The creative documentary 1989 is a high-politics drama about the the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain. When the young technocrat, Miklós Neméth, was appointed Hungary’s new prime minister, his main task was to save the country’s appalling economy. Neméth decided to remove the expensive border control apparatus from the state budget, a decision which set him up against communist hardliners, and soon after the Berlin Wall fell.
Director Anders Østergaard recreates the events of 1989 and invites the audience into the secret meeting rooms through a mixture of testimonials, archive material, recreation and reconstructed dialogues of the key political players.
Directed by Anders Østergaard
Duration: 96′
Year: 2014
Rabbit a La Berlin, a film by Bartek Konopka and Piotr Rosołowski which will be screened on Wednesday 20 August, examines the plights of a colony of rabbits which lived between the two barriers of the Berlin Wall. Enclosed in this space, the animals lived undisturbed lives – until the Wall was taken down. Then the rabbits had to readjust, and learn to live in a new environment (much like the people, of course, who had to unify what was once West and East). The rabbits who inhabited the “death strip” between the West and the East are not the only example of nature caught in human conflict.
The Animals in War Memorial in London. Tamsin Slater CC
Animals such as horses and dogs have long been used by the military, but the impact of war can go far beyond such matters of “utility”. As a human endeavour, war and armed conflict can have a profound impact on the environment and natural systems: landscapes, for instance, have been transformed by advancing militaries and migrating populations. What is more, this impact is not only inflicted during the fighting of war. Military preparations, such as training and the development of a military infrastructure, also affect the environment. And in the aftermath of war, reconstruction once again leaves a mark.
The Cold War, in this respect, presents a specific example, in which a conflict was not actively fought (at least in the European arena), but nonetheless dictated human activities and shaped their movements. It therefore also affected the natural elements of this continent. The rabbits in the “death strip” lived happy, untroubled lives because no people or natural enemies were present in the enclosed space.
In another case which mirrors the Berlin rabbits’ story, groups of deer also felt the effects of the Iron Curtain, which stretched into what was then Czechoslovakia. At the time, three parallel electrified fences presented a heavily guarded border: over the years, 500 people were shot as they tried to escape into West Germany. The barrier would now traverse a combined German/Czech national park, where a wildlife crossing has been made to aide red deer who migrate in the summertime. However, a recently concluded study shows that the animals in the Sumava Natural Park in the Czech Republic now balk at crossing the area where the fences once stood. The animals on the German side present the same behaviour. Where people are now freely crossing political borders, the deer seem to have kept the Cold War distinction “in mind”.
With the 25-year anniversary of the fall of the Wall, none of the deer living today would remember the fence as it stood. Red deer typically live for 15 years, meaning that the animals now fearful of the traverse are at least of the second generation since the fall – implying that fawns would have adapted their mothers’ migratory behaviours in avoiding the barrier.
The Cold War is not the only case of a conflict that is characterised by a stand-off. It still echoes in the relations between North and South Korea that have been restrained for decades, a fact that is represented by the so-called Korean Demilitarised Zone. It lies on the original boundaries between the US and USSR brief administrations of Korea post-World War Two, and was reinstated in the 1953 Armistice Agreement that ended the Korean War. The DMZ roughly divides the Korean Peninsula in half: it is 250 km long and four meters wide, extending on both sides of the front line. It is a buffer zone, with large numbers of troops still stationed alongside it.
Only two small villages remain within the boundaries of the DMZ; the rest of the zone is a deadly place for people as the area remains heavily patrolled and tensions are still high. As a result, the DMZ has become an involuntary, unintended wildlife park. The area encompasses a unique geography including mountains, prairies and swamps – and thus is a unique temperate habitat. It is home to a number of near-extinct species: the Korean tiger, Amur leopard and Asiatic black bear are free to roam this “green ribbon”. While the guns and land mines are keeping people out, they are de facto keeping other species alive.
A deer runs along the train tracks at the DMZ
One important note, however, is that this ecosystem has a precarious future: demilitarised zones might not remain in that stage indefinitely, and especially not if a war were to break out. Should the tensions between the two Koreas become hotter, the troops now lurking on the border will cross the DMZ, destroying its unique ecosystem. In a telling occurrence, South Korea’s submission to UNESCO to create an official wildlife park in the southern part of the DMZ, has been blocked by North Korea as a violation of the armistice agreement.
View the trailer for Rabbit à la Berlin here:
Rabbit à la Berlin
Academy Award-nominated documentary Rabbit à la Berlin uses the Berlin Wall rabbit population as a metaphor for the huge transition post-communist societies underwent. For 28 years, the Death Zone between the Berlin Walls was a safe home for wild rabbits: full of grass, no predators, guards protecting them from human disturbance. They were enclosed but happy. When the rabbit population grew to thousands, guards started to remove them but the rabbits survived and stayed until, one day, the wall fell down. The rabbits now had to abandon the comfortable system they had been living in. They moved to West Berlin, where they’ve have been living in small colonies ever since. They are still learning how to live in the free world, just as many citizens of Eastern Europe. Directed by Bartek Konopka and Piotr Rosołowski | Duration: 39’| Year: 2009
EXIT
In October 1989 the East German authorities tightened border security following the exodus of GDR citizens that had started earlier in the summer. Through exceptional and rare footage shot between 10 and 20 October 1989, Exit shows East German refugees who managed to cross the Polish border in order to reach the West German embassy in Warsaw. For the first time they talk openly about life in East Germany, not knowing the world is about to change. Directed by Małgorzata Bieńkowska-Buehlmann | Duration: 30′ | Year: 1990-2009
Oxygen
During the communist dictatorship in Romania (1945-1989), thousands of people risked their lives attempting to flee their country. Despair made them invent the most incredible methods to cross the border illegally. Some of them managed to escape, but many lost their lives in these attempts. Oxygen is a free re-enactment of a real case: a man who tried to cross the Danube illegally using an oxygen cylinder, to escape the communist Romania. Directed by Adina Pintilie | Duration: 30′ | Year: 2010
The screening of Rabbit à la Berlin kindly supported by Deckert Distribution
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A packed house at The Frontline Club heard Matt Frei regale them with tales from his long and illustrious career. The former BBC Washington correspondent, recently poached by Channel 4 News, was on fine form as he spoke to former BBC executive Vin Ray about more than 20 years with the BBC:
“The BBC is mother, and it’s been a very good mother to me, but now and again it’s a good idea to leave mother and elope with a mistress. I’ve always admired Channel 4 because it’s a cross between current affairs and news. Newsnight with a bit more of a newsy edge at a decent hour. I’ve had my eye on it for some time, and I guess they may have had their eye on me for some time.”
The event was delivered in conjunction with the BBC College of Journalism, as part of the ongoing Reflections series in which journalists including Alex Crawford, Jon Snow, Bill Neely and Martin Bell have discussed their experiences as journalists.
Frei spoke of the time he met Bell in Serbia, during the Bosnian war, and the valuable lessons that he took from him:
“He taught me the craft of television. It’s a very strange craft because it’s more about what you deny yourself than anything else, he said: ‘If you can’t say it in one minute and 42 seconds you can’t say it. Don’t bother.’”
Delivering his reflections alongside a series of memorable video clips, he discussed some of the high and low points of his career, including his coverage of the fall of the Berlin wall:
“I was told by a famous American journalist that this was the best story I would cover, and that it was all downhill from here. He was sort of right – it was such a happy event.”
He also spoke of some less orthodox approaches to stories, including one particular experience during his time in Rome:
“Giorgio Armani was accused of bribing the financial police. I got an interview by saying I was a fashion journalist for the BBC – I said I wanted to talk about hemlines and colours. Halfway through the interview he turned to me and said, ‘You know **** all about fashion, don’t you?’ I said, ‘Did you pay the money?’ He said, ‘Yes, in brown paper bags.’”
With regard to the challenges facing the next generation of young journalists Frei expressed some optimism:
“I think the challenges are going to be the same: find a story, tell it well and make sure somebody is going to pay you for it. If you’re starting out now you have an incredible range of tools at your disposal – much better than the tools we had, and cheaper.”
The issue of social media was subsequently raised, and the question of what it meant for the future of sending journalists like him around the world – particularly in light of the numerous journalists who have recently been killed and injured whilst reporting from warzones:
“I don’t think most serious organisations are thinking social media will replace what they have. It’s just another source of information – if you can’t get into Syria but you have evidence on your mobile phone you’re going to use it.”
As the evening drew to a close he discussed his only regret, the fact that he had to cover the Iraq war from Washington:
“I never went to Iraq, and in some ways I wish I’d covered it. In some ways talking about it from Washington makes you a bit of a fraud: unless you’ve seen the impact of policy on the ground you can’t really talk about it.”
Watch the full event:
]]>Former Israeli President Moshe Katsav is back in court in Jerusalem on Monday, appealing his April conviction and seven year sentence for indecent assault and sexual harassment of two female employees.
In Dharamsala, Lobsang Sangay is sworn in as the new Prime Minister of the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile, following the Dalai Lama’s announcement in March that he is stepping down from Tibetan political leadership.
Tuesday is International Day of the World’s Indigenous People. Celebrations of indigenous culture and discussions on human rights, social and economic development and international cooperation take place around the world.
Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus and UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Valerie Amos address the InterAction Annual Forum, which kicks off in Washington on Wednesday. The forum brings together NGOs, government agencies and international organisations to discuss development, with the focus likely to be on the current drought and famine crisis in the horn of Africa.
In London, Shrien Dewani is expected to find out whether he will be extradited to South Africa to stand trial for alleged involvement in his wife Anni’s murder last November.
On Thursday, Sri Lanka shuts down a number of national parks to begin the first large-scale census of its wild elephant population by counting them as they approach watering holes. The census will allow policy-makers do enact more effective conservation policies.
The US Presidential race continues to heat up, as candidates for the Republican nomination face off in a TV debate from Iowa State University ahead of Saturday’s Ames Straw Poll, a traditionally important gauge of support for Presidential wannabes.
As the European debt crisis rumbles on, France and Greece both release second quarter GDP figures on Friday, while Greece is also due to make a relatively small bond repayment of €480m.
Meanwhile, ABC publishes July circulation figures for UK newspapers. Media-watchers will be paying particular attention to the sales of Sunday papers following the 10 July closure of News of the World.
Saturday is the 50th anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall, which is being marked in Germany with a commemoration ceremony attended by President Christian Wulff.
The Dalai Lama begins a three-day visit to Toulouse, while in his adopted home country of India, Hindus celebrate Raksha Bandhan, signifying the bond between brothers and sisters.
On Sunday, neighbouring Pakistan celebrates Independence Day. Last year’s celebrations were cancelled due to the floods that killed some 2,000 people and displaced or affected another 20 million.
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The international editor for ITV News, Bill Neely delivered a fascinating masterclass in television journalism last night at the Frontline Club.
Part of a regular series of ‘Reflections’ events in association with the BBC College of Journalism, in which top journalists talk about their work and those who inspired them, the hour-and-half event was a mine of information and expert analysis on how to best make use of words, pictures and sound – and silence.
A must-watch for aspiring journalists and those who want to improve their game, the event includes insight into some of the key moments in TV journalism history since the 1980s, including the Bosnian war of 1992 to 1995. In the face of the atrocities carried out during that conflict, some journalists including the BBC correspondent Martin Bell and Ed Vulliamy decided that detachment was no longer possible and instead opted for the “journalism of attachment”, Neely explained.
He also analysed his colleague Penny Marshall’s use of words and pictures in a 1992 report from a Serb-run detention camp in Bosnia, which opens with Marshall saying ‘We were not prepared for what we saw there’. “Then for 18 seconds, she said nothing,” said Neely.
The report won the International News Award for 1992 at the Royal Television Society TV Journalism Awards but was caught up in a “storm” after Living Marxism magazine claimed that the video tapes were faked.
ITN successfully sued the magazine for libel but some people “still had not forgiven” BBC world affairs editor John Simpson’s decision to give evidence for the magazine, Neely said.
After showing one of his earlier reports from Newry while he was the BBC’s Northern Ireland correspondent, Neely examined the work of a number of journalists from ITV News, including Colin Baker and Paul Davis and the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen and Martin Bell.
Good journalists are able to use words to “grab a person by the lapels and never let them go,” said Neely, who talked about the different approaches used by journalists, including Bell, who did not script his reports.
Drawing on a career that had seen him cover stories around the world from the fall of the Berlin wall to the Haiti earthquake and fighting in Libya, Neely also discussed the use of sound, pointing out the differences in the way ITV News and the BBC reported from Dunblane massacre in March 1996.
Neely highlighted Baker’s report that showed school children leaving the primary school where 16 of their classmates and a teacher were shot dead. Ove the images, the former senior correspondent said: “Evil touched them, but just brushed past.”
During the report the sound of grieving parents could be heard from a building behind him but at no point did Baker draw attention to it, Neely said. “I think there are times when you just don’t need to,” he added.
The award-winning journalist, who picked up BAFTA’s three years in a row, contrasted different reporting styles from the BBC correspondent Kate Adie’s “icily detached” approach to the more conversational style of his colleague Tom Bradby, political editor of ITV News.
Neely talked the audience through step by step through his report from Haiti that won him his most recent BAFTA last year. The report was shown in three parts and Neely highlighted different aspects of the package, which Ray pointed out broke with accepted wisdom of “using your best pictures first”.
Part two of the interview is here:
My wife sat at home in floods of tears in front of the television, the uncomprehending toddlers hugging her knees. I was hanging out on a chaotic street corner hundreds of miles away pouring three 19-year-old waitresses into a taxi to take them to the biggest party the world had seen in four decades.
My wife’s tears were tears of joy. The night was November 9th 1989, and the Berlin Wall was coming down. For the first time in the century it seemed the whole world was empathising with the Germans. But for me, on that street corner in Berlin in the midst of the biggest story of my career, the predominant thing on my mind as a Sunday newspaper reporter on a Thursday night was, “Damn, this is all happening 24 hours too early.”
But then nobody had known it would happen at all. Least of all the intelligence agencies of the West, caught napping on the eve of their greatest ‘victory’, as they would be again on September 11, 2001, their greatest embarrassment. Not even the men who gave the orders in East Berlin knew it would happen. Not even as they gave them. The fall of the Berlin Wall was the triumphant vindication of the ‘cock-up’ theory of history, of what happens when those seemingly immovable objects of political inertia and the status quo get swept away by two irresistible forces: accident and emotion.
In the initial hours of chaos after the first border guards had bowed to the pressure of people, confusion in the chain of command, a lack of clear orders, a fuddled political decision to relax border restrictions, imperfectly understood by the man announcing it, essentially misreported by the western media – which was all most East Germans listened to – nobody really knew what was happening. Could the most concrete manifestation of the Iron Curtain really be crumbling? Was this really a sea change in global politics? Or just a moment of madness? Would the shutters come down again the next day with a political crackdown and the restoration of the Cold War status quo, or would this be a brave new world?
Seldom has emotion been more palpable than on the streets of Berlin that night, the first time in 28 years it was possible to speak of it as a single city. At that precise moment I was less concerned about what I would write than soaking up the intoxicating atmosphere of a once-in-a-lifetime experience. East Berlin wasn’t just a place I went to write about but an inseparable part of my life. The people whose lives were about to be changed forever were not interviewees, but close personal friends, people I considered almost part of my family.
As a young correspondent, then for Reuters, East Berlin had been where my wife and I made our first home together as a married couple. A home we had to share with a secretary and a housekeeper, one of them possibly in the employ of the secret police, with microphones in the walls, and men in unmarked cars on our tails as we went about our daily business. It was where the ordinary East Germans we encountered introduced us to a different kind of world, one in which expectations were limited, luxuries few and far between, where the walls had ears and trust was the most valuable commodity. In late-night conversations fuelled by beer, barroom philosophy and black humour they taught us the difference between acquaintance and friendship, about the value of freedom and the curious sweet-and-sour taste of life in a virtual cage, and finally about how the tide of history can sweep over people and places.
My three waitresses had been working inan East Berlin hotel all evening, while outside the world turned upside down all around them. They heard the news that the Wall had opened while they served pork and dumplings to Russian tourists, but with typical Prussian thoroughness worked to the end of their shift, after midnight, before one winked at the others and said, “Anyone for the Ku’damm?” When they burst giggling and spraying cheap ersatz champagne through the gates at Checkpoint Charlie, heading for West Berlin’s most famous boulevard, I realised they were just what I was looking for: a bright young element of human colour, not that the story was going to be short of it.
For that one delirious night most of East Berlin took a walk on the wild side: two-stroke ‘Trabbies’, the fibre-glass midget cars soon to become an accidental symbol of a revolution based on middle-class values, raced Porsches along the glitzy avenues of the West, littered with broken bottles beneath a sky ablaze with fireworks; it was as if a long-awaited marriage had occurred; Berlin embraced Berlin. Policemen (West) kissed bus conductresses (East). “Berlin is again Berlin. Germany weeps with joy” screamed the headlines on special edition tabloids, rushed off the presses and handed out free on streets in the West.
On the Ku’damm itself, awash with people hugging one another, spreading across the wide avenue in a vast, deliriously happy drunken party I let my waitresses vanish into the throng, when I found myself suddenly grabbed and embraced by friends who were practically family. And for them it really was a family reunion: Kerstin Falkner and her husband Andreas had only weeks earlier fled their home in East Berlin, via the West German embassy in Poland, thinking it would be years before they ever saw the rest of their family again. If ever. Now she was standing arm in arm with her brother Horst and his wife Sylvia, who had only hours before walked through a gap in the Wall they thought would keep them apart forever.
It was an off-duty East Berlin bus driver I met coming West that evening who gave the definitive answer to the question on everyone’s mind. “Can they close the wall again? Never. We’ll see them sink in ashes first.” The domino effect that followed – the Velvet Revolution in Prague, full liberalisation in Poland and Hungary, bloody revolt in Romania and the squalid end of its dictator Nicolae Ceausescu – have left 1989 remembered as an ‘annus mirabilis’, the death knell for the Cold War that finally came to an end with the failed putsch against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, his resignation and the breakup of the Soviet Union itself.
Gorbachev’s was the minor tragedy that any playwright would have seen as a fitting codicil for the drama. More than anyone else he had been the sane force that had made 1989 a year of miracles rather than of bloodbaths. He tried to reform an empire and ended up overseeing its disintegration. At any stage he could have stepped in and halted that disintegration, though he would probably only have postponed it, and at incalculable cost in human life. The most remarkable thing I heard him say was several years after his resignation when he was asked who was his greatest role model. His answer was not any icon from the pantheon of communist, or even historical Russian leaders. Instead he named a much more unlikely individual: King Juan Carlos of Spain. Asked why, he answered simply: “Because he too inherited absolute power and chose to give it away.”
And with that, history came to an end.
I wish.
American political philosopher Francis Fukuyama’s celebrated 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, arguing that the collapse of communism spelled the global triumph of western liberal democracy could not have been more wrong. In early 1990, I described the tumultuous events of the previous year as a wave of revolutions that had finally ended a 75-year European civil war that went global. Today I might rephrase what in modern parlance might be called a bloody “massively multiplayer role playing game” in four rounds….
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Anyone who has not heard – and felt the impact of – the primal anthem of rock music, ‘Born To Be Wild’, suffers, arguably, from an unenviable deï¬cit of experience. Most people do know the song, however, for it is one of the most-played and popular rock songs of all time, in part because of its being chosen as the soundtrack for the cult movie, Easy Rider.
But less so for its connection to the Berlin Wall which fell 20 years ago, initiating the transformation and uniï¬cation of Europe. And not because ‘Born To Be Wild’ was written and played by a band called Steppenwolf, title of a novel by one of the greatest German writers of his country’s turbulent 20th century, Hermann Hesse. The connection is this: that John Kay – the man who sings ‘Born To Be Wild’ with his immediately recognisable, deep splenetic scowl, and whom most people believe to be American or at least Canadian – is actually German, ‘East German’; smuggled through the Iron Curtain by his mother, at risk of death at any moment on their journey, when he was ï¬ve years old.
Kay’s childhood odyssey, and the road along which it took him, is one of the most compelling narratives in popular music, both because of the extraordinary adventure itself, and because it led Kay – as an exile from communist tyranny whose dreams of America were then tested by reality – to become the singer he is, and Steppenwolf the band they were and still are. As Kay puts it: “We were never afraid to speak our minds, let the chips fall as they may”. But with a difference from the rest: Kay’s origins in Germany, and his childhood American dream as a refugee from communism, led him to become a very singular ï¬gure in the rebellions of the 1960s in America, and an even more compelling rock and roll critic of our times, 20 years on from the fall of the wall. Kay’s crossing the Iron Curtain also led him to compose the most complex yet passionate and cogent of all political protest songs, ‘Monster’ of 1970, written during the war in Vietnam, but suddenly, of late, ï¬nding itself arousing and inspiring crowds of fans from a new generation: ‘Now we are ï¬ghting that war over there / No matter who’s the winner, we can’t pay the cost’, it goes.
Yet ‘Monster’ – by the German Kay – is, more than any protest song written by an American, a deeply patriotic American eulogy, about America at its outset, the betrayed dream of its founding fathers. Not unlike the American dream betrayed of a boy determined to make it to America, then regained in part, having left East Germany and the Berlin Wall behind. ‘I am an American by choice,’ says Kay
Here is the opening from another song by John Kay and Steppenwolf, called The Wall:
“Crossing the line in the dead of night
Five years old and on the run,
This ain’t no game, boy, don’t make a sound,
And watch that man with the gun,
Say a prayer for the ones we leave behind,
say a prayer for us all,
Come take my hand now and hold on tight,
Take one last look at that Wall.”
This was no dream, this was autobiography. John Kay was born on April 12 1944, as Joachim Fritz Krauledat in Tilsit, East Prussia, while his father was away, ï¬ghting on the slaughterhouse of the Third Reich’s retreating Russian front, on which 20 million citizens of the USSR were killed, and some six million Germans, including Kay’s father, Fritz Krauledat. He was accordingly raised by his mother, Elsbeth. As Kay writes:
I remember, I was barely four
Mama told me Daddy’s gone
Died in the war
He won’t be home again
I never knew him
Pictures all I had
Mama raised me through good and bad.
Kay the Wolfman howls ‘Born to be Wild’ for what it is: anthem of America’s freeway outlaws, but turns out to speak with a ï¬rm courtesy and marked command of the English language, offering such counsel as: ‘I think you may be well pleased by spending a couple of evenings with this book …’ He has kept his lean, rock’n’roll-seasoned good looks, behind sunglasses (in a Jagger-esque way, though Kay could hardly be more different to the strutting pantomine Jagger has become).
And Kay recalls: “When the war drew to a close, and the [Soviet] Red Army was beginning to advance on East Prussia … that was when my mother took me as an infant and headed West. By train. We came to a halt in a region known as Tueringen. She found herself in the middle of the night in a strange place and got off the train.
“There was a woman there from a Red Cross type service and she said ‘Do you need some place to stay?’ We wound up staying for the next four and a half years – in this family’s home, who had lost three sons in the war, and had an extra room”.
This was a time, easily within living memory, when a shifting Europe was ravaged by armies, but not only armies. It was a continent across which wave upon wave of people wandered – lost, itinerant; in flight from what was behind them, in fear of what lay ahead, as every refugee knows. Fleeing a burning home or seeking those last heard of in concentration camps or embarking for the front lines. And it became a continent abruptly divided by the new front line established by Joseph Stalin’s Red Army. The embryonic Iron Curtain followed the borders of Czechoslovakia and Poland, but it carved battered, defeated Germany down the middle.
“Shortly after the end of the war, the Americans moved in to Tueringen”, recalls Kay, “but as it turned out, the Americans pulled out and the Russians, came. The result was that all of a sudden, we were behind the Iron Curtain”.
Kay’s mother had other problems, closer to home, which though domestic, necessitated a dangerous and major course of action. “My mother had discovered that I would squint, and my eyes were quite bad,” says Kay. “The doctor said that if I had any chance of getting my vision improved, I would need a more balanced diet. And he hinted to the fact that in the West, in West Germany, the opportunity for a better diet was there. My mother had decided to get us out of East Germany”.
To a child, it was a terrifying flight: “There were dog patrols and searchlights and that sort of thing”, recalls Kay, “and I had a nasty cough. I was told to be very quiet. I had a little knapsack and – well, then it was like – I was told: ‘RUN’”.
“Oh the truck came by to put us in the back,” runs ‘Renegade’:
“And left us where the railroad tracks cross the line,
Then the border guide took us by the hand,
And led us thru the hole into the promise
land beyond,
And I can hear him now,
Whispering soft and low,
“When you get to the other side,
Just you run like hell”,
Get to the other side,
Keep your head low,
Hey you, keep your head down,
Don’t you look around,
Please don’t make a sound,
If they should ï¬nd you now,
The man will shoot you down”
“Once we were in West Germany”, says Kay, “we made it to the town of Hannover” – a manufacturing city which had been carpet-bombed by the British – “and being refugees from the East, we lived in the attic of a building that had been bombed and been repaired”. In the new life, romance also blossomed for the widowed Frau Krauledat: &ld
quo;Shortly after, my mother met a fellow, Gerhardt Kyczinski, who had just been released after three or four years in a prisoner of war camp in Russia and just made it home”. As often happened between camp survivors and other people left bereaved and traumatised by genocide and battlegrounds in shifting, uncertain Europe, “those two hit it off,” recalls Kay, with a chirp, “and got married”….
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