I asked a guard how far we could walk toward the gate that no one could cross directly through. He politely pointed to a spot within about 100 feet of the structure. Once we made that point, my brother took my photo, a mirror image of another taken from the Western side of this gate.
“I made it,” I smiled. “I busted through that Wall.”
Patrick nodded. “Does it look any different from this side?”
I turned around and stared for a moment. “Naw, it looks about the same.”
Three years later, East Germans would march out of the country. Many would stay and fight for freedom and political reforms. Police would violently squelch protests in East Berlin.
Gorbachev would call for hard-line East German leader Erich Honecker –the designer of the Berlin Wall –to retire. Honecker’s successor, Egon Krenz, would allow people to freely walk through the Berlin Wall to try to retain power.
And the Berlin Wall would tumble down.
So would Krenz, as just three weeks later he would be ousted in the midst of political reforms. My sister, Kathy, would observe the strange, joyful scene of people from both sides ripping apart the Berlin Wall while touring Europe herself. And she would bring a piece of that Wall home.
But on that cold, gray day in November 1986, it was hard to foresee such earth-shattering events as I stood on ground that I had been forbidden to walk upon a year earlier.
As I looked closer, the structure began to not even look like a Wall. It just looked like any other man-made structure.
Maybe that’s the key to walking through the Wall, I thought. You have to first see it as not being a Wall, even though everyone you know still sees it as a Wall.
In my mind, I saw the peace walk button I tossed the year before, flying over that structure from the other side, to be picked up as a keepsake of another attempt to break through.
Then the Wall disappeared.
And I saw my hand reaching out to another.
“C’mon, Patrick,” I said. “We’ve done all we can here. Let’s go home.”