Full Thread: White people
View Single Post
Old January 15th, 2011 #16
Bernie
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: Australia
Posts: 1,302
Default

I was in Berlin on Holiday with my wife one Sunday just after the fall of the Wall. We are Australian citizens but I was born in Germany and my Wife is English.

Berlin is a large city and with our Opel hire car we spent much of the day driving around it fascinated by the contrast between the affluent western half and the stuck in a time warp of the east.

Near the end of the day I realized we were lost and the only hotel rooms were back in West Germany, all Berlin Hotels had signs saying 'No Vacancy'. To get back to the West is about a 3 hour drive, so at 8 pm I am hopelessly lost and just wanted to get out and into a hotel.

On a street corner I saw some young German guys hanging around with their cars and went over to them for help. It turned out the boys were skinhead types. I speak reasonable German and asked for help. They were extremely helpful, especially after I told them where we came from.

One of the boys had a huge old American car which was very much out of place in Berlin. He offered to lead us out of the city to Potsdam and refused my offer of money for his trouble.

By midnight, following a harrowing drive in teeming rain on the crumbling East German Autobahn back to the West, my wife still fast asleep, I take an OFF ramp and find a Police Station in a small West German village. There is a light on over a sign on a small shuttered window. I ring a bell and presently it is opened revealing the iron bars behind.

A forty something policeman sits behind the window, a revolver visible in his right hand casually placed on the window sill in a non-threatening way. I tell him where we're from, that we haven't had a decent night's sleep for two days and could he point me at a hotel, especially one which serves beer.I added that I was as thirsty as buggery and jokingly said that 'a man is not a Camel'.

He then invites me to come into the Police Station. I enter and quickly see he is the sole occupant of the smallish building. He invites me to take a seat and as he sits on the other side of the desk I notice he no longer has the gun in his hand, it now lies squarely on his side of the desk between us.

After I showed him my passport and told him before our family emigrated to Australia many years earlier, that I actually went to school up to grade three in a village not more the 20 Kilometres distant. Oddly, he then asks me how much would I be willing to pay for a nights accommodation. Momentarily thinking this was an odd question, I jokingly replied that I'd pay $1,000 Marks for a good nights' sleep.

He said this won't be necessary and booked us into a good Hotel by phone. It was now near 1Am and I was concerned about finding this Hotel. I needed not to have worried as this gentleman said in his quietly efficient way, 'I have a police car outside, its driver will lead you to your hotel, I trust you and your wife will have a good nights rest and you enjoy the rest of your stay in your birthplace'.

I could not have wished for a more obliging and thoroughly decent White man to help me. As I got back to the car my Wife was by now awake, I told her what was happening and in minutes we were in a fine hotel. In our room was an ice bucket containing a nicely chilled bottle of Heineken Beer and a special Heineken Beer, 'Stein', (glass) which the Hotel Manageress later told me was ordered for me by the Police who asked them not to charge me for it.

They didn't.

That man, in my opinion is an ornament to the German Police, their Tourist Industry should give him a medal.