Checkpoint Able #2of2

In 1980, after filling out the proper forms and buying our visa, we approached the next Checkpoint Able control point for our second visit to Berlin. Here the guard, who was the spittin’ image of General Charles DeGaulle, told Emmy to take off her sunglasses so he could check her passport picture. He asked if we had a transmitting radio and something else we couldn’t understand. Finally he pointed his fore-finger with the other three fingers curled and his thumb sticking into the air just like a little kid playing cops and robbers, to let us know he was asking if we had a gun.

At the next stop a guard took our passports and visa forms and placed them on a moving belt, and by the time we arrived at the last building they were stamped and we were ready to go.

At Drewitz, near West Berlin, we were given a cursory inspection, no problem, except they again snapped at Emmy, “Ohne Brille!” (glasses off, as in her passport picture.) — but what a contrast with our experience ten years earlier.

In 1991, the next time we were to visit Berlin and former East Germany, was the very day Mr. Gorbachev was thrown out of office in the Soviet Union. We were concerned that civil war might break out, and if the Soviet Army was ordered to come home, they would. We could just imagine what the former East German and the Polish countryside, the stores, gas stations, streets and highways, would look like, during and soon after the “invasion in reverse” by an Army with little or no food, gasoline, or money.

A few days later short-wave radio reported Gorbachev was back in power, so we decided to visit Eastern Germany after all. Twenty-one years earlier, the buildings were temporary shacks, eleven years ago there were several large new buildings and a large parking area. Now, imprisoned behind a high chain-link fence, huge empty buildings and acres of unused parking lots were all that remained of Checkpoint Able.

When we drove past the former Checkpoint Baker at Drewitz, at the Berlin city limits, we saw buildings and huge parking lots behind the fence, but there were no guards to order Emmy to take off her glasses.

To make sure she did not feel neglected, doing my best guard imitation, I barked, “Ohne Brille!”