The expansion of the Berlin Wall

In August 1961, the young Lutz Porombka was able to witness first-hand the expansion of the Berlin Wall, as his parents' flat was located in the immediate neighborhood of the border checkpoint Sonnenallee. In fact, it was so close that Lutz once saw a soldier staring inside his room through the window from a tank. The barbed wire that had been initially placed at the border was subsequently replaced with a proper wall which was gradually further expanded. There were dogs and soldiers everywhere along the wall. The wall separated Lutz from his favorite places like playgrounds where he used to go. On the way to school, Lutz walked through an enclave to West Berlin. “If you had a paraglider, you could have jumped out of the school-building window and fly over to West Berlin,” he recalled. The pupils had a great view of the Wall from the windows and thus it comes as no surprise that they twice had the chance to watch an escape attempt across the Wall to West Berlin. These extreme experiences made the young students question the prevailing regime in East Germany for the first time in their lives.