ces—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 were empty, and the evacuation team moved on.
On a recent visit to Berlin, I saw what a street that has been made part of the wall looks like; one afternoon I walked the length of Bernauerstrasse—a distance of about a mile—in the company of a Berlin newspaper editor. We stayed on the west side of the street, at the suggestion of a policeman, who said that Vopos patrolling the vacated buildings liked to drop things on people venturing along the east side. A walk down Bernauerstrasse is a sickening experience. While people go in and out of the shops and apartment houses on the west side of the street, the other side is empty and silent. From one end to the other, no living thing appears. My companion said that the buildings had been taken over by rats. The dead buildings, stretched out in a long line, show the signs of violence committed on them in every door and window, crudely sealed with bricks of various sizes, shapes, and colors (some red, some white, some yellow)—often mixed together. As a rule, the window frames were knocked out and the entire aperture bricked up. In a few places, both the frames and the windows were left, and the opening was sealed from the inside; one looks through dirty panes of glass at a sloppy blank wall of bricks—a sight all the more repugnant when, as occurs here and there, remnants of curtains are still hanging at the window. On the roofs, barbed wire is strung along the front edges and from chimney to chimney. The spaces between the buildings have been filled in with the familiar concrete slabs and blocks and topped with barbed wire. Looking closely at the upper stories, one can see places where a few bricks have been removed to provide lookouts for the Vopos. Otherwise, there is nothing but a solid façade of ugly, ashen masonry. As we neared the end of this spectral thoroughfare, my companion said, “We call this Berlin’s first completely socialized street.”
While the Communists were trying to make West Berlin’s front door impenetrable by strengthening the wall, they were also making