re 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 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 i