Blogs I Follow Part 2

I received an e-mail in response to my last post on Blogs I Follow from my Aunt Elly. She is 100% German and grew up in Germany and then came here....not sure how many years she was there before coming here...guess I should have asked her, LOL
Anyways, I did ask her if I could post her e-mail on my blog and she said yes! so here is her e-mail:

Mel, I read it, and again, how fortunate we are that we live in a country where we can express our opinions so freely, even to a fault sometimes.

when I grew up in West Berlin, shortly after the war, people were regularly kidnapped and taken to the East and it was a very unsettling time, so I can sympathize

And I remember each time we had to travel by car from West Berlin to West Germany,, we had to drive through East Germany, since West Berlin was like an island in the middle of East Germany, and they had specific routes that we were allowed to drive on, and they would check us over and search us and our cars when we drove into East Germany and then we were allowed so much time to make it to the checkpoint at the other end )to make sure we did not stop and maybe talk to people in East Germany or heaven forbid try and meet up with our relatives whom we were not allowed to see since the wall went up,
and people who stopped and maybe gave an east German a pack of cigarettes or something were picked up and thrown in jail for indefinite times, there were no diplomatic relations to help them get out at that time, they also could make us sit there and wait at the check points because they could, I remember one Easter when we drove to visit our family in the West, they made us sit there for 12 hours, no reason, just harassment.
And the Russians would fly their MIG airplanes so low over the city that I could see the
pilot from my window at work at the Chamber of Commerce (I was on the 2nd floor of a 7 story building) and they would commence to break the sound barrier, just because they could, and it goes on and on and on.....

Stories like these amaze me and make me realize how fortunate we are living here in the United States and the freedoms we really do have!
Just wanted to share this with all of you!