Word: wall
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...aware of the criticism, both at home and abroad, that already surrounded the youthful missionaries of democracy. Communist propagandists had been hard at work for months, denigrating the Peace Corps. Some home-grown critics were just as harsh. "The thing is so disproportionate as to be nonsensical," editorialized the Wall Street Journal. "What person, except perhaps the very young themselves, can really believe that an Africa aflame with violence will have its fires quenched because some Harvard boy or Vassar girl lives in a mud hut and speaks Swahili...
Like a monstrous guillotine, the wall has slashed the arteries and nerves of Ber lin. It cuts through sewers and subways, severs bridges and thoroughfares. It bisects a cemetery, shears off churches and dwellings. Beside a green canal it becomes an ugly spaghetti-swarm of barbed wire. Along a quiet suburban street, its spine glints with jagged glass. The wall has separated sons from mothers, wives from husbands, friends from friends...
East and West have begun to live with the monstrosity of the wall. Berliners on both sides are permitted in spots to approach the wall to chat, even exchange foodstuffs and newspapers, if the Vopo guard feels indulgent. But anger remains. Sunny weekend weather brought a crowd of West Berlin youths to the border at Markgrafenstrasse. Some began throwing small paving stones at a Vopo water-cannon truck. The Vopos retaliated by firing a battering stream of water at the assailants-until a U.S. tank rumbled to the wall. The Vopo cannon's squirt quickly subsided into an embarrassed...
...Late. For Berliners, the wall measured itself out in forbidding miles of personal tragedy. They gathered in little groups on both sides of the wall to wave handkerchiefs or shout cautiously worded greetings, sometimes climbing trees for a better look. ''My wife's over there with our little boy," explained one young Berliner looking east from Gartenstrasse. "We lived over there, but we knew we had to get out, so I rented a room over here and started bringing our things over a little at a time. They stayed there to cover up until...
Some 30 refugees a day are still managing to vault the wall to reach freedom in the West, including in the last three weeks no fewer than 65 Vopos. But a young East German worker, put to felling trees along the Teltow Canal, leaped into the water to try to swim to freedom, was ruthlessly riddled with machine pistol fire-the second refugee to be killed trying to swim to freedom. Next day, despite a hail of bullets, a third swimmer made it. The Vopos promptly strung a double row of barbed wire along the canal...