 his head. “I don’t know about him,” he said. “He could be capable of anything.”
The second refugee was an elderly, thin-faced woman who wore a long pale-blue coat and a white scarf and carried a straw purse nearly as large as a shopping bag. Her ears had been pierced, and she was wearing small gold earrings. As she sat, with her hands folded in her lap, her tiny bright-blue eyes darted about the room, and she looked like a frightened bird. She was the widow of a carpenter who had been killed as a soldier during the war. Until 1960, she had lived with her son, an official in the East Berlin government. Then he had fled to West Berlin. The official asked why. “He had a responsible position, but they asked too much of him,” the widow replied. “In his heart, he was different.” After he had left, she went on, she changed her apartment, but the Party functionaries located her and called her in for questioning. “I had to answer all kinds of questions,” she said. “They shouted, ‘Tell the truth!’ But I didn’t say much. They let me go but said I would have to come back again and answer more questions. Then I was afraid. I knew I must have the courage to leave, but I couldn’t make myself do it, and then they built the wall.” The widow wet her lips and pushed up the hair at one side of her head. The official asked when she had arrived in West Berlin. “I was fetched at eleven o’clock at night,” she said. “I was put in a box, and it was nailed up and put on a truck. At the crossing point, I was scared. My God, I thought, what will become of me. At two o’clock, the box was opened, and I was in West Berlin. I am so glad to be here. I will be seventy years old in three weeks.” She said she was living with her son, who had found a job as a clerk. She sat and watched intently while the examiner thumbed through her dossier. “Tomorrow,” he said, “you will be registered as a citizen of West Berlin.” The widow smiled, looked around the room, and nodded to each of us. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, everybody.” Picking up her straw bag, she darted out of the room. The officials began collecting their papers. That day’s processing was finished.
Driving back from Marienfelde, Max stopped at a traffic light next to a pair of blue Volkswagen station wagons, each with six loudspeaker horns on its roof and each bearing on its side, above a drawing of a length of barbed wire, the words “Studio am Stacheldraht” (“Studio at the Barbed Wire”). Max said that the station wagons were part of a mobile fleet that RIAS—Radio in the American Sector—had set up after August 13th to broadcast into East Berlin from right beside the wall. He added that the sessions were sometimes rather lively affairs, and asked if I would like us to follow the unit ahead. I said yes, and as we started off, Max explained that while it is not actually against the law in East Germany to tune in on Western television or radio broadcasts, a tremendous campaign is constantly being waged to discourage the practice on a “voluntary” basis. “The press raves that only spies and traitors listen to RIAS,” Max said. “Schoolchildren sign pledges that they won’t watch or listen to Western broadcasts. Teachers ask innocent-sounding questions to trick the youngsters into informing on their parents. The regime lets groups of the Jugend roam the roofs of East Berlin apartment houses and tear down every television antenna that looks as if it might be set to receive Western stations.” Soon after SAS got started, Max added, the East Germans retaliated on a large scale, ringing the city with hundreds of loudspeakers attached to utility poles along both the wall and the zonal border, and putting mobile transmitting units of their own into action. As a result, the two sides are now engaged in what Berliners call the Loudspeaker War. As we got within half a mile or so of the wall, it became clear that that day’s battle was already under way, for march music from East Berlin began to fill the air, becoming louder and louder as we followed the SAS station wagons to their destination, which turned out to be