WATCH ABOVE: The fall of the Berlin Wall is being remembered by Calgarians like Global News cameraman Mike Hills, along with former east German residents whose lives changed forever. Carolyn Kury de Castillo has more on their stories.
CALGARY- An emotional and monumental celebration in the German capital Sunday night.
There are estimates as many as a million people came out to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a structure that symbolized European divisions during the cold war.
The fall of the Berlin Wall is being remembered by Calgarians who were there during those historic days.
Global News cameraman Mike Hills was one them, along with former east German residents whose lives changed forever.
From her home in Mckenzie Towne, Daniela Hills remembers a childhood in east Germany, of fear and suspicion.
“We always learned about the bad Americans and that the bomb can drop any time. And we even practiced how to hide in the basement and how to shoot. This training for me was terrible horrifying,” Daniela Hills said.
That all seems worlds away now, living in Calgary with her children and her grandson.
But that new life couldn’t of happened without the fall of the Berlin Wall.
“I was young and adventurous and it seemed to be a very exciting time and I wanted to be part of it,” she said.
Global News photographer Mike Hills was a new film school grad from Vancouver in 1989. He had moved to Berlin just before the wall came down, looking for work.
“In Deutschland, people emotionally were out of control,” Mike Hills Said.
“You had families who hadn’t seen other family members may be they had never seen them or they hadn’t seen him for decades and people were coming together and there were tears there was cheering clapping,” Hills said.
“The guards didn’t know what to do. They were thinking of opening fire and shooting them but then it’s like eventually you’re going to run out of ammunition. So they thought no there’s nothing we can do the tide of people was just too great and they open the gates and they let the people through and that was it that was history.”
In the months that followed, Hills worked for a German TV news network capturing images of east Germans hauling back everything from televisions to food.
“Covering stories of people lined up like coming from the east and lining up and grocery stores and gigantic lineups. They would go into a grocery store and clean it out to be cleaned out in a day.”
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But the collapse of the wall also brought challenges to older members of Daniela’s family, as they adjusted to the new capitalist way of life.
“For me it was a really good life. For older people, I have to say for my parents it was not so easy for them to find a job in east Germany. We all had a job, we didn’t need to worry about that’s so we had problems in east Germany but then we had different problems after the wall came down,” Daniela Hills said.
But perhaps the strongest emotion Hills recalls feeling during those historic moments was a sense of relief for not just east Germany but for the world.
“It had a lot to do with the fact that a huge burden was taken off of our shoulders at that moment because I had grown up with the idea of the soviets being the enemy and that one day we were all going to die in an atomic blast and I think people realize that wasn’t going to happen anymore,” Mike Hills said.
The added bonus for Mike Hills, is he met his wife Daniela while recording history in Germany.
They’ve called Calgary home for the past ten years.
“I never would’ve met my lovely wife. I can only be grateful and thankful for all of that.”
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