Bernauer Street was one of the more famous sections of the Berlin Wall since the structure incorporated many of the buildings into its aspect. So for a time you had people able to escape to the West by jumping through their friend's bedroom windows. Eventually the Stasi (Soviet/East German secret police) got wise to this and bricked up the windows of these buildings with facades that faced Bernauer Strasse. In time they demolished all these buildings to create a wider field of vision that would make it easier to shoot escapees.
The re-united city of Berlin poured a bunch of money into keeping certain sections of the Wall still standing as a memorial to the hundred or so people who perished trying to cross it between 1961 and 1989. Bernauer Strasse is one of the larger pieces of this effort. The Wall itself stands as it did and outlines of original building foundations are tracked in the ground. A continuation of the wall in the form of rusted poles spaced wide enough to pass through picks up where the former concrete leaves off, enabling a fairly decent mental picture of the no-man's land that characterized this ground.
The kids roll around in the former kill zone:
Those who perished trying to cross got their own memorial, with the Wall remnants standing in the background.
Building facades that overlook the open ground have murals and period pictures that make for a running historical commentary on the events of that actual spot.
When we had truly soaked up Bernauer, it was back to the trains. We bought the kids little cars (Jasper's was an East German Police Car "Trabant" and Cody's was a Double Decker bus of the type that prowl the tourist trail between the Brandenburg Gate and the Eastside Wall gallery). Here they are racing them around the S-Bahn window sills.
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