The Berlin Wall and me.

I remember standing in the middle of the front room of our college flat watching the news that the Berlin Wall was being taken down. I remember being dumbfounded. It was inconceivable and fantastical. You see, just 11 months earlier I'd seen the wall. I had taken a long weekend off from my studies in London to visit my cousin and her husband who were stationed in the US military in Berlin. They agreed to take me into East Berlin for the day. It was December, bitterly cold, a pregnant East German woman had just escaped across the river Spree and miraculously survived. But the East German government was bruised by the news and were on alert. My cousin's husband was required to wear his US military uniform when we went into East Berlin. I was told when we crossed the border to hold my passport up to the window but keep my eyes straight ahead and not make eye contact with the East German guard - it would be seen suspiciously as a slight or an attempt to communicate and we would be questioned. Indeed, a car ahead of us was pulled over for that reason.

Crossing into East Berlin was chilling. We were on alert about what could or could not be photographed. Who we could or couldn't speak to. Where in East Berlin we dare not go. The city, stripped of the advertising, commercial signs and neon was grey and seemingly deserted. We went into stores barely stocked with decades old furniture, shabby textiles and wooden toys. This was the 80s, mind and Western shops were garishly stocked with patterns and fluorescent colours. We bought a few wooden toys, had an extravagant meal of stodgy German food in a East Berlin restaurant, visited the Tomb of the Unknown Solider and made our way back to West Berlin. I later returned to a cold but somehow more festive London and finished my exams.

11 months later I watched as it all came down. As East Germans strolled freely through Checkpoint Charlie at once exhilarated and full of sadness that such a divide had been allowed to tear a country apart. The pictures of East Berlin and the Wall, now gone, stick in my head to this day and a visit years later to a reunified Berlin made them seem even more dreamlike.

Now, we celebrate 20 years of reunification and the freedoms and challenges that brought. But we must remember that these territorial walls exist today, tearing apart families, communities and cultures with no more justice than the Berlin Wall embodied. And be hopeful that, like the Berlin Wall, oppressive regimes and the controls they institute do not have to be permanent.