Originally Posted by
Nagasaki Joe
My reference to "crossing the border from the Soviet Union to East Berlin" is in reference to Soviet-era trains traveling from Moscow to East Berlin, where Western passengers could get off and catch onward transportation to the West, presumably from West Berlin. I should have been clearer, but I was referring to what a passenger who took the trip once told me about the tensions he experienced at the arrival station, which likely was very different from your experience at Checkpoint Charlie as someone already in Berlin. Anyway, his experience with border tensions was similar to my own traveling from Moscow to Vienna in 1976. After passing through Poland and Czechoslovakia we arrived at the Austrian border where Austrian soldiers with machine guns and military dogs boarded each end of our train car (the only car on the train that held passengers of all nationalities traveling from the Soviet Union). Once we arrived at Vienna Station, the soldiers and dogs descended the train steps and just stood there waiting on the platform, but were close enough to the exit that I thought they might be there to block it, leaving me to wonder if I could get off or not. I was very hesitant as no instructions were given and I didn't want to get shot for getting off the train if I wasn't supposed to. It was very eerie and tense, but eventually, I saw others start to make their way off the train and to the station, so I followed. Anyway, my point was that this was far tenser than anything I ever experienced from Narita Airport security, though the machine gun nest there was certainly a Cold War reminder.
Jackal), and the Japanese Red Army, which had carried out the LOD AIrport massacre in Tel Aviv in 1973 where 26 people were killed, were very real threats at the time. So Narita security did have a serious mission.
In 1986 I took the train from Italy to Czechoslavakia, then to Poland, and had a similar feeling seeing the dogs, wire and guards with guns at the border crossing. Also was in West Berlin and took a special bus to East Berlin to catch a cheap(er) flight to Greece.