Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Caldach and I'm in Berlin, a city that I love and have visited many times.

Specifically, I'm right next to Friedrichstrasser station. That's one of the huge stations where the S-Bahn and the Deutsche Barn normal railway lines swerved through the city. It's a place of glass and steel and

wide views but right next to it is a place that is called Trennen Palace. That's nothing to do with

trains. It means Palace of Tears and this is where East met West during the Cold War. It became a checkpoint shortly

after the Berlin Wall was put up and you'll recall that that basically sealed off West Berlin

and kept it apart from West Germany. You had to go through two frontiers to get from West

Berlin to West Germany and very difficult they were too.

The particular place here, Friedrichstrasser, station, was actually somewhere I crossed from East Berlin to West Berlin before the wall came down.

It was a chilling process involving very, very close scrutiny of you, of your possessions.

And that took place actually where I'm standing in this big building, which is now a memory to the

division, the hatred, the suspicion of those very tragic days. I'm just walking through here,

there's all kinds of posters celebrating as they were then, the creation of the German Democratic

Republic of demonstrators hurling bricks at Russian tanks, at the devastation, of course, left

behind after the Second World War, and more cheerfully right here the amazing scenes on the night of the night of November 1989 when the Berlin Walls came down or rather at least people were allowed to cross. There's all kinds of exhibits about how difficult it was,

how families would perhaps leave all their loved ones behind if they were being allowed to flee to

the West, possibly because they were simply too much trouble to keep behind. That's where the

tears came in and here's a big sign saying

Berlin Hauptstatt du German Democratic Republic. Capital of the German Democratic Republic.

Some interesting things here. Here's the inter shop. That was the hard currency store where you

could buy things like Marlborough cigarettes, Lux soap and all kinds of good things like coffee and vodka.

...Berlin a breaishat, then the smutze getai of the great and little dana's end.

That was an East German news film saying how terrible it was that the few people who were allowed to cross tended to be very old people into West Berlin would sometimes smuggle stuff back and that was undermining the German Democratic Republic.

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