TELLURIDE – Bärbel Hacke has instant radar when it comes to detecting East Germans.

“Do you know that we were on the moon?” she asks her fellow “Ossis” (as distinguished from their “Wessi” compatriots born on the other side of the Berlin Wall, which for nearly three decades symbolized the harsh realities of life for residents of Eastern Bloc countries who were trapped behind the Iron Curtain).

“In a way, we’re from another planet,” says Hacke, who, upon seeing an orange at age 7, after her family’s carefully planned escape to the West, asked wonderingly: “‘What is that orange ball?’

“There was no tropical fruit in East Germany,” she explains.

When the family of four fled the Communist-occupied part of their homeland in 1958, three years before the wall was erected, even making the two-hour trip from their hometown, Naumburg, to East Berlin meant navigating a minefield of bureaucracy and menace.

To hide the fact that the whole family was leaving, Hacke’s mother and 13-year-old brother, Pit, went first, with papers confirming their invitations to an East Berlin meeting of the Pioneer youth group, of which Pit was a member.

Hacke, 7, followed with her father later that day. “He told me we were going to an equestrian show,” she remembers, and had documents to that effect obtained from “a friend who was an agriculture official.”

In reality, they had become refugees, who left their homeland with “of course, only what we were wearing.”

Today, Hacke, who moved to Telluride in 1983, mourns the depths of her parents’ sacrifice.

“How could they leave their parents? Their siblings? Their friends and possessions?” she asks. She knows the answer, of course: “To give my brother and me life in a free country.”

Hacke’s father died three weeks before the wall came down; on her last visit, Hacke says, she told him the wall was coming down.

“‘The Russians won’t allow it,’” he told her, confidently.

At home in Telluride when the wall finally fell, Hacke says: “It was the loneliest day of my life. Everyone was so euphoric.

“I was not euphoric. No-one understood what I was going through.”
But even Hacke was unaware, at the time, of the scope of her feelings.

“I used to be upset,” she says today, “by these people who went to war, but never talk about it.” Today, she realizes, that’s just how she and her family coped with the loss of their home, friends and family.

“All these years, we never talked about it. I never talked to my brother,” who today is a railroad engineer in West Germany. “For me, to move was an adventure,” says Hacke, who remembers moving 12 times in as many years. “For my brother, it was totally different.

After they fled, “We had to be in a refugee camp until my parents got cleared,” she says. How long were they there?

“A couple of weeks? I have not anymore the recollection,” says Hacke, whose perfect-pitch English falters slightly as she digs deep for the memories.

For an Ossi, Hacke says, the wall has not come down. “The wall between the people will last for another 30 years,” she says. “The wall is still there, between East and West.

“‘When the cage is opened after 30 years, you cannot fly anymore,’” she says, referring to a key scene in Margarthe von Trotta’s 1995 film, The Promise, tracing the history of the division of Germany through one couple’s story.

Hacke has been facing down childhood memories this last month, getting ready for her Monday night presentation (and personal first-time viewing, as well) of Leipzig in the Fall, a documentary film about the 1989 Leipzig uprising against the Soviet occupation (“the birth of the peaceful revolution,” as she calls it) that jump-started the historic Nov. 9, 1989 dismantling of the Berlin Wall.

A precious piece of that wall – a benign-looking chunk of gray cement, with pastel graffiti – is just one of the props for Hacke’s upcoming Nov. 9 night talk at Wilkinson Library.

“Berlin was always for me a nightmare,” says Hacke, who has not returned to that city since she left Germany for good in 1983, remembering meetings with relatives who would not talk to her.

Years later, she would understand – her uncle, a police officer, knew he was wired; a longtime family friend was allowed to see but not speak to her.

A map will be another prop at Hacke’s Monday night talk, “to show how Germany was divided.

“Berlin is an island,” Hacke says, remembering the sadness she felt upon passing East German city exits on the autobahn from West Germany to East Berlin that were closed to Westerners.

And so, today, upon meeting fellow East Germans for whom the wall will never cease to be a reality – Hacke makes a point of saying: “‘Did you know that we were on the moon?’ and we hug each other and cry,” and shout their rallying cry of “Ossis! Freundschaft!

“‘Can you believe that we are meeting?” she will ask them.

“In America?”

Hacke speaks Monday, Nov. 9, at 6 p.m. in the Wilkinson Library program room; after which the 50-minute film Leipzig in the Fall will be shown. On Thursday, Nov. 12, Hacke has arranged for a free screening of the film Lives of Others that debuted in 2006 at the Telluride Film Festival, featuring “the extraordinary Ulrich Muehe,” who grew up one town away from her family, and who died last year, in the role of a disenchanted Stasi wiretapper. Sony Pictures has donated the free screening of the film on Thursday, Nov. 12, at 8:30 p.m., at the Nugget.