Chris Gueffroy lived his entire 20 years trapped behind the Berlin Wall, unable to reach freedom just on the other side. The imposing structure ran nearly 100 miles, stood 12 feet high in most places, and had 300 watchtowers manned by armed guards. It divided the city into two vastly different worlds: democratic West Berlin and, where Gueffroy lived, Communist East Berlin, controlled by the Soviet Union.
For most of the 1.3 million East Berliners, it was illegal to cross the wall. Attempting to do so could get you thrown in prison—or worse. But Gueffroy, four months shy of his 21st birthday, wanted to see the world. Close to midnight on February 5, 1989, he and a friend, Christian Gaudian, tried to scale the wall. That’s when the guards, with orders to shoot to kill, raised their automatic rifles and took aim.
Today, 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gueffroy’s story and the stories of hundreds of others like him reflect the desperate acts people undertook to flee the
“Human beings have a basic desire for a measure of freedom, to move around, to do things, to think and create,” says historian Frederick Taylor, author of The Berlin Wall. “And I think you can’t, in the end, suppress it.”