Jim and John and a piece of infamy

So how come, on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Kilcullen has a very direct connection?



Well, local man Jim Collins was there when it started to come down. And he brought home a bit of what had imprisoned many thousands of Berliners for decades as his only hold luggage on the plane. Wrapped in cardboard and brown paper.

"I told the people at the check-in to be careful with it, saying what it was," he recalled last week. "And then I was afraid that I'd told them too much, and it would disappear as something of historic value."

History records that it didn't disappear. And during the current celebrations and media rememberances of the occasion he recalls how his own place in this particular part of Cold War history came about.

"I was in Cologne at a trade fair with my brother John, and things there suddenly got very quiet," he says. "We wondered why, and then somebody said that the Berlin Wall was coming down. So we rang a German friend of ours in Cologne and persuaded him to drive us to Berlin."

When they got there, the first exuberances of the breaching of the wall were still in evidence. In fact, they were greeted by the recently elected boss of the zone as 'newsmen from the west', a description the two Irishmen neglected to deny. But it wasn't an easy situation.

"We weren't sure what the official status was. I remember standing in a gap in the wall, looking across at some guards with rather grim faces. I stood there, then put a foot across into the East German territory. They burst into laughter, and then indicated to me to make up my mind, was I going to chance it or not?"

Sometime later, Jim and John hacked out a piece of the wall, the result being the souvenir that Jim brought home to Kilcullen. "I remember being really worried that somebody might take a potshot at us as we did it."

The following day they went to visit a church in the East Zone where services of celebration were being held. "I had a bad feeling about that place too, that it might not have been a good location to be in if everything suddenly went wrong. But nothing happened."

The German friend who drove them to Berlin that night has since died. But he'd had his own interesting career during WW2, surviving in a Panzer tank division in the North Africa campaign, and subsequently spending three years in a POW camp in Kentucky USA.

"He said he spent a lot of his time picking cotton," Jim remembers. "I asked him once what he missed most as a POW. His answer was one word. Women."

Meantime, two decades on, Jim agrees that having his fairly substantial bit of the old Berlin Wall is like 'having a bit of rock from the moon'.

"I haven't been able to go to the moon, yet," he says. But you get the real feeling that, even now in his 70s, he hasn't ruled it out.

Brian Byrne.

This story appeared on the Kilcullen Page of last week's Kildare Nationalist.