How the wall still divides one family

Teenia Harmon
11-6-09
2:55 pm
Twenty years after the Berlin Wall came down people are still feeling the effects of the separation. The family of Ursula Schmidt is one of them. In 1973 while she was in West Germany with a travel permit, she arranged for her part of her family to be smuggled over. Because it was so dangerous only her two youngest daughters and her husband could go. She could not arrange for her three sons in their late teens and an older daughter who had children of her own to get across the border. The following year, two of her sons tried to escape, but were captured before making it across the border. They were sent to prison where they were practically brainwashed into thinking their family had abandoned them and broke their trust in their family; but their family was on the other side grieving for them and fearing that they would be tortured. Two years later they were reunited with their family (including the other son who had escaped earlier) after their freedom was bought by the West German government. But their suffering did not end there. All three sons became aggressive alcoholics who distrusted their family and accused them of abandoning them. The oldest daughter that they had to leave behind became a shopaholic and her debt tore her family apart. More than twenty years after the family was reunited and the wall torn down, the Schmidt family is still separated by an invisible and unbreakable divide.
This is such a sad story. Many people in America now probably do not think much about the cold war. Even though we were a major part of it, it did not affect every single pat of life, as it did in Germany. The country was divided and ruled under two very different sets of government, and there were very visible representations of this divide, like the Berlin wall, and it is apparently still effecting people in the country today. The wall was torn down the year I was born, and this family has been emotional separated since before then. Though many of the injuries the country received have healed with time, some it seems may never heal. And I am sure that this is not an isolated case. I cannot imagine how painful it must be for their mother who did the best she could for her family to see the distrust in the eyes of her children.
SOURCE: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/germany/091104/berlin-wall-divided-families?page=0,0