Vopos, who were sometimes urged on by Communist fighting songs issuing from a sound truck. The apartment houses on the border presented a more difficult problem. In several places—on Bernauerstrasse, for example—the buildings on the east side of the street are in East Berlin, and the sidewalks and the street in West Berlin. Since this meant that a resident could walk out his front door to freedom, the East Germans started, on August 13th, to wall up the entrances to all those buildings. Residents immediately began leaving by way of first-floor windows, after throwing a few possessions into the street. The windows on the first and second floors were then bricked up, after which refugees departed from third-floor windows by lowering themselves on ropes or jumping into rescue nets held by members of the West Berlin Fire Brigade. As the bricking up of the windows proceeded, the attempts to escape by jumping continued, though they were fewer and some ended in death. The Vopos thwarted as many as they could by throwing tear-gas bombs at the firemen holding rescue nets. Frequently, too, they sent out false alarms. They would arrange for a decoy to appear at an apartment window and signal his wish to jump. A West Berlin policeman or someone else on the street would summon the fire brigade, and when the firemen had arrived and were holding the net, the Vopos would shower them with stones and red paint. Meanwhile, the authorities were evacuating the apartment houses—first floor by floor and then entire buildings at one time. A typical operation of this kind got under way shortly before dawn one day in mid-October of 1961, when detachments of Vopos and other military units, a fleet of moving vans, and about a hundred civilians wearing armbands to show that they were functionaries of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or S.E.D.—the Communist Party—descended on Harzerstrasse. The functionaries went through a row of apartment buildings and told the two hundred and fifty families living in them to start packing; van after van drove off to an undisclosed destination and returned to be filled again. The evacuation went on uninterruptedly for two days and three nights. Then the buildings we