Berlin, 2016

It's Monday night, December 19, 2016. I'm standing in the lobby of a Frankfurt hotel, staring at a TV monitor. The Berlin Christmas market next to the Kaiser Wilhelm church is on the news. Strings of Christmas lights shine behind the flashing red and blue of emergency vehicles. I try to decipher the German headline scrolling by on the bottom of the screen. Something has gone terribly wrong. Not much later, I find out about the truck.

Two days before, Ping and I had passed through that very spot several times, happily wandering from stall to stall, enjoying the holiday spirit in the Christmas market. A few yards away, we had sipped warm cups of Glüwein. Pictures of the scene on the internet today make my heart ache. We'd been there--right there--and nothing bad had happened. Not on that day. Not to us. It wasn't our time.

Being in Berlin was already an emotional experience for me for other reasons. 

A little background. In my early teens, I was obsessed with World War II. As I struggled with everything from the confusion surrounding Vietnam to zealous religious beliefs to my own deep internal conflicts, WWII offered a simple dichotomy. Evil had raised its ugly head, but Good had emerged victorious.

Hitler, Himmler, Mengele, Goering and Goebbels conceived and carried out some of the worst atrocities in recent history. Auschwitz, Dachau, Mauthousen and Ravensbrück actually existed. The miraculous evacuation of Dunkirk, the Battle of the Bulge, and D-Day actually happened. Good people did amazing things against impossible odds. It's also true that IBM, Kodak, Standard Oil, Chase Bank and others made fortunes supplying both sides. The United States remains the only country ever to have dropped an atomic bomb on someone else. We did it twice. Things weren't so simple even then.

In Berlin last week, I got to go inside the preserved wreckage of the Kaiser Wilhelm church. I saw what it looked like before and after the Allied bombing. The blasted out rosette remains empty. I walked in Tiergarten Park, whose towering trees are all younger than 71 years old. Every one of their predecessors had been chopped up and burned for firewood after the war. We crossed the street.

Tears welled up as the setting sun lit the inside of the Brandenburg Gate and I realized what I had just done: I had casually crossed the street from West Berlin to East Berlin! No papers had been scrutinized, no looks of suspicion had been leveled at me. I could walk back anytime I wanted. No shots would be fired. All I had to watch out for was traffic. 

A double row of bricks embedded in the pavement marks the line where the Soviet-built tank barrier once walled off the Brandenburg Gate. Cars drive across it all day.

This city had suffered under one tyrant only to be divided up, dominated and isolated by another. What struck me was how free it felt that day. People of all ages hung out at the Christmas market, laughing and talking over steaming mugs of mulled wine or hot cocoa. Locals smiled and joked with us in two languages, counted out my coins for me when I forgot my glasses, and cheerfully waited to pass while Ping took a picture of some new delight. A peaceful demonstration blocked traffic, escorted fore and aft by the Polizei. The only order barked was the one that stopped a car trying to squeeze in a right turn after the intersection was closed to let the demonstrators proceed safely.

Two days later, a hijacked truck plowed into the crowd at the market by the bombed-out remains of the church.

I wasn't around for WWII. I was in a different hemisphere during most of the Cold War, but I remember listening to the radio with rapt attention as the wall came down in 1989. Crossing the street to the Brandenburg Gate brought me full circle. And having wandered through that Christmas market in Berlin made the truck attack all the more real.

Would I go back? Absolutely. I would go back to Berlin, just like I would go back to Istanbul and Ankara. These are special places. Why? Not only because I've been there; that just makes them special to me, personally. They're part of the world, part of this planet. That makes them special in their own right. That's enough.

This is the world in which we live, but that's the point: we LIVE here. We LIVE. So does everyone else with whom we agree or disagree, whom we understand or do not understand, who hold us in high esteem or in contempt--these are the people of this planet. This is our home. These are our times. 

The same questions that have been asked of every human being before are now being asked of us: "Who will you be in these circumstances? How will you respond?"

May I answer not with a fist, a creed or an ideology, but with open eyes, a clear head, a strong backbone and an open heart.

On one of the sections of the Berlin wall left standing (directly translated):
"You have learned what freedom means and never forget."