A moving company like T-N-T Moving Systems in Charlotte
moves hundreds of couches each year.
They see all kinds of table and chair combinations. They move every size of bed ever made. Owners Todd Koepke and Tom Tulowiecki have
been in the moving business in Charlotte for 18 years, so they have seen it
all. They have moved baby grand pianos,
dressers, beds, and pieces of the Berlin Wall.
Wait… Pieces of the
Berlin Wall?
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| Photo Courtesy of the BBC.CO.UK |
That is right. The
crew at T-N-T Moving systems was called upon to move a household and they were
asked to be very careful with a true piece of history - a chunk of the Berlin
Wall that their client owned. According
to Koepke, this was the strangest thing his company has moved in their 18 years
of business. The piece was a four foot
by four foot display of the Berlin Wall, and the client had it set up in their
living room. The display weighed 600
pounds, and the team at T-N-T Moving Systems carefully moved it from one home
to another. They treated it in the same
careful manner that they treat every item they move for their clients. It was carefully added to the moving truck,
and placed back in display at the new home.
The Berlin Wall was a major symbol of the Cold War,
constructed by East Germany starting in 1961.
After the Soviet Union took over one fourth of German and Berlin, many
citizens fled the Iron Curtain to escape into the west. Many of the East Germans who had been moving
into the west were younger, better educated Germans. There was a mass emigration, and in response
to these moves from east to west, East Germany began to put up the barriers and
the Wall.
The Wall effectively cut West Berlin off from the rest of
East Berlin and East Germany for 28 years.
According to Wikipedia, the Wall began with a simple wire fence, but
between 1965 and 1975 a concrete version was constructed and the end result was
a reinforced concrete wall with pipes, wire meshing, trenches, beds of nails
and watchtowers. It was a formidable
block with only nine border crossings.
The Berlin Wall was designed to keep East Germans from moving to West
Berlin. It split up neighborhoods and
families. Limited in travel, many East
Germans were effectively trapped in their country, unable to move away.
On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall began to fall. Germans from all over the city came to the
wall with sledgehammers to take down large sections of the Wall. Initially, East German soldiers attempted to
repair damage done to the Wall, but soon the holes in the Wall, and the
unauthorized border crossings became so common that the soldiers stopped
enforcing it. This allowed Germans to
move from one side of the border to another, and opened up the eventual
reunification of Germany in 1990. All
Germans were then allowed to move anywhere within the country.
The official destruction of the Wall began on June 13, 1990,
when the East German military began to tear down sections. Most of the Wall was dismantled by 1991,
leaving small sections and a few watchtowers still standing for memorial
purposes. Many people had taken hammers,
chisels and sledgehammers to take chunks and sections of the wall for
souvenirs. There are many sections of
the wall on display around the world, and in the hands of private collectors,
like the one T-N-T Moving Systems was moving.
According to Koepke, the 600 pound piece of the Berlin Wall
was not the heaviest thing they have ever moved, but it was the strangest.
Patrick Jones,
Staff Writer
CCP Web Design
