SATURDAy, NOVEMbER 9 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE K A
Macron said in an interview
w ith the British weekly t he
Economist that was p ublished
Thursday.India’s top court to deliver
verdict on temple dispute:
India’s t op court will p ronounce
its v erdict Saturday in a decades-
old l and title dispute between
Muslims and Hindus o ver plans
to build a Hindu temple o n a site
in northern India where Hindu
hard-liners demolished a 16th-
century mosque i n 1992, sparking
deadly religious riots. Prime
Minister Narendra Modi
appealed f or peace ahead o f the
verdict, as have Hindu a nd
Muslim o rganizations.
— F rom news servicesBosnia summons French envoy
over ‘time bomb’ remark:
Bosnia’s g overnment s ummoned
the French a mbassador Friday to
protest President E mmanuel
Macron’s c omment t hat the
country is a “time bomb” b ecause
of returning Islamist f ighters.
Macron, commenting on France’s
refusal t o support the s tart of
negotiations for a ccession to the
European Union with North
Macedonia a nd A lbania, said a
real concern for the E .U. was
Bosnia. “If you’re concerned
about this region, the first
question is... Bosnia-
Herzegovina, the time b omb
that’s ticking right next t o
Croatia, a nd w hich f aces the
problem of r eturning jihadists,”BRITAINTorrential rains kill 1;
roadways floodedA woman died when she w as
swept away b y surging waters a s
rain d renched north and central
England, swelling rivers, f orcing
evacuations and disrupting travel
for a second d ay Friday.
In S heffield, 140 miles n orth of
London, the River D on
overflowed after 3 .4 i nches of rain
fell Thursday.
Emergency crews in
Derbyshire recovered a body near
the R iver Derwent after a woman
was r eported to have been s wept
away.
— Associated Pressvolleys of r ubber bullets behind
simple white shields.
Protests that began over an
increase in metro fares quickly
unraveled i nto riots, looting and
arson, and, e ventually, m ass
protests demanding a n end t o
social injustices and inequality.
Clashes with police and security
forces h ave escalated.
M ore than 20 have been killed
and a lmost 2,000 p rotesters
injured i n skirmishes with
security forces.
The medical group has focused
its a ctivities around a Santiago
square where the c ountry’s
largest protests have taken place.
They s tockpile medical supplies
and c art the injured t o safety.
— Reuterswas f ollowed by a Turkish
invasion in n ortheastern Syria
and a series of d eals between
Turkey a nd Russia, as well a s
between the Syrian government
in Damascus a nd U. S.-allied,
Kurdish-led forces.
— Associated PressCHILEDoctors hit the streets
amid violent protestsP ushing rickety grocery carts
as improvised h ospital beds,
more than 1 00 C hilean d octors
and n urses hit t he streets s hortly
after r iots broke out in Chile
weeks ago, diving into t he fray
amid clouds of tear g as andSYRIA
Turkish patrol kills
protester during truce
A S yrian protester w as k illed
when a Turkish military vehicle
ran over h im Friday as it drove
through a n angry c rowd
protesting a joint Turkish-
Russian patrol in n ortheastern
Syria, Kurdish forces a nd a group
monitoring the S yria conflict
said.
The death reflects the
complicated political geography
in northern Syria in the a ftermath
of a U.S. d ecision to pull i ts troops
away f rom the border a nd deploy
them elsewhere in t he country.
The U.S. d ecision to withdraw
The World
DIGESTmany people that they had to ex-
tend its run, she said. The piece of
the wall, meanwhile, was too big
to fit inside the museum, so they
placed it outside, where it still
stands. (Zommer-Ta l joked that it
was cheaper for the Germans to
leave it in Israel than pay to trans-
port the s lab back to Europe.)
“It’s very special that we did it
and that we have this piece, be-
cause it’s v ery symbolic,” s he said.
Not everyone was pleased with
an exhibition about the plight of
Germans.
“It wasn’t s o easy to do this k ind
of exhibition almost 3 0 years ago,”
Zommer-Tal said. “There were a
lot of Holocaust survivors who
didn’t like it.”
That w as why it was important,
she s aid.
“It was the Germans them-
selves who were responsible, but
they also s uffered because o f what
happened in East Berlin at that
time,” she said. “It’s not just a
decoration or a historical piece; it
has s ome m eaning here i n Israel.”
The wall segment was later ded-
icated to those killed during the
Holocaust.Washington
Walk into the spacious entry
hall of W ashington’s Newseum, a
museum dedicated to free expres-
sion and free p ress, and you w ill bedirected to begin your tour in the
basement. There, standing 12 feet
high, are eight 2 .5-ton segments of
the Berlin Wall, whitewashed and
blank on what was once the side
that faced East Germany, colorful
and graffiti-covered on the side
that faced west. Looming over the
wall segments is an authentic,
three-story East German guard
tower.
Chris Wells, as a senior vice
president at the Freedom Forum,
the Newseum’s parent organiza-
tion, traveled t o Berlin in 1993 and
purchased the eight segments for
about $5,000 each (plus ship-
ping). The tower, she said, was a
gift to the Newseum, which in
return donated $15,000 to the
Checkpoint C harlie m useum.
“The wall is the most iconic and
biggest symbol of what a lack of a
free press is and w hy i t’s so critical
to democracy,” Wells said in a 20 14
podcast, noting t hat what was sep-
arating the free media from East
Berlin was the wall.
The Newseum’s current space
on Pennsylvania Avenue was es-
sentially built around t he w all and
the tower, said Sonya Gavankar,
the Freedom Forum’s director of
public relations.
“Half of our visitors are school
kids,” Gavankar said. “So the Ber-
lin Wall and the Cold War are
ancient history to them. What itwas like in the Cold War to be
completely blocked from free
speech — nothing says it better
than those 12-foot concrete piec-
es.”
When the Newseum closes its
doors a t the end o f 2019, G avankar
said, the pieces will go into an
archive facility until a new home
can be found for t hem.Cape Town, South Africa
In 1996, a piece of the Berlin
Wall journeyed to South Africa as
a gift for then-President Nelson
Mandela. To day, it stands in
C ape To wn, outside the Mandela
R hodes Foundation, which pri-
marily serves as a scholarship or-
ganization for A frican students.
The gift came at an important
time for Germany and South Afri-
ca.
“In the early 1990s, both Ger-
many and South Africa began to
disassemble the divides created
during the Cold War and apart-
heid, respectively,” s aid Judy Siku-
za, chief executive of the Mandela
Rhodes Foundation. “The Berlin
Wall physically represented those
barriers and divides. It was a sym-
bol of a lack of freedom and em-
bracing of our common humani-
ty.”
In C ape To wn, s he said, the w all
serves as an inspiring, though om-
inous, r eminder.“Having a piece of the Berlin
Wall outside our offices,” Sikuza
said, “is a symbol both of how far
we have come — of the political
and social freedoms we have
achieved in South Africa — and
the ways in which we continue to
be divided.”Fulton, Mo.
The story of h ow the Berlin Wall
came to Fulton, population
13,000, dates to March 5, 1946,
when British Prime Minister Win-
ston Churchill traveled to Fulton’s
Westminster College to give an
address. He had been persuaded
to do so by a good friend and
Missouri native, President Harry
S. Truman.
There, Churchill delivered
what became known as his famed
“Iron Curtain” s peech, warning of
the looming threat of Soviet ag-
gression.
“From Stettin in the Baltic to
Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron
curtain has descended across the
continent,” Churchill said.
The Berlin Wall came to physi-
cally embody Churchill’s meta-
phor, sealing East Germany off
from the West.
When the wall fell in 1989,
Churchill’s granddaughter Edwi-
na Sandys, an artist, had the idea
to build an installation in Fulton,
which, she said, “seemed to be theperfect place.”
She traveled to Berlin in early
1990 and procured eight sections,
which the Germans gave her, she
suspects, when they realized who
her grandfather was. The pieces
traveled by ship to Long Island,
N.Y., where Sandys carved two
openings in the wall in the shape
of human figures. She titled the
work “Breakthrough.”
“If you’re there, you have to
walk through it,” S andys said, add-
ing that she encourages people to
think of their personal medita-
tions, resolves or prisons before-
hand and then “ break through.”
The wall in Fulton has brought
with it many illustrious guests.
Former Soviet l eader Mikhail Gor-
bachev, former secretary of state
Madeleine Albright, British for-
mer prime minister Margaret
Thatcher and former president
Ronald Reagan have all given ad-
dresses there.
“In a place like Fulton, history
doesn’t seem old. History is alive,”
said Tim Riley, the director and
chief curator at the National
Churchill Museum in Fulton,
where “Breakthrough” s tands. “A s
we commemorate and celebrate
the demise of the barrier, we also
have to remember and educate.
Walls don’t always work. And this
is a prime example.”
[email protected]BY RUBY MELLENWhen the border between East
and West Germany opened on the
night of Nov. 9, 1989, revelers
hacked and chiseled at the Berlin
Wall, which had divided the city
for decades. They were trying to
make way for people to cross over
but also revolting against a struc-
ture that had been a symbol of
oppression and division for de-
cades.
The wall was erected in 1961
t o prevent residents of Soviet-
dominated East Germany from
defecting to the West — as they
had been doing in droves. Once
the concrete barrier was in place,
getting caught trying to cross
without authorization had life-or-
death implications. Between 1961
and 1989, at least 140 people were
killed by the East German police
while trying t o escape.
It took more than a year for the
wall, w hich stretched for about 114
miles, to be completely demol-
ished. Some of the matter was
recycled to build roads, but capi-
talism also caught on quickly, and
the German government began to
look for buyers from all over the
world to purchase and display
parts of t he wall.
Thirty years later, pieces of the
Berlin Wall have journeyed far
outside Germany to six c ontinents
and dozens of countries, where
they now serve as memorials to a
disturbing past and joyous libera-
tion. But regardless of how far
from Germany the wall segments
travel, the message, said curators
and h istorians, always hits close t o
home.
Ein Hod, Israel
For Raya Z ommer-Ta l, bringing
part of the Berlin Wall to Israel
was not an obvious choice. The
director of the Janco Dada Muse-
um outside T el Aviv, Zommer-Ta l
was in Berlin in 1991 when the
director of the Checkpoint Charlie
museum, which commemorates
the famous checkpoint into East
Berlin, asked her a question:
Would she host an exhibition in
Israel on the history of life in East
Berlin? He said they would send
her a piece of the wall to display if
she a greed.
Zommer-Tal hesitated. It w ould
be an atypical exhibition for her
museum, which p rimarily focused
on the Dada art movement — an
absurdist form of expressionism
that rose i n reaction t o the h orrors
of World War I. But, as she pro-
posed to her colleagues back in
Israel, the subject matter had a
connection with the antiwar
i deals of the Dada m ovement.
The exhibition, which opened
in early 1992, took up the entire
museum space, displaying the
work of German artists’ represen-
tations of the wall, as well as ob-
jects and contraptions people liv-
ing in East Berlin used to escape.
Zommer-Tal remembers wheeling
in a car that had a special compart-
ment used to smuggle people into
West Berlin. The show drew so
Four unexpected places where the Berlin Wall still stands
NATIONAL CHURCHILL MUSEUM
“Breakthrough” by Edwina Sandys, made from slabs of the Berlin Wall, stands outside the National Churchill Museum, on the campus of Westminster College in Fulton, Mo.DAN BALILTY/ASSOCIATED PRESS
A piece of the Berlin Wall stands outside the Janco Dada Museum
in the Israeli village of Ein Hod, outside Tel Aviv, in 201 4.FOTO24/GALLO IMAGES/GETTY IMAGESA segment of the wall is installed outside the headquarters of the
Mandela Rhodes Foundation in Cape Town, South Africa, in 201 0.
JONATHAN NEWTON/THE WASHINGTON POST
Washington’s Newseum displays eight segments of the wall, shown
here at the building’s opening in 2 008. It will close later this year.