My father is from (west) Berlin, Germany, he was 15 years old when the wall started going up. He remembers it very well. My mother, who is from America, would tell us stories about getting stuck at Check Point Charlie for hours and hours for no apparent reason, while trying to visit my dad's family in the east. These photos are ones my father took while we were all on a trip to Germany in 1987, after having moved to the United States 8 years earlier. I was only 6 years old, but remember clearly seeing The Wall, and not understanding at all what it meant. When the The Wall came down, my dad had returned from a vacation to Berlin just a couple of days before. My mom called him at work and told him, and he just couldn't believe it. The idea of The Wall coming down peacefully just was not in the realm of possibility. I thank God that the impossible happened.