Escape

On the morning of 13 August 1961, the residents of East Berlin found themselves cut off from family, friends and jobs in the West by a tangle of barbed wire that ruthlessly split a city of three million in two. Within weeks, the barbed-wire entanglement would undergo an extraordinary metamorphosis: it became an impressive 156-km-long wall guarded by 300 watchtowers, the Berlin Wall. One Berlin street made immediate history: Ber-nauer Strasse. The border between the districts of Mitte and Wedding – and thus the line that divided East from West Berlin – ran directly in front of the buildings situated on the East Berlin side of the street. The front of the houses faced the now walled off West Berlin, whereas the entrances and the back of the buildings were located in East Berlin. This exceptional circumstance gave people the chance to escape from the windows of the apartments (until the police barricaded them), even to use ropes from the middle floors and jump into rescue nets of the West Berlin Fire Department from the upper floors of the buildings. After the police had bricked up all windows and doors, people even jumped from the roofs to escape from the East. Some people were seriously injured while doing so. The buildings were evacuated a few weeks after the wall had been erected.The remaining residents were forced to reset-tle elsewhere and the windows and doors of the buildings were bricked up. From mid-August to mid-October 1961, 113 people had escaped through the houses of Bernauer Strasse. By autumn 1961, the last of these houses had been vacated and the buildings themselves were then demolished in 1963. There is a memorial at the corner of Swinemünder Strasse for the ten people known to have died trying to escape in the area of Bernauer Strasse. The Mathern family lived on the side of Bernauer Strasse that belonged to East Berlin (number 11). The sector boundary here ran along the front of the buildings, and the sidewalk was already part of West Berlin. When the police started to close the doors of the neighboring building, the family understood the seriousness of the situation and escaped on 17 August by jumping out of an intermediate floor window.