Crossing The Berlin Wall

Extract from Guilt and Redemption

Our first stop was Brest, a little town in the Byelorussian Socialist republic, which has been a principal boarder crossing out of the USSR since the Second World War. The town has a population of less than 250,000 and was once a part of Poland until the area was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939.

Usually all trains leaving the USSR would stop at Brest in order to have their bogies changed since the Soviet Union uses a broad-gauge railway system, as opposed to the standard one used in the rest of Europe. Ours was no exception, so while the bogies on our train were being changed we had been asked to go through the border controls.

We were ushered into a hall where our passports and exit visas were checked by stern looking immigration officials that reminded me of the people I had met at Sheremetyevo airport on that very first day almost a year ago when i had first arrived the Soviet Union.

They appeared to be especially strict with the Soviet nationals and I wondered whether they were looking out for defectors…

After we passed through boarder controls and got back onto the train, we continued on the four hour journey to Warszawa Centralna, the main railway station in Warsaw, where we stopped over for about an hour before continuing on our Westward journey towards Berlin.

Berlin, the city with so much history. There is so much talk about the infamous Berlin wall, the Iron Curtain that separates the East from the West and I was very excited about being able to actually see it for myself.

But the reality of the crossing was not as I had thought it would be because a few hours later our train had pulled into the Friedrichstrasse underground station in East Berlin. This is supposed to be the crossing and here we were told to get off from the train and then were ushered through a little hallway where some stern looking armed boarder controls checked our travel documents before waving us on to the platform on other side. That was it-the underground changing of platforms at the Friedrichstrasse underground station, was our own experience of crossing the Berlin wall and as we climbed on to the train on this side of the station we found ourselves moving unceremoniously from the Communist world into the "decadent" Capitalist West.

Several minutes later our train slowly pulled into the Berlin Zoologischer Garten in West Berlin.

@SMC
Thanks for your advice. But what exactly is repulsive about my posts? The fact that they're extracts from the manuscript (Guilt and Redemption) does not necessarily mean that the posts are continuous. As the titles of the posts suggest, they deal with different themes within the the bigger plot of the book-this one,for instance, is about crossing the Berlin Wall.

Of course, i would like to apologise if the posts were deemed offensive, but i don't see anything offensive in them. On the matter of others being repelled, i m not particularly bothered. You see, most writers-and indeed most artistically inclined individuals-in addition to the creativity "thing" are driven by an almost unconscious exhibitionism and they will always find voyeuristic partners who will engage them in completing the metaphoric tango.

With that in mind, i hardly care how many people actually read my posts, as nobody is paying me anything for them at the moment. And as long as my exhibitionist appetite is gratified  I don't really have a problem 

When the time comes and i need to make money from my work, i will do the right thing.

PS: I am almost through with this draft of the book anyway and will start on the real work, which people will have to pay for to read. So you won't be seeing any more extracts from Guilt and Redemption.