The first was excavated in 1961, the final one in 1985. No visit to today’s Berlin is complete without walking the ‘Mauerweg,’ which winds its way along the former Wall and indicates via plaques embedded in the ground the points where these tunnels originated and how far they reached into Western soil.

The few who were successful used the most ingenious methods: hiding in the boots of specially rigged cars, flying in hot air balloons, clawing their way through Berlin’s sewers and underground train systems, or laboriously digging tunnels that led from the cellars of East German buildings to those in the West. Its publication is timely, since the notorious ‘Operation Rose’ went into effect exactly 60 years ago on the 13 th of August, when German citizens awoke to a city whose Russian-occupied, Eastern zone was completely sealed off from the Western-American, British, and French-parts of Berlin by a vicious ‘death strip.’ The Wall, a deadly combination of cement fortifications, barbed wire fencing, attack dogs, exploding mines, razor-sharp ground covers, and observation towers occupied by troops with ‘shoot to kill’ orders, the ‘anti-fascist protection barrier’-as the German Democratic Republic termed the structure-stayed in place until 1989, in effect creating two Germanys with separate political identities.ĭuring the ensuing years, nearly two hundred people died attempting to flee from East to West. And awake.The Girl Behind the Wall by Mandy Robotham: A Novel of Divided BerlinĪs a child of divided Berlin, I read Mandy Robotham’s novel, The Girl Behind the Wall (Harper 360, 2021), with great interest. Joss' solitary, secret world is blown wide open and the comfortable numbness she's lived in for the last six years will burn away leaving her aching and afraid. Now a new outbreak is imminent and the Colonists are closing in. A choice that will threaten everything she has. Then one night their paths cross and Joss makes a choice that goes against all of her instincts. As a member of an all male gang, Ryan is a threat as real as the Risen, a threat Joss avoids at all costs.

It's a world dictated by Risen and the looming threat of the Colonists, a group of fellow survivors living comfortably in their compounds and patrolling the wild, looking to 'save' the orphans of the end. A loner living in the post-apocalyptic streets of Seattle. That's the problem with the Risen - they refuse to die. Since Joss watched her parents die at the hands of a nightmare, a nightmare that stalks her even now, all these years later.

It's been nearly a decade since the world ended.

Writing on the Wall by Tracey Ward