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Testimony of five
East Berliners about life in the Soviet occupied part of the city.
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Hans R. is a
cabinetmaker, thirty-seven years old. He was a corporal in the Wehrmacht
and fought in the winter campaign in Russia. He is married, and he and his
wife have a ten-year-old son. He wears his thick blond hair short and
straight back. His eyes are calm and steady, and he has the blunt, quiet
hands of a craftsman. Hans R. was born in the East German city from which
he fled, and he lived there all his life except for his army service.
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Dieter S.,
twenty-one years old, has classic German good looks: blond hair, clear
blue eyes, a fine nose, and a square chin. His father was killed in
action, and his mother died after the war. He grew up with relatives in
East Berlin and received a secondary school education. He belonged to
various Communist youth organizations as the price of securing this
education. Dieter crossed the East Berlin-West Berlin frontier the day
before the wall went up.
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Ursula F.,
twenty-five years old, is a small, pretty girl with a mass of auburn hair.
She has a quick laugh and a mobile, expressive face. She speaks a witty
German, full of unexpected phrases.
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Ilse R. is a
strong-faced woman of about fifty with iron-gray hair and an air of
dignified reserve. She was dressed in a neat gray suit, shiny from much
pressing. Her daughter Inge, blonde, looks a good deal like her mother.
The younger daughter, with hair dyed black, has a thinner and finer face
and must favor her father, from whom Ilse R. has been divorced for five
years.
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Georg K., about
forty-five years old, is a graying, untidy, impatient man. He is much
absorbed in his profession and seems to be wholly apolitical. He and his
wife have two sons, seventeen and eighteen.
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