Forty Autumns

by Nina Willner

  With no news from her family, Hanna resigned herself to scouring West German newspapers and tuning in to television and radio to learn what she could about what was happening inside East Germany. Information was sparse, however, and finding out any news about small villages like Schwaneberg was nearly impossible. For Hanna it was as if East Germany and her family were beginning to slip away from her and fade into a remote gray fog.

  Hanna and Eddie had their first child, a boy, Albert. Then the U.S. Army posted Eddie back to America, where John F. Kennedy had just taken the oath of office as president. From the start, Kennedy was enormously popular among Americans, in no small part due to his tough stance on the Soviets.

  Hanna was thrilled to begin her new life in America but was disheartened that the move would put a greater physical distance between her and her family, even though it no longer seemed to matter anymore whether she was one hundred or three thousand miles away.

  They moved to the prairies of Kansas, where Eddie was assigned to Fort Riley. I was born in March 1961, as Hanna, my mother, started her new life in the Midwest as an American military wife, with now two babies.

  That same month and into the spring, thousands of East Germans were still scrambling into West Berlin every day. Rumors circulated throughout the country that the regime was preparing to permanently seal off West Berlin by building a physical barrier around the city. Believing the window for escape might be closing for good, large numbers of East Germans rushed the border. In mid-June, Ulbricht, worried that the rumors were sparking a panic and an exodus that would be catastrophic to his economy, took to the airwaves to tell the citizens of East Germany that their fears were completely unfounded.

  “No one,” he assured them, “has any intention of building a wall.”

  But in the early-morning hours before dawn, on August 13, 1961, while Berliners slept, brigades of construction workers and some forty thousand East German troops set to work rolling out spools of barbed wire and erecting fencing to block off all access to West Berlin.

  Armed East German soldiers stood at six-foot intervals, prepared to fire on any last-minute defectors, who, they had been warned, might include the construction workers and even fellow border guards themselves. Concerned that NATO might respond with force, Soviet tanks had taken up positions along the border, but when there was no response, East Germany’s Aktion Rose (Operation Rose) went into full swing.

  Deafening noise riddled the city as heavy machinery ripped up streets and knocked down buildings. Roads, subway systems, and rail lines were severed. By midmorning, thousands of West Berliners had amassed to watch the extraordinary scene unfold. Shocked at what they were witnessing, they stood watching, shaking their heads and verbally assailing the East German soldiers and construction workers who appeared unaffected by their taunts and quietly went about doing the work they had been ordered to do.

  By noon, all routes into West Berlin, the last border that had offered any chance of escape, were effectively sealed for good.

  People all around the world stopped in their tracks to see and hear the news, astounded by the eerie scene of a country locking its people in.

  In her military quarters in Kansas, Hanna got up that morning and tended happily to her two babies. With the summer sun streaming through the window, she made herself a cup of coffee and switched on the television, preparing to start her day. Tuning in, she was surprised to see a live news broadcast from Berlin reporting that East Germany was being cut off from the West.

  The scene showed East German workers toiling away on a massive construction project. Initially confused, my mother suddenly felt ill when she understood what she was seeing. Watching the workers stacking concrete blocks, armed guards in the background, she was heartbroken as she realized that the regime had taken final desperate measures to break from the West. A wall would seal off the country and pull the people of East Germany even further into isolation and, she knew, would take her family with it.

  Within twenty-four hours, the Berlin Wall cut through the heart of the city. By the next day, the Brandenburg Gate stood trapped inside the East, only fifty paces from freedom. The very symbol of German unity, that day the majestic Brandenburg Gate would ironically become the foremost symbol of a divided Germany.

  Over the next days, the pace of construction intensified as the first generation of the Berlin Wall was erected.

  Made up of barbed wire and concrete blocks, it would stretch over a hundred miles, and completely encircle the island city of West Berlin, cutting it off from the rest of East Germany. Construction severed streets, bore through neighborhoods, even sliced cemeteries in two. East Germans who happened to be in the West at the time of construction were simply cut off from their loved ones on the other side, families separated in an instant.

  Hanna watched television images of distraught family members waving to one another from opposite sides of the border until East German police shooed away those in the East.

  More tragic scenes followed: desperate people jumping from East Berlin apartment buildings onto the West Berlin pavement below, West Berliners on the other side waiting to catch them and assist in their escape. Those images were followed by scenes of workers calmly boarding up windows and forcing people to relocate farther into East Germany.

  The world continued to watch as hundreds of watchtowers sprouted along the Wall. At the same time, the Inner German border between East and West Germany was fortified with a greater number of, and more complex, obstacles, which eventually included mines and automatic spring-loaded guns.

  Moscow watched to see how the young, untested leader in Washington would react to the sealing of West Berlin. President Kennedy, mindful of tensions escalating to dangerous levels, vehemently objected to the building of the Wall, but not wanting to risk World War III over it, conceded that “a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.” As long as Western rights in Berlin were not threatened, he said, the United States would not interfere.

  Of the East German people, West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer pledged, “they are and remain our German brothers and sisters.” West Berlin mayor Willy Brandt, who went to witness the building of the Wall up close, called it “the Wall of Shame.”

  Moscow was relieved that the West took no action to challenge the situation. With the pressure of retaliation off, Ulbricht turned to face the people of East Germany. He told them that the Wall was an “antifascist protection barrier,” and that it had been designed to keep them safe from attacks from the West. Without such a looming threat, he said, the state could start making real progress. The next day, the East German newspaper Neues Deutschland ran the headline, “Measures to Protect the Peace and Security of the German Democratic Republic in Force.”

  The first known leap to freedom over the Berlin Wall came on August 15, just two days after workers began building, when Conrad Schumann, a nineteen-year-old East German border guard who had volunteered for duty in Berlin stood at his post, rifle at the ready, with orders to keep his countrymen from escaping. As West Berliners called “come over here,” Schumann jumped the barbed wire and bolted into West Berlin, where he was whisked off by a waiting West Berlin police car.

  Nine days after construction began, news rang out about the first known casualty at the Berlin Wall. Fifty-nine-year-old Ida Siekmann died after trying to leap onto a West Berlin street from her third-floor apartment window before the building was condemned to make way for more border construction. Two days later, Günter Litfin died after being shot in the back of the head by an East German border guard as he attempted to swim across Berlin’s Spree River to the West. In the East, the regime conducted a smear campaign, slandering Litfin as a hooligan with a criminal past long before he tried to flee. West German news condemned the murder as “brutal cold-bloodedness.”

  Over the next years, the Wall would undergo constant upgrades in an attempt to make it increasingly impossible to penetrate. Border officials carefully studied every spot where anyone had escaped
and corrected deficiencies in the structure so others could not escape in the same way.

  What began in the early hours of that warm August morning as a simple barbed-wire fence would soon evolve into a twelve-foot-high, one-to-three-foot-thick concrete structure with a rounded top to prevent grasping and scaling its heights. Wire mesh and electric signal fencing and more rolls of barbed wire would eventually be installed, along with various electric alarms, searchlights, trenches, and, all along the border, the death strip, a hundred-yard-wide gauntlet of meticulously raked sand to make it easy to spot the footprints of escapees. At night, floodlights and searchlights constantly scoured for signs of life. Booby-trapped throughout with tripwires and anti-vehicle trenches, the Wall was a death trap that offered a clear field of fire for armed guards who were posted in some three hundred watchtowers around the perimeter, with orders to ensure no one got over it alive.

  Just months after Wall construction began, an incident occurred at Checkpoint Charlie, the Allied crossing point from West into East Berlin, when East German border guards denied a U.S. diplomat unhindered access into the Soviet sector, East Berlin, in direct violation of the Four Power agreement.

  In response, the U.S. Army’s Berlin Command moved a column of ten M48 A1 Patton tanks right up to the edge of Checkpoint Charlie, facing the Soviet sector. American diplomats, escorted by U.S. military police, pushed their way into the East on foot. The next day Soviet tanks moved ten T-55 tanks into opposing positions on the east side of the checkpoint. With the attention of the world once again locked on Berlin, American and Soviet tanks, barrels trained on one another only yards apart, menacingly faced one another down. Nerves on edge, many wondered if the world was on the brink of World War III.

  Thanks to back-channel diplomacy between Khrushchev and Kennedy, twenty-four hours after the standoff at Checkpoint Charlie began, tensions abated when the Soviets withdrew one tank. The United States in turn removed one tank. The pullout continued slowly, one tank at a time, until all had retreated. The world breathed a collective sigh of relief, and Allied access into East Berlin resumed.

  From her distant perch in Kansas, my mother had no way of knowing that her now eight-month-old baby would one day be part of a team that would regularly cross through Checkpoint Charlie to exercise those American rights to access, and to run intelligence collection missions, in the Soviet sector of Berlin.

  West Berliners peer through the Berlin Wall into the East near Checkpoint Charlie.

  Courtesy of Keystone/Getty Images

  In Schwaneberg, the family learned about the building of the Wall from Ulbricht’s radio address to the people of East Germany. Despite their leader’s explanation that the structure was erected to protect them, Oma and Opa knew it was being built to lock them in and cut off connection with the West.

  The building of the Berlin Wall marked a turning point for Oma. She now feared the family was severed from Hanna for good. With no contact in almost three years, she did not even know that Hanna had moved to the United States, or that she had had two children.

  Party bosses, teachers, and youth leaders throughout East Germany were ordered to spread Ulbricht’s message that the Wall had been a necessary measure to keep them safe. In Schwaneberg, Heidi’s teacher made her point by asking if anyone in the class wanted the evil forces of the West to destroy the country.

  “We have to make sure East Germany is locked up tight against those who want to harm us,” she said.

  The children looked at one another, their concerns falling away to pride that their leadership had taken such bold measures to stand up to its enemies and protect its citizens.

  With all avenues of travel out of the country sealed, the regime turned back to manipulating the population. Oma braced for the further tightening of controls that threatened her children. Now even more compelled to give her family a soft place to fall when things got rough, she did the only thing within her power to protect them—she built a barrier of her own and instituted a rule of family solidarity at all costs.

  The safe haven she had begun to create the day the Soviets stepped foot in Schwaneberg, to shelter her family from the suffocation of the regime, now had a name. She declared the Family Wall a sanctuary, a refuge where the family would preserve their souls by keeping the good in and the bad out. The children followed Oma’s lead and the concept took hold.

  Inside the Family Wall, the children let down their guard. As the fabric of East German society began to fray under the yolk of an Orwellian climate of oppression, and families wondered whether or not they could trust their spouses, parents, or siblings, Oma demanded family trust and loyalty. Behind closed doors, to Opa, Oma insisted that they had to foster the idea of the Family Wall if they were to have any chance against a regime out to crush the spirit of its people.

  Back in the village, however, no matter how much Oma tried, the Family Wall could not keep the authorities from invading their lives. They continued to harass Opa, whom they directed to work harder to encourage his students to passionately serve the regime. When the authorities began to detect apathy in him, they taunted him by insinuating he was losing his edge and that his days were numbered.

  12

  THE FAMILY WALL

  OMA’S FAITH AND OPA’S DEFIANCE

  (1962–1965)

  Freedom has many difficulties. And democracy is not perfect. But we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in.

  —President John F. Kennedy

  East Germany now had a profound image problem. The Wall had added insult and injury to a reputation that was already dismal, so the leadership assembled to figure out a way to deal with the thrashing it was taking in the eyes of the free world.

  Meanwhile, throughout the East, Party bosses praised the regime’s decision to secure the borders against the enemies in the West. In Schwaneberg, at a Party meeting, the authorities tested community leaders, asking for their opinions about the building of the Wall. While the ardent new village mayor supported it outright and others enthusiastically advocated for it, Opa nodded his approval but said nothing; it all came off halfhearted and sorely unconvincing.

  At school, Opa was compelled to back the Party’s explanation for the Wall and none of his students challenged him. As with many other topics, the villagers did not discuss with one another the sealing off of East Germany. Some East Germans accepted the authorities’ reason for the building of the Wall and simply went on with their lives.

  Heidi and her sisters continued to divide their time between home, school, and youth activities. Helga and Tutti took Jugendweihe and moved up to the FDJ, while Heidi remained a Young Pioneer. After his service in the army, Manni became a teacher like Roland, Klemens, and Tiele. At the age of nineteen and just out of high school, Kai was drafted into the NVA to serve what by now had become an eighteen-month tour of compulsory military service for every young East German male.

  While life under communism had now become routine for the family, Opa seemed to be the only one who could not manage to make peace with his reality. At home, his agitation began to show itself in uncensored outbursts. Roland, by now a mature man in his mid-thirties, found himself constantly warning Opa to be more discreet, if not for himself, then at least to consider the possible consequences for his family. Opa tried to heed his oldest son’s advice. But he could not contain his anger the day he learned what the regime had in mind for his fourth son, his gentle and sweet-tempered Kai.

  During training, Kai distinguished himself as a top performer, earning honors as a standout athlete and an expert rifle marksman. As a result, he was ordered to serve his country as a border guard at the Berlin Wall.

  Opa was upset. Though he knew that Kai had no choice in the matter, he did not want his son performing border duty where he would be put in the position of having to shoot at someone trying to escape. Oma spent much time in her garden that summer, thinking about and praying for her boy.

  Around the same time I was turning two years old in the
United States, Kai was put through a battery of tests to ensure he was politically reliable and capable of serving on the border. He donned his olive gray border guard uniform and reported for duty. Preventing escapes, his superiors told him, came with rewards, medals, and promotions. Failure to prevent escapes, on the other hand, would be punished by a prison term, consequences for his family, and eroded prospects for his future.

  Because of their proximity to the West, guards had to be closely watched and constantly evaluated. At every posting, Kai was paired with a new guard, someone he had never worked with before. Required to serve in pairs, they could work together only once, minimizing the chance that they might form a bond, then conspire to escape, or that they would agree not to fire on would-be escapees. It was their sworn duty to report any hint of disloyalty in partner-guards, including signs that they were not committed to accomplishing the mission to its utmost end.

  Most guards followed the rules, but a few tested the system. Rüdiger Knechtel was sentenced to a year in prison for tossing over the Wall a bottle that contained a note to the American Forces Network (AFN) in Berlin, in which he expressed his disillusionment with life in East Germany and wrote the word Schandmauer (Wall of Shame), then requested a song. Without mentioning his name, AFN promptly dedicated a song only by saying, “Congratulations from the other side,” then posted the note on a bulletin board, where it was seen by a Stasi spy who reported the note to the Stasi.

  The United States and the Soviet Union continued to wage proxy wars throughout the world, each side buttressing its capacity to conduct nuclear war. As things looked to be heating up, President Kennedy encouraged Americans to build underground bomb shelters to protect themselves in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack.