West Berlin, 9 November, 1989
‘Tor auf! Tor auf!’
They are as young as she is, those who now scramble up the wall—an activity which just the other day would have seen them shot. Ahead, a crane raises its steel arm and comes crashing down on a section of concrete.
The Brandenburg Gate appears ghostlike through the rain beyond the wall, on the east side. The statue of Victoria, the goddess of victory in her chariot atop the monument, sits in low cloud. She is supposed to be ushering peace into the city. A gust of wind threatens the umbrellas of those who hope to hold back the weeping November sky. People coalesce, thousands of raincoats glimmering in the floodlit night.
Berlin, divided, as she’s learnt, down the middle since 1961, sits uncomfortably inside the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. She tries to imagine growing up on one side of a wall which cuts off all of those in East Berlin from those in the West—mothers separated from daughters, husbands from wives, brothers from sisters.
A man bumps her from behind. A metre away, Heinemeyer struggles to make his way back to her. A growing number of people come between them, and she has a moment of panic—what if she loses him?
Everyone in the city, East and West, wants to be here, at die Mauer, at this moment.
A young man with a pickaxe hacks at the concrete, chipping away. ‘Passt auf!’ Watch out!
‘Susanna!’ Heinemeyer calls.
People stack against each other like cards with no air between. She has never been in such a crowd. Her life in Australia has been defined by space and air and light. But now it’s almost too hard to breathe. People crush her from behind, from in front. She tries to suck in air and her ribs don’t expand. The hood of her heavy wool coat falls back, and she can’t reach around to put it on again because there is no room to move. Her hair is soaked. It sticks to her scalp. Rain runs down her eyelashes into her mouth.
‘Lass mich durch!’ a woman screams. ‘Ich ersticke!’
Let me through! I’m suffocating!
Maybe it is as dangerous as it feels. Maybe she, too, is suffocating. Will she die here in front of the Berlin Wall, a twenty-year-old Jewish Australian violin student, trampled to death by a stampeding crowd? It would make some kind of sense. Her grandmother, Oma Mirla Heller, died in the Holocaust—in the Buchenwald—this month forty-five years ago. Her crime: wearing a small blue and white Magen Dovid pin that said Halt Hitler.
Imagine dying for two words…
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