I was very doubtful about the rumors we heard in the evening of November 9, 1989 that the Berlin wall had fallen. There was no Internet, of course, so we had to wait for the CBC news to find out for sure. The photo above shows what we saw when we turned on the TV.
For many seconds, we sat dumbstruck. What we were seeing did not compute. 24 hours earlier, a crowd like that on top of the wall would have been cleared with machine guns. More video came in showing the same scene in other parts of the city. One showed a guy riding a bicycle on the top of the wall. Unthinkable. But the world had just changed. We celebrated most of the night. Not because we had won the Cold War, but because it seemed to be over without nuclear incineration.
