Walls

Last night I went to a presentation on a friend's recent trip to Berlin. He and his wife had lived there for over a year while he was stationed in Germany, and he returned as part of an almost-all-expense-paid trip honoring the U.S. servicemen whose presence helped to protect West Berlin from being overrun by the Communists on the other side of the Wall that divided the city in half.

The fall of the Berlin Wall is probably my earliest memory as far as global news is concerned. I remember hearing about people who had tried to come over the Wall from East Berlin and had been killed for their troubles. I had believed, with what I've sometimes seen as a 10-year-old's naivete but now recognize as the general shortsightedness of humanity, that the horrible fact of the wall was inevitable, almost eternal. The evil that had been would always be, or else might become worse. And then suddenly one day it was gone. (The long-boiling things always seem so sudden, so remarkable, when they happen.)

What strikes me after last night's presentation is the same thought that haunted me after seeing The Pianist, a film featuring a man who was forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, an area of the city bricked off from the rest that could be entered or exited under only strict military supervision.

People on the other side of those walls watched them go up. Watched as strands of barbed wire tore their city in half and as that barbed wire was replaced by concrete barriers. Watched as a whole group of people were bricked away. Walked by those walls every day, walls behind which their former neighbors were sealed.

People being shut off from the free world watched, too. Watched by the hundreds of thousands, by the millions. In The Pianist, a Jew waiting to board a German train muses, far too late, over the number of Jews in Poland and the question of why they couldn't fight.

It's chilling. And I wonder what people will say about us, fifty or sixty years from now. I wonder if there are any walls going up, right before our eyes, while we keep to ourselves and mind our own business and maybe toss up a few prayers and stay comfortable and safe.

Dear God, keep us awake and unafraid.