Our last day in Berlin came all too quickly (it seems like ages until I will be back in Ox again) and we decided to continue our journey around the Wall. We headed to the Northern bit of the Wall along Bernauer Strasse, which has become famous as being a bisected street - that it to say that the houses on one side were under DDR control and the houses on the other side were under BRD control. This road became popular for escape attempts, particularly in the early days of the Wall.
Some of the videos of people jumping out of windows to escape from the DDR come from Bernauer Strasse. Although the houses are no longer there (the DDR first blocked up any access/windows to the Western side and later tore down the houses), someone has placed markers as to where the various escapees landed, and the lines of some of the escape tunnels.
Wandering further along we came across part of the Wall which had been preserved with Watch-Tower and the dead strip in the middle. Not having enough time to queue for the viewing platform, we instead tried staring through a gap in the Wall - the view was grey, grim and fairly foreboding - an empty stretch of land where everything could be seen from the watch-tower by the border police, helped by lights. The wall itself was quite high and had a curved top to make trying to get over/on to it more difficult. I cannot even start to imagine what it must have been like to attempt an escape through these sections of the wall, or how bad the situation in the DDR was to drive people to do it. Having studied this time period in history lessons, it seems so remote from the life I live today despite the fact it all happened within the last 50years, and I have met people who were born under the Communist regime.
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