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Show Aims MpMatch mmRsg ort by wor a Hh A Thanksgiving lesson Fifty yards from the border separating East and West Germany, overlooking a steel fence that delineates that border, is a West German observation post called 0. P. Alpha. The border that can be seen from the platform at O P. Alpha is more than a brown, lifeless scar cut through an otherwise lush, beautiful terrain. It is a line that separates the free world from the oppressed. The East German side of the fence is planted with spring guns loaded with dynamite, which are set to go off if anyone tries to climb it. A freshly-plowed freshly-plowed strip of ground parallels the fence so the East Germans, in hourly patrols, can see if anyone has tried to escape. Looking east from the platform of 0. P. Alpha, over the fence, past an East German lookout tower, you can see a lazy little town nestled in the hills of the rolling countryside. And looking down from the platform, when I visited the observation post in the fall of 1979, I saw a hole in the fence. I asked by hosts: What caused the hole? That August, they told me, they saw a young East German boy and an old man presumable his father leave the town and walk up the hill toward the fence. The two approached the fence together. Then the father stopped and the boy walked to the fence alone. He started to climb and was halfway up when the spring gun tripped and the dynamite blasted him to the ground. The father, seeing that his boy was seriously injured and knowing that he couldn't carry him, turned and ran back down the hill, leaving the boy writhing and crying in pain. The West German soldiers told me they could do nothing to help him strict orders designed to avert an international in-ternational incident kept them from ever crossing the fence so they helplessly watched the boy lay there. The East German soldiers, summoned by the blast, also stood and watched, doing nothing. This horrible impasse continued for four solid hours, they said, until the boy bled to death. Only then did an East German armored vehicle rumble out to the fence and scoop up the boy's body like so much trash. My hosts at O P. Alpha showed me where he was buried; there was a small white cross and some freshly-turned dirt near the foot of the East German tower. Hearing this story on the platform of the post's tower, looking out to see the new grave, the hole in the fence and the eerily quiet countryside, I gained a new appreciated of freedom. I saw the difference between free and totalitarian governments, and I saw what the totalitarian countries will do to keep their people from the blessings of freedom that we often take for granted. I resolved then, on the platform plat-form of O P. Alpha, to do everything I could for freedom and to never take it for granted. It is one of the things I am most grateful for on Thanksgiving Day, 1981. |