When you go to Europe, you can enjoy many things: historical monuments, ancient cities, amazing museums filled with history and of course, great food; all while spending the Euro, which represents an important step towards political unification.

What is hard to imagine, even for young Europeans, is that the old people you meet in the streets of Paris, Rome, Berlin and London, saw with their eyes Germany bombing France and England, Italy invading Greece, Poland occupied and Russia almost conquered.

It’s actually a relief to imagine that during its life span, the old continent passed from the most atrocious war, to an advanced state of integration.

Berlin is an incredible melting pot of cultures. Not only is it the place where West and East Europe mixed, but also Turkish and Europeans, and nowadays people from all around have relocated to the city.

When the wall fell, the world promised it was going to be the last wall. That was a lie.

Today, there are new walls separating the US and Mexico, all around Palestine and the Berm of Western Sahara, just to name a few.

In Berlin, the wall is an almost invisible scar, like if the city would like to forget what happened. Just a few pieces still stand. in the rest of Berlin that huge space. Hundreds of new buildings grew where once was the wall, to the point that even long timer Berliners cannot tell where the division line used to be.

But there is a place that became a museum to remind to Europe what their grandfathers did just few decades ago.

Checkpoint Charlie was, for 28 years, a crossing point for foreigners during the Cold War. We saw it in many spy-movies, and read about it in countless books. It is also the place where many people died trying to escape and many others found incredible ways to cross. The museum is a tribute to this people and their bravery, as well as an instrument not to forget.

Inside the museum you can see the cars that used to transport people hidden in secret compartments or hand made gliders that flew over the wall, tunnels dug below the wall, as well as Peter Fechter’s body bleeding to death after he was shoot in 1962.

A special part is dedicated to graffiti painted on the western side of the wall, where it was actually possible to touch the wall. The images tell us about the pain a city suffered and the hope for freedom of the youngsters of the 80s.

The museum takes you on a tour from the first to the fourth generation of the wall. From a barbed wire to a wall constructed from 45,000 separate sections of reinforced concrete, each 3.6 meters high and 1.2 meters wide. It was reinforced by mesh fencing, signal fencing, anti-vehicle trenches, barbed wire, dogs on long leashes, “beds of nails”, the “death strip”, over 116 watchtowers and 20 bunkers.

The wall used to separate the city that today is a symbol of integration.

The hope is that maybe in few decades, when we will be old and grey, somebody will write about the absurd things they saw in the museum of the “checkpoint Charlie” equivalent in Mexico or Palestine that our generation allowed to exist.




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