 it more difficult to get through the city’s back door by increasing the fortifications along the zonal border. This is West Berlin’s boundary on the west, north, and south—a zigzag line, sixty-nine miles long, separating the city from East Germany. Though the zonal border is more than twice the length of the sector border, it has been the scene of comparatively few escapes. It is not hard to understand why after seeing it, as I did one morning, accompanied by an American Army colonel, wearing a sports jacket and slacks, who picked me up at my hotel and drove me out in an Opel sedan. On the way, he told me that he had been stationed in Berlin for five years, and had become fond of both the city and the people. “Of course, since August 13th, you feel a little more hemmed in,” he added. “East Berlin has the most beautiful parks and forests and the largest lakes, and West Berliners by the thousands used to spend their Sundays there. Now, on a nice Sunday, In the Grunewald, which is the largest forest in West Berlin, you have a hard time walking ten feet without stepping on someone. But if you want to get an idea of the really important and rough effects of the wall, just imagine waking up one morning to find Manhattan divided by a wall down the middle of Fifth Avenue from the Battery to the Bronx. You live on West Tenth Street, and your office is on Park Avenue. Well, you’re not going to work there any more. Your parents live on East Eighty-second Street. You’re not going to see them, and you’re not going to the East Side to visit a hospital or see a movie or anything of the kind. And nobody over there is coming to see you.” The colonel said that probably seven out of ten West Berliners have relatives or close friends in East Berlin. Because of the suddenness with which the border was closed, husbands were separated from their wives and parents from their small children. Engaged couples who lived on opposite sides of the border had to give up their marriage plans. West Berliners could no longer attend their church if 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 on