From the end of the summer there was a wave of fear, said Petra Rochner, a high school teacher, providing a personal account of what it was like living in East Germany in 1989. It was forbidden for teachers to participate in the Montags-Demonstrations. I had two small children and I was afraid. I was concerned about my husband. There was talk that the army may fire upon the crowd, she told me in Athens at a ceremony marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Rochner was afraid the Soviet Union would do what it had done in 1953 in Berlin or 1968 in the Czech Republic. Rochner graduated in Leipzig in 1984 and the state found her a job working as a teacher at a high school in a village near the city of Oschatz, 180 kilometers from Berlin. She was 25 years old in 1989. We heard about the Panzers (German tanks) and thought the same thing would happen, she said. But it didn’t. On 9 November, 1989, East Germans took to the streets and tore down the Berlin Wall and the regime that backed it without a single shot being fired. We were listening to the radio and we couldn’t believe it! The next day it was confirmed I couldn’t hold back my tears. My kids two and four years old - were playing on the carpet and looked at me confused. ‘Why are you crying mommy,’ they asked. And I said: ‘Nothing, keep playing.’ On the other side of the wall, Eberhard Blanz, a teacher from West Germany, who was 34 years old at the time and now a colleague of Rochner at Ellinogermaniki Agogi in Athens, felt the same way. I was at a conference in Freiburg and called my wife and asked her: ‘Is it true?’ Germany’s ambassador in Athens, Wolfgang Schultheiss, was also surprised. I was in Bonn at this time. It was extremely emotional. Nobody had thought about it, expected it really despite the preceding events. You had this wave of refugees to the Eastern European countries and then they came back and then the Hungarians opened their border to Austria and then they could go via Hungary to Germany. But that the wall would fall down, nobody really expected it at least not me, Schultheiss told me. It might have been even a small error in reading the news by Mr. (Politburo member Günter) Schabowski. At least the guards did not know what the matter was. And people said: ‘What? Schabowski, the secretary responsible for the press, has said the wall is open.’ There was confusion and the crowd demanded to let them through the gates. So it became that the borders guards said: ‘Well…’ They did not act, he said. Asked if the fact that Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet president, had failed to persuade Erich Honecker, the GDR leader, to carry reforms was any indication that the wall would fall down, Ambassador Schultheiss said: Looking back - yes. But we had been living 40 years in a divided Germany so it did not look like it. Even for young people, who did not experience living in a divided Germany, November 9, 1989, is a moment of pride. For Jessy, a feisty 22-year-old woman born in a West German town and working for the past year in Greece, visiting the wall was a powerful moment. Not much of the wall is left, little bits covered by graffiti. I was a baby in 1989, she told me. I went to Berlin Wall years later, touched it. I felt really emotional.