The Fall of the Wall

[scaeagles]

What a tremendous moment in history. I can recall sitting in my apartment while in school, watching news coverage on TV, completely amazed and ecstatic.

I also own a piece of the wall. It's an exterior portion with a small bit of graffiti on it. I wish there was some way to know exactly what portion of the wall it came from and what the entire section of graffiti looked like.

While I had never been to Berlin, in the summer of 1985, I had a chance to be at the Austria-Hungary border at a place they called the "Desert Lake". The border went down the middle of the lake, and about 50 yards over the border, spaced about 100 yards apart, were guard towers, and I was close enough to see the guards with their automatic rifles standing there, looking for anyone trying to leave. Out guide told us that the pseudo forest next to the lake had hundreds of people shot annually as they tried to excape. It was at that point I realized what the Soviet Bloc was. It really was a life changing experience for me.