Twenty-eight years passed. During those years, citizens of the eastern part
of Germany were scared, lonely, hungry, and helpless. On that fateful day
of 1989, the 9th day of November, East Germany started tearing and ripping
the Wall to pieces. The task was finished by 1990.
Today, the wall is barely visible. Where it stood has been marked out in downtown
Berlin over a distance of 20 kilometers {12 miles}, with a red line or cobblestones.
All that remains are a few places here and there kept as memorials. The people
of Berlin were impatient to see this painful scar vanish into thin air. (This
makes it difficult for us to imagine now what it was for this city to be split
right down the middle by an iron and concrete curtain.) Not all traces of
the Berlin Wall have been erased from the city or people’s minds. As
the German writer Peter Schneider admitted, “Demolishing the Wall in
people’s minds will take longer than it will take for a demolition firm
to do the same job.”
Today, Germany is one country with the rights of democracy and people can
vote for their leaders. They can also leave the country to visit other places,
have freedom of speech, and have the right to gather peaceably.