The first time I went to the West was with my son, his wife and my grand daughter. She was still very small but she had to come as well for us to be able to get the money for her. It was on December 14, 1989 that we drove to Sontra; I wrote that in my diary. We got out of our car in Sontra, next to a market, and were immediately approached by Jehovah’s Witnesses who wanted to convert us. Later they also started coming to our village and ringing people’s doorbells.
We mostly bought things for the kids for Christmas, which we usually couldn’t get like sweets and tropical fruits. I didn’t buy anything specifically for myself. At the most I bought baking ingredients like raisins, almonds and coconut flakes, which weren’t available in the GDR. We used them to bake more cookies for Christmas. We also went to Kahl am Main. We were told we would get another 100 DM there but we only got 40 DM.
The way things were priced, that really changed. In the GDR a loaf of bread cost exactly the same in our region as it did at the Baltic Sea. But in the West, a store on one side of the street had a different price from the store on the other side. I would always ask my daughter-in-law: “How much did it cost?” Also the whole thing with the 99-cent prices – that was weird. I wasn’t used to it because our prices were always in round numbers.