 while West Berlin police and Allied soldiers looked on. It was nearly two hours before a truck arrived to remove the body. The farmhouse was levelled the next day. The colonel and I turned around and walked back to the main road, where we were again taken under surveillance by the Vopo at the checkpoint. “I see Junior still has the glasses on us,” the colonel said. He thumbed his nose at the Vopo, and with that we got into the car and headed away from the Zone of Peace.
The colonel’s annoyance interested me, because it indicated that he had still not become accustomed to being watched. The tactic irritated me, too, but I had been in Berlin only a few days, and had thought that in time one would get used to it. My German friends and acquaintances apparently had, and seemed somewhat amused when I showed my displeasure, as I did for the first time a couple of days after arriving in Berlin. I was talking to a West Berlin Polizeimeister, or police captain, in a wooden shack overlooking the wall, and was being watched through binoculars by a Vopo standing on a raised platform about ten feet on the other side. After a while, I borrowed the policeman’s binoculars, and trained them on the Vopo. He put his glasses down, turned his back, lighted a cigarette with studied nonchalance, and didn’t train the binoculars on me again until I started to leave. (I played this childish game a few more times, usually with much the same result, though not if the Vopos were officers; the officers glowered but didn’t turn away.) “It shouldn’t bother you,” the Polizeimeister said with a smile. “You must remember that everything the Vopos do is calculated to intimidate us, or to try to. They want to give us the feeling that we’re being watched and that we’re helpless to do anything about it.” Later that day, he took me out to a suburban neighborhood on the sector border, where the wall consisted mainly of barbed-wire fencing. On the West Berlin side, workmen were noisily constructing a new housing development. The East Berlin side was seemingly deserted. “We’re being watched, of course,” the Polizeimeister said, and pointed to places on the roofs of four houses across the border where several pieces of slate had been removed. “The Vopos made those observation slits, and they’re probably up there in one of those attics now, looking out. For them, it’s like in war. They’re always taking cover, spying from concealed positions. They like to stay out of sight, and then appear suddenly with binoculars fixed on you. If they’re not up in an attic, they may be over there on the ground, behind the hedges. Some of them are pretty clever at hiding themselves. It takes a while to pick them out. Our men on border duty work a shift of two hours on and one hour off. If you’re on too long at a stretch, you don’t see the Vopos.”
Though the flow of refugees into West Berlin was long ago reduced to a trickle, the East Germans are still strengthening the barriers relentlessly. This past summer, squads of between three hundred and five hundred Vopos could be seen at work along the wall and the zonal border nearly every day. In a great many places, barbed wire was replaced by a concrete wall, rows of tank traps made of old streetcar rails were set up, and more dwellings were sealed or demolished. Seventy concrete pillboxes with observation slits and gun ports were constructed at intervals a short distance behind “the anti-Fascist rampart,” as the East German press sometimes calls the wall. Frogmen of the East German Army strung wire fences in the Spree and other waterways, and squads of Vopos cut down the tall grass and the bushes on the East Berlin shores of rivers and lakes The border guards assigned to the waterways were equipped with new and faster patrol boats. Concurrently, some forty construction workers, guarded by two hundred Vopos, began to build, first in one place and then in another, a second wall about half a block behind the first; this was designed to help Vopos cut down refugees before they could reach the original wall, where West Berlin policemen, pho