AFP/Berlin

“It was an immense joy,” says Thekla Koehler, recalling the night 20 years ago that the Berlin Wall, the concrete barrier dividing the city and keeping her apart from her family, was no more.

“I fled from the East to the West through Checkpoint Charlie, hidden in a car, 35 years ago,” the 59-year-old told AFP, one of tens of thousands of people in the German capital celebrating the anniversary yesterday.

“I fled out of love. I met my future husband who lived in West Berlin when he came to visit his family in Dessau (in East Germany),” she recalled, ambling near the Brandenburg Gate with the same man she escaped to marry. “We fell in love and so I prepared my escape all by myself.”

But her euphoria was tempered by the fact that her daring escape from communist East Germany - dozens of others died attempting to do the same, or were imprisoned - meant she could no longer see her family.

For 15 years, her only contact with her brothers and parents on the other side of the Iron Curtain was “a few letters”.

Retired teacher Kristel Ucar, 61, who lived in West Berlin, meanwhile recalled the incredible scenes on the night of November 9, 1989 that would change Germany forever.

“A friend called me and we decided to go with my daughter and her two daughters, who must have been around 10, down to the Reichstag”, the parliament building on the West Berlin side of the Brandenburg Gate, Ucar told AFP. “People lifted them up, so that they could cross the wall. And then we followed.”

Former “Ossi” (“Easterner”) Karl-Heinz Buchholz said he had spent a year in a prison run by the hated East German secret police, the Stasi, and was part of a 30,000-strong demonstration on the night of November 9.

“When we came home, we heard on the radio that the Wall had fallen,” said the retired social worker, 63, sporting a cap in the national colours of black, red and gold, with the crest of the German football federation.

People in the misleadingly named German Democratic Republic (GDR) were also prevented from experiencing with their own eyes the gaping difference in living standards that developed over the decades between East and West.

Buchholz, who was forbidden to hold an ID card or to travel to see his relatives, travelled straight across the border in 1989 and was stunned.

“I went to Lower Saxony (in West Germany). I was shocked because the economic gap was even worse than I had thought, although I knew that in the East, we were really on the brink,” he said.