f it was in East Berlin, or visit cemeteries there. The lives of East Berliners have been sorely diminished. Before the wall went up, a quarter of a million of them crossed into West Berlin every day to visit, shop, attend the theatre, concerts, and movies, and use libraries where they could read books and newspapers forbidden at home. “Thousands of East Berliners used to come over, maybe only for an hour or two, just to walk around and feel free in a free city,” the colonel said. “It’s hard to overestimate what that meant to them—and to West Berliners, to the Germans as a whole, and to the West. Certainly it was the most effective answer to the Communist propaganda.
As the colonel talked, we were driving on Heerstrasse to the western edge of the city. The landscape gradually became rural. We passed a sizable field of hay which was being harvested by a woman with a long wooden rake, drove through a checkpoint manned by West Berlin police, and parked about twenty feet from the East German border, which was marked by a white line painted across the street. Beyond the city limits, Heerstrasse leads to a highway that goes to Hamburg. Two Hamburg-bound trailer trucks were parked at the curb on the West Berlin side of the white line; their drivers were taking a rest before starting the hundred-and-ten-mile journey through East Germany, during which it is not advisable to stop. Three young men in shirtsleeves were standing nearby, trying to hitch a ride. The colonel and I got out of the car, but even before we had opened our doors, a Vopo standing about thirty feet inside the East German border had trained his binoculars on us. Just beyond the border was a brightly painted metal sign that featured Picasso’s white dove over representations of Berlin, Potsdam, Warsaw, Moscow, and Peking. “Achtung!” the sign commanded. “This is the beginning of the Zone of Peace. From here it reaches over 10,000 kilometres to the Pacific Ocean.” (The geographical non sequitur, the colonel said, stemmed from the fact that signs like this one were produced for use on the East German-West German border.) A few feet inside the Zone of Peace stood a ten-foot-high fence of barbed wire strung thickly on concrete posts. Six feet behind this fence was a similar one, and six feet behind the second was a third. Directly behind the third fence was a ditch about eight feet wide and three feet deep. Behind the ditch was a strip of land, about thirty yards wide, that had been cleared of trees and brush—the death strip. To the north and south, this formidable band of fortifications stretched as far as one could see, across fields that had once been used for farming and truck gardening. Nothing was growing on them now, nor was there any sign of life. “This border looks much the same over its entire length,” the colonel said. “They’ve mined the death strip in a great many places—we know, because we’ve watched them do it—and they’ve also put up watchtowers about every three thousand feet. Between the towers they’re building bunkers out of earth and logs. There are plenty of searchlights, and plenty of Vopos on patrol. Last December, about half a mile from here, they killed a young student who was trying to help a refugee escape. Three months after that, also not far from here, a thirteen-year-old boy cut the barbed-wire fences in the family meadow, and he and his parents and his sister got out safely. It’s a strong border, but it’s not perfect. There are still places where a person could get through if he studied the situation diligently enough.”
It was a pleasant morning, and the colonel suggested that we walk down a cobblestone road that leads off to the right, parallel to the border. The Vopo continued to watch us through his binoculars as we set off. When we had gone the equivalent of a couple of city blocks, a pair of patrolling Vopos (they never go on border duty singly) came into view behind the barbed-wire fence nearest the road. Each had a submachine gun, or machine pistol, as the Germans call it, slung over his shoulder. When we were nearly abreast of them