(AP) – Ulrich Sauff and his wife stared at the mammoth domino pieces marking the path where the Berlin Wall once stood and reminisced about life in the barrier’s shadow.
“It was like a prison,” said Sauff, 73, who lived on the Western side of the wall. “For us ‘Wessis,’ the few kilometers from our old home to our new home (in the East) was unthinkable.”
The Sauffs were among those who gathered Monday to celebrate 20 years of unity, marking the day the wall came down. Thousands cheered as 1,000 colorfully decorated dominoes along a mile-long route were toppled to symbolize both the moment the wall came crashing down and the resulting fall of communist governments in Eastern Europe.
It was the finale to a day of memorial services, speeches and events that attracted leaders from around the world, including former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Chancellor Angela Merkel and 78-year-old Gorbachev stood shoulder to shoulder as they crossed a former fortified border crossing point between East and West Berlin to cheers of “Gorby! Gorby!”
Merkel – Germany’s first chancellor to be raised in the former communist East – called the events of Nov. 9, 1989 an “epic” moment in history.
“For me, it was one of the happiest moments of my life,” Merkel told a crowd of tens of thousands packed around the Brandenburg Gate.
In a video message screened at the main event, President Barack Obama paid tribute to the dissidents and demonstrators who ushered in the fall of the wall 20 years ago.
“Let us never forget Nov. 9, 1989, nor the sacrifices that made it possible,” Obama said to applause and cheers.
“We remember the people of the Baltics who joined hands across their land … we remember the students of Prague who propelled a dissident playwright from a jail cell to the presidency,” she said. “And tonight we remember the Germans, and especially the Germans in the East who stood up to say ‘No more.'”
Merkel also recalled the tragic side of Nov. 9 for Germans – the Nazis’ Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass – an anti-Semitic pogrom 71 years ago. At least 91 German Jews were killed, hundreds of synagogues destroyed and thousands of Jewish businesses vandalized and looted in the state-sanctioned riots that night.
Music from Bon Jovi and Beethoven recalled the joy of the border’s opening, which led to German reunification less than a year later and the swift demolition of most of the wall – which snaked for 96 miles around West Berlin, a capitalist enclave deep inside East Germany.
In the decades it stood, 136 people were killed trying to make their way across the border and the wall came to represent the split in ideologies between the communist East and the democratic West.
“This wall divided not only a single country but, as we realize today, all of Europe,” Medvedev said, taking his turn in a series of speeches by leaders gathered at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate for the ceremonies.
By the Brandenburg Gate, which stood in a no man’s land behind the wall for nearly three decades, Dieter Mohnka, 74, and his wife Helga, 71, shared a bowl of French fries on Monday afternoon and recalled the night the wall was opened.
“We were shocked when we heard that announced, simply astounded,” Helga Mohnka said. “The next morning we went straight to visit my aunt in the West.”
Dieter Mohnka, a high school teacher at the time, said he had long been fascinated with West Germany.
“I was born in East Germany, I went to school in East Germany. I was supposed to teach the kids about the wonderfulness of the East, when I was secretly watching TV from the West,” he said.
