Divided by the Wall: a Family's Tale

BERLIN, Nov. 9, 2009 — -- Anna Kaminsky is a child of the wall. She was born behind the wall, raised behind the wall and gave birth behind the wall.

"My family is a divided family," she said. "My father is from Sweden and my mother is from the East. But my parents were separated by the construction of the wall."

Her parents' relationship, in the late '50s, early '60s, was not condoned by the East German government and, because her mother was from the East, the couple needed government permission to marry. They were refused.

But on Aug. 12, 1961, Kaminsky's mother learned that she had, somehow, been granted permission to travel to Sweden.

"Normally," Kaminsky said this week, "that would be the happy ending."

But her grandparents had convinced her mother to leave her young son behind with them while she went to Sweden, and to come back for him once she got settled.

Then on Aug. 13, overnight, the Berlin Wall went up. Kaminsky's parents and her brother, as with so many thousands of German families, were suddenly stranded on opposite sides of an impossible barrier.

The East German government would not allow Kaminsky's brother -– a toddler -– to leave the country to join his parents. They would also not allow his mother to come and collect him.

She could return but she would have to stay. And, if she didn't return, the government had threatened to send her son to an orphanage. Either way, her Swedish fiancé had no chance of entering East Germany. A writer with a political agenda opposing that of the East German government, he had been branded an enemy of the state. They never married.

Months later, in 1962, Kaminsky's mother made a heartrending decision: She took the one-way trip back to East Germany, to her son. By then, she was pregnant with Anna.

Anna Kaminsky would never meet her father. He died in the early 1980s, before the wall came down.

On Nov. 9, 1989, Kaminsky was asleep in Halle, nearly two hours from Berlin. When she heard the news, she said, "my first opinion was fear. I feared that the East German communists, that they couldn't accept that the wall is coming down. What I feared is that they would find the first opportunity to shut it again."