TRIBUTE ABDUL - Perdana Library

FRANK SULLIVAN
The flags and banners were out in the deserted Karl Marx Platz, but
there were very few anywhere else; the propaganda posters of Soviet
and East German leaders were out too, but not very many of them.
Half-hearted, grim, dour, it was a city of the Might-Have-Been, a
city with a kiss of death. The only inspiring and beautiful scene in
all this vast disappointment was the mass cemetery in honour of
5,000 Russian war dead!
Tt was a relief to return to West Berlin, and coming back the
shock of contrast was even more striking. I saw four children
playing ball on the footpath, and suddenly I realised what I had
missed. In the whole of East Berlin I recalled only three children,
two watching bears at the entrance to the Zoo, and one boy playing
alone in the rubble. That solitary boy seemed to me now a symbol
of a city without hope.
There is no greater argument in all the world against the false
promises and unfulfilled ideas of Communism than the city of East
Berlin. In Berlin the ideals of the free world and the ideology of
Communism live side by side. Both beliefs have had equal opportunity
to express themselves in more or less peaceful co-existence
during the fifteen years since the ending of the war. Berlin is the
object lesson, the example and the answer. Tn the Eastern sector
the heart sags with despair, for this is the result when man exists for
the State. In the Western sector the heart soars with hope, for this
is the achievement when the State exists for man. If any member of
the Malayan party ever had small shadows of doubt about his views
on Democracy viz-a-viz his views on Communism, then the shock of
East Berlin strangled that doubt once and for all.
Now we knew why the Freedom Bell rings out daily in West
Berlin, but soon we were to have even more positive and personal
proof. The Prime Minister and his party visited the refugee camp
at Marienfelde in West Berlin, and had the privilege of sitting in on
an interrogation of a farmer and his wife from East Germany seeking
refuge in the West. There are twelve Refugee Commissions in
West Berlin, each Commission consisting of three refugees from
East Germany. It is their task to ensure that all the hundreds of
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