This is for you Ms. V.
Somehow in the course of our conversation we wound up talking about Check-point Charlie in Berlin, (https://www.history.com/news/7-things-you-should-know-about-checkpoint-charlie) a museum dedicated to educating the world on what happened in Berlin when it became an island of democracy in the middle of communist East Germany. During our conversation I told her that I had kept a journal while I lived in Germany, specifically in Berlin and Göttingen in the late 70's. I made the mistake of telling her about this blog, and as a result feel compelled to write about my experiences back then- let's just say she inspired me to chronicle what it was like for a 21 year old, wet behind the ears LDS missionary from Utah living in the "Island of Freedom" surrounded by Communist USSR controlled East Germany.
November 2, 1978 twenty-one year old me walked into the MTC, the Missionary Training Center for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Provo, Utah, said goodbye to my family and embarked on one of the greatest adventures of my life. I spent eight weeks trying to learn German and how to be a missionary. One tool to motivate learning was the expectation to only speak German when conversing with my classmates and teachers. Don't be surprised when I tell you the first two weeks were pretty quiet around our dorms. There was no shortage of grunts and other strange noises, including horrible misuse of what little German we did know as we tried to communicate the simplest phrases. On January 2, 1979 I boarded a Lufthansa flight from Chicago to Frankfurt after a lengthy delay due to a snow storm hammering O'Hare International Airport. Several hours into the delay, I remember hearing an announcement "the Captain is going to go out and walk around to see if the runway is clear enough to take off..." So now I am imagining him out there sort of skating around in his patent leather black pilot shoes deciding if it isn't too slick to drive a 747 around and take off. It wasn't and we did. Take off. Off to another country where being an American could be good or bad, depending on who was asking. Most people spoke better broken English than my infantile German. I did have a nice, very basic conversation with the gentleman in the seat next to me. He patiently allowed me to practice my German on him for quite a while, a sort of on the fly mentor/tutor-perfect stranger, who gave me some confidence that I might be able to learn to communicate in my new environment after all. Frankfurt airport is massive. Connecting to my flight to Hamburg seems more like a dream than a memory. January 3rd we met the mission president and his family, people I hold dear to my heart to this day. After interviews with President Roylance, a testimony meeting, and wonderful dinner we were shuttled off to a hotel that was more like a hostel, and slept deep and hard. The morning of the 4th we learned where we would be assigned to work. I didn't know what to think about going to Berlin so I decided to just be excited about it and forget about my worries that I was going to be in this little round circle on the map in the middle of Communist East Germany.
I don't remember if we landed at Tegel or Tempelhof. What I do remember is all the snow on the ground. Everywhere. It seems God must have thought it would be good for me to start my great new, in country adventure in the middle of the biggest snow storm Berlin had seen in 100 years. In my journal I wrote something about feeling like it was -100 degrees Fahrenheit. My first companion was a cowboy from Kamas, Utah. He didn't know any more about how to use the coal oven heater in our apartment than I did. I had never seen one before. We lived in an apartment on the top of a six story walk-up (that means no elevator) with really thick walls, maybe 15 or 18 inches thick, and 12 foot ceilings. When we woke up in the mornings I could see my breath. If it was my turn that day, I would jump up out of bed, run into the kitchen, light the gas stove and oven, leaving the oven door open, close the kitchen door (very small kitchen) and race back into the bedroom/living room, climb quickly back into bed under the giant feather comforter and wait for the temperature in the kitchen to be warm enough to have breakfast. After two months my companion got transferred to another city and I got a new companion. He was German. He knew how to properly use the big ceramic coal heater we had, and he showed me what we had been doing wrong, just in time for a nice Spring thaw.
It was great having a German national as a companion that third month. In addition to teaching me how to use a Kachelofen coal heater, he insisted it was his job to help me learn to communicate effectively in German. I landed in Berlin with the mistaken impression that I could speak and understand basic German pretty well. That was before I heard the dialect in Berlin, aptly called Berlinisch, which sounded nothing at all like the High German I had been studying intensely for two months. They may as well have been speaking Russian. That was quite a blow to my fragile linguistic ego.
I had never been on a subway train before. We either walked wherever we went, or used public transportation. I had been warned to be careful not to mess up and wind up riding the subway train into East Berlin by mistake. Apparently, another missionary had ridden the train to Berlin from West Germany and had fallen asleep and missed his stop in West Berlin. He was awakened in East Berlin by Russian soldiers with machine guns who immediately accused him of being a spy for the West and detained him for a couple of hours. Imagining myself waking up surrounded by machine gun toting soldiers in an unfriendly communist country made me shiver. I was pretty sure my new great adventure did not need to include any episodes like that.
I will add some memories from my journal about my missionary work in Germany in another post. Here I want to focus on my experiences with the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain border between East and West Germany.
Most of the time we were not in view of the Wall. We were limited to the Charlottenburg area for missionary work, Dahlem to attend church, so most of the time it just seemed like we were in the middle of a big city. One day a week is designated a P-day, short for preparation day, when we were to do laundry, shop for groceries, clean the apartment, write letters to home and one to the mission president to talk about our week, and anything else that might be on our mind. My first companion, Elder Prescott, the cowboy, would write his letters to President in a sort of Cowboy-ese using expressions and idioms only a true cowboy could make sense of. For example: "This week was cold enough to freeze the spurs off your boots, but we hunkered down, checked our topknot, and cinched her a little tighter and dallied up every chance we got, but these people over here are a tough lot. We'll post a better time next week and have more to show for our efforts." More than once President Roylance asked for translation help with Elder Prescott's letters. If we accomplished all the weeks preparation early in the day we could occasionally do some sightseeing.
Checkpoint Charlie was the main border control point between East and West Berlin. The West had a museum there, and last I heard it was still there. It chronicles the history of the Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain, and many of the failed attempts a few successes over the years where citizens of East Germany tried to escape to West Germany, which West Berlin was part of. I remember watching films and seeing pictures of actual escape attempts. One that haunts me to this day was of a young man, who appeared to be in his early twenties, who was shot running across "no man's land" by Russian soldiers in a watchtower. He was left there on the ground for what seemed like the longest time, alone, bleeding, unable to move. They left him there until he was dead, and eventually carted his body off. The Wall was a concrete barrier almost 12 feet tall. It has bits of sharp metal and jagged, broken glass embedded in the top. On the East German side there was a "Death Strip" (No Man's Land) that was bare dirt a couple of hundred feet wide, bordered by a high metal fence topped with razor wire. Anyone unauthorized persons caught on the Death Strip was shot, arrested, or both. Somewhere between 120 and 200 persons were estimated to have been killed attempting to cross it to escape into West Berlin. We weren't allowed to go into East Berlin. We would have been arrested. Missionary work, promoting Christianity, or even carrying a Bible was illegal and could get you arrested. So what I was of East Berlin at that time was from a distance. What I could see (from an upper story of a building) appeared to be all different shades of gray. It was like looking at an old black and white photo of a large, third world city.
When I was finally transferred to Braunschweig, a city in West Germany, I was relieved. While Berlin was a wonderful experience and I learned and grew tremendously there, the idea that I was no longer living in the middle of a tiny island of democracy in the middle of communist East Germany just made me feel a lot safer. When I got news that the wall came down and the re-unification of East and West Germany had begun on November 9, 1989, I cried. I literally sobbed. I had lived for over ten years with the thought that it would never happen. And then it did. Thanks be to God and Ronald Reagan.
Editor's note: This post is a work in progress. To be continued...
