Monday has dawned, the stores are
open (very tight laws about that in Germany), and it’s time to make
good on the promise to return to the Caran d’Ache store. We had a
very pleasant conversation with the woman on duty, learned a lot
about the history of the company, and exchanged greetings with the
proprietor, who did indeed remember us from the other night. And we
left suitably enriched with more of
their world class art
supplies.
Our next stop was the Berlin Wall Museum at Checkpoint Charlie. It’s
a place we have been visiting ever since Bruce’s early business trips
here. It started out quite small, as the Wall was still up and all it could commemorate was escapes that had received so much
publicity that there was no concern about accidentally releasing
escape secrets or endangering family members still on the other side. Once the Wall came
down, that restriction pretty much went away. The place got much
larger, and it told lots more stories.
What we saw on this trip was way much larger than anything before. It
went farther back into the history of postwar German partition, and into much
greater detail about specific escapes and other situations.
We are still amused at the memory from our 2000 visit of a young
British boy asking his mother, “Who was Charlie, and what did he
do?” Nope, there wasn’t a Charlie, nor have they invented one as
a mascot. It was simply the letter C in the military phonetic
alphabet. Checkpoint Alpha was at the East-West Zone Border in Helmstedt on the official Allied land route to Berlin,
Checkpoint Bravo was where the highway from Alpha entered West
Berlin, and Checkpoint Charlie was the third in the series, one of the few official crossing points between West Berlin and East Berlin.
On our 2013 trip we were advised by two local ‘experts’ that the museum was not worth going to. We respectfully disagree, though timing did prevent our visiting it on that trip.
The name Checkpoint Charlie is with us forever. It’s even been enshrined in the name of the local subway stop.
On our 2013 trip we were advised by two local ‘experts’ that the museum was not worth going to. We respectfully disagree, though timing did prevent our visiting it on that trip.
The name Checkpoint Charlie is with us forever. It’s even been enshrined in the name of the local subway stop.
Care packages arriving from the US
A big linguistic problem - Some of the boxes were labeled with the words like ‘Gift from the people of the United States’. Unfortunately ‘gift’ means ‘poison’ in German.
Documentation of deaths in Soviet prison camps
Many efforts are underway to validate this information and locate relatives.
Children’s art, based on a famous photo
Escape in two suitcases
Escape in a home made airplane
No, Sue Anne wasn’t sitting on the plane. She was in a regular seat in the next room.
Escape in a model cow
The famed Russian-born cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, by then Music Director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, DC and stripped of his Soviet citizenship, flew in to Berlin when the Wall came down and presented his own tribute of Bach compositions to the occasion. You can read about it (and watch a video with sound) at this link.
The event has also been remembered in a statue at the museum, shown above with an adjacent photo of the performance and the opportunity to listen with the headphones. Plus some background photos of the unforgettable scene.
Then it was time to head back to our hotel, stopping for more curry wurst along the way, and taking note of the bilingual spelling
on the Canadian Embassy.
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