Experiencing the rise, fall

Riding in the back seat of a Volkswagen with Czechoslovakian license plates through the concrete traffic barriers that surrounded Checkpoint Charlie, Newport Beach resident David Henley tried not to think about what might happen if the East Berlin Border guards found the 10-year-old girl hiding under piles of blankets and a spare tire in the back of the car.

Henley and two of his friends had conspired to smuggle the child out of Berlin to reunite her with their parents in democratic West Germany. If all went as planned, they would return to East Berlin for the girl’s 8-year-old brother the next night.

“I was petrified doing this,” Henley said. “I had never done anything like this in my life before.”

Monday will mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Henley, 73, who has lived in Newport Beach for more than 30 years, was in Berlin when the wall was erected, dividing the democratic West Germany and communist East Germany.

“It was a terrible time,” Henley said. “In East Germany, food was rationed, clothes were rationed. There was no free press, no freedom of religion. Every bit of their lives was regulated.”

It was 1961 when Henley and his friends attempted to smuggle the two children out of East Germany to their parents, just a few months after the East German Army closed the border between East and West Germany to stop East Germans from fleeing to the democratic West.

At first, a wire fence was erected, splitting the city in two. Eventually, East German troops and workers erected an 87-mile-long concrete retaining wall known as the Berlin Wall.

East German troops sealed the border with no warning at midnight on August 13, 1961.

Families were split up when the border was closed, like the two children Henley and his friends attempted to reunite with their parents.

The children’s parents were East German schoolteachers who had managed to escape to the West a week earlier using falsified documents. The children had stayed behind with their grandparents, who were too afraid to try to leave East Germany.

“You would see people standing on ladders, or standing on the tops of their cars, looking over the wall with signs that would say things like ‘Baby Erika is OK,’ ” Henley said. “Families were torn apart.”

Henley was in Berlin working as a foreign correspondent for Hearst Newspapers, writing dispatches from the front lines of the Cold War on a portable typewriter that were sent out to newspapers across the United States via transatlantic cable.

Henley’s friend, a Turkish refugee and scholar named Constantine, was driving the Volkswagen that night as they approached the East German border guards with the 10-year-old hidden in the back of the car.

The threesome took Constantine’s car because his Czech license plates gave the border guards the impression he was a communist supporter.

Henley was along for the ride because he had a foreign press pass, allowing him to cross easily between the East and West Berlin. The border guards rarely searched foreign journalists.

Henley sat with a U.S. Army sergeant named Al in the back seat of the car that night.

Constantine had doused Al with half a bottle of wine before they approached Checkpoint Charlie, so he would reek of alcohol when the border guards looked into the car.

One guard who recognized Constantine leaned in the window of the Volkswagen when the group arrived at the border checkpoint.

“I see you are back here again. Who are your friends?” the border guard said to Constantine.

On cue, Al got out of the car and tossed his arm around the guard, acting as if he were drunk.

“Hey, my friend, how about a drink,” Al slurred.

It was Henley’s job to act like he was trying to persuade drunken Al to get back in the car.

“Go home,” the guard said. “Get the hell out of here before we arrest you as a public nuisance.”

The three men safely delivered the girl to her parents, who were staying with friends at an apartment in the British sector of the city. They repeated the same ruse the next night, smuggling the girl’s 8-year-old brother into West Germany.

Henley worked as a foreign correspondent for six or seven years, for both Hearst Newspapers and Ridder Publications. He and his wife, Ludi, have been married for more than 40 years. The couple have three children and three grandchildren.

Henley has been a trustee at Chapman University for the past 18 years. He will give a talk at Chapman on Tuesday about his experiences in Berlin during a special ceremony to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall.

“What the wall showed people is that communism failed,” Henley said. “It just didn’t work.”

If You Go

What: Ceremony to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall

When: 4:30 p.m. Tuesday

Where: Liberty Plaza at Chapman University, 1 University Drive, Orange.

Topic: Newport Beach resident David Henley will give a talk about his experiences working as a foreign correspondent in Berlin during the Cold War.