John Vyge’s story didn’t start much differently than many others. It finished with history though.In the fall of 1989, after graduating from the University of Toronto, he left his rickshaw company behind to be “just your typical Canadian backpacker.” Vyge’s parents were Dutch but they settled in Stratford, Ont., and he wanted to visit family in Amsterdam.He didn’t know when he left that he’d end up at the top of the Berlin Wall, tearing it down, setting up a shop to sell pieces and working with anti-Communist resistance leader and Checkpoint Charlie Museum founder Rainer Hildebrandt to distribute the largest chunks to museums around the world.After stops in Morocco, France, Switzerland and England, he was in Nerja, Spain when he heard rumoursthat the wall would come down that fall and decided to set out for Berlin, with little money left in his budget.His story now lives on in the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, telling the tale of John “Vyges” (his surname is spelled wrong on the display) of Toronto, falling in love and tearing down the wall with Suzanne Dykes of Melbourne, Australia.It is only partially true.The 23-year-old Vyge and 22-year-old Dykes did meet at the wall, tore pieces of it down to sell to tourists and worked with Hildebrandt to preserve the biggest chunks.But while they grew close, their young love didn’t last past their travels. Before Vyge met Dykes, he arrived at the wall alone and in disbelief. At the time, East Berlin border guards still walked along the wall. To pass, he had to travel through Checkpoint Charlie, purchase a set amount of East German currency (exchange rates were so bad that it was mandatory in order to limit the growing black market), and be interrogated in a room full of tables “like going into old Russia.”Vyge describes East Berlin as “very, very empty” and East Germans as “uncertain about what was about to happen to them ...
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