JB
Honorary Moderator Emeritus
- Joined
- Mar 25, 2001
- Messages
- 45,907
I complain a lot about the pains and penalties of getting old, but there is another side to that disk.
You experience history, assuming you pay attention. I can remember where I was and what I was doing when: Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, D-day, FDR died, Enola Gay dropped "the" bomb on Hiroshima, VJ Day; JFK, RFK and Dr. King murders; Man first landed on the moon, the Challenger explosion, Columbia's death (I actually witnessed both shuttle catastrophes) and many more red letter days in our history.
Tonight I am remembering the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Let me explain why that is so important to me.
The Love Of My Life, who was to become the Mother of my wonderful children, was a German trapped in Czechoslovakia at the end of the war. She and her Mother were interned in a refugee camp in East Germany by the Soviets. In 1948, at the age of 11, she took her night-blind mother and fled the camp in the night, making her way to the border with West Germany.
Hiding in the woods, they met a young couple with an infant in a carriage who also wanted to flee to the west. The young wife took a bottle of vodka and went to the gate to bribe the Soviet guards. After they were properly drunk all four (and the infant) just walked down the road and under the gate into the west.
They left relatives in East Germany, who she wouldn't see again for over 40 years.
Twenty years ago I sat with my eldest daughter and watched the news of the wall coming down, and subsequently a concert at the wall when they played Beethoven's 9th Symphony, the "Ode to Joy". Tears rolled.
That event freed the LOML and our four children from a terrible shadow by allowing them access to relatives in the east.
How much I would have missed had I not gotten old.
You experience history, assuming you pay attention. I can remember where I was and what I was doing when: Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, D-day, FDR died, Enola Gay dropped "the" bomb on Hiroshima, VJ Day; JFK, RFK and Dr. King murders; Man first landed on the moon, the Challenger explosion, Columbia's death (I actually witnessed both shuttle catastrophes) and many more red letter days in our history.
Tonight I am remembering the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Let me explain why that is so important to me.
The Love Of My Life, who was to become the Mother of my wonderful children, was a German trapped in Czechoslovakia at the end of the war. She and her Mother were interned in a refugee camp in East Germany by the Soviets. In 1948, at the age of 11, she took her night-blind mother and fled the camp in the night, making her way to the border with West Germany.
Hiding in the woods, they met a young couple with an infant in a carriage who also wanted to flee to the west. The young wife took a bottle of vodka and went to the gate to bribe the Soviet guards. After they were properly drunk all four (and the infant) just walked down the road and under the gate into the west.
They left relatives in East Germany, who she wouldn't see again for over 40 years.
Twenty years ago I sat with my eldest daughter and watched the news of the wall coming down, and subsequently a concert at the wall when they played Beethoven's 9th Symphony, the "Ode to Joy". Tears rolled.
That event freed the LOML and our four children from a terrible shadow by allowing them access to relatives in the east.
How much I would have missed had I not gotten old.
