Slabs Of Berlin Wall At Mountain View Library Tell Story Of Friendship Written In Graffiti
MOUNTAIN VIEW (KPIX) -- A decades-old story of friendship and freedom is written in graffiti on a slab of concrete torn from the Berlin Wall and displayed outside a Mountain View library.
Two large slabs from the wall were donated to the city a couple years ago by Frank and Kunigunde Golzen, a Mountain View couple who bought them shortly after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.
There were graffiti scrawled on one of slabs: the German words "wir liebe dich" (we love you) along with a heart and the name "Polly."
Recently the Mountain View library received an e-mail. Attached was a picture of three men leaning against the Berlin Wall, right next to the very pieces now displayed there.
Librarian Paul Sims was incredulous at first.
"Initially when I started reading the e-mail I thought 'this is wild, this can't be true,'" he told KPIX 5.
Robin Pohle is one of the men in the photo. A friend of his found a picture of the slabs online a couple weeks ago and alerted him to their new location in California.
It turns out the graffiti is his handiwork.
And, although "Polly" wasn't pictured in the photo, she was very much on their minds at the time -- "wir liebe dich" was meant for her.
Pohle, contacted in Germany via Skype, told KPIX that he and his friends still get together -- and they still see Polly when she's in Berlin.
"I was quite astonished, quite amazed and quite pleased that our little graffiti still exists," Pohle said.
Before it was brought down, the concrete portion of the Berlin Wall was 66 miles long. Pieces of it are scattered around the world.