How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed

Drakulić recounts her meeting with Ulrike, a 27-year-old who has left East Germany for Iowa and is always “turning her gaze inside to her own past” (33). A mutual friend describes Ulrike’s effort to escape East Germany, and eventual recapture on the Romanian/Yugoslav border. She became so ill in prison she lost all her hair, a fact that helps Drakulić realize “there was no way for her to communicate” the extent of her trauma (34). Ulrike was eventually repatriated to West Berlin, where she worked at a museum that honors those who crossed at Checkpoint Charlie or escaped the GDR. Ulrike eventually fulfilled her lifelong dream of travel, and met an American on a trip to India. She became engaged to him and moved to Iowa. While she does not like Iowa, she enjoys “traveling, being able to travel, this is why I escaped” (34). Drakulić recalls her own trip to Berlin in the summer of 1989, how the city “looked like a cake cut into two parts” by the large whiteness of the Berlin Wall (35).

When the Wall falls, Drakulić remembers Ulrike and wonders if the end of the Wall means she feels liberated, or instead, remains marked, because “the end of the Wall will bring no forgetting?” (37).