Imagine that your country has been divided and a wall built through your national capital. Armed guards along the entire length of the wall shoot anyone who tries to leave your side of the wall.

When people visit from the other side, you see that they live well. In fact, they are wealthy far beyond what anyone on your side of the wall can imagine. They also live in freedom. They don't have spies and secret police constantly ready to jail anyone who might question the way things are. Your family knows people who have been jailed, and may know someone who could no longer stand it and one day just disappeared. Everyone knows the person tried breaking through to the other side of the wall. Did they succeeed? Or are they dead or imprisoned in a dark cell somewhere. No one knows.

That's what life was like in East Berlin after Communists built the Berlin Wall in 1961. An entire generation was raised in the political repression and economic backwardness behind the wall while on the other side of the wall, Germans lived in freedom and prosperity until November 9, 1989, when people arose and pulled down the wall.

One of the most famous parts of the Berlin Wall was Checkpoint Charlie, a major crossing point for foreigners and residents of West Berlin. It's been recreated in Second Life, with a series of posters giving the history of the partition of Germany that culminated in the building of the Berlin Wall, known as Der Mauer in Germany. Second Life members can  visit it at slurl.com/secondlife/Ciel/82/124/24.  The barbed wire and the dead end road, both frequent sights along the Wall, are reminders that for an entire generation of East Germans, their country was a concentration camp from which there was no escape.