Berlin Wall endures as a symbol of freedom in the USA

Maybe because he came from behind the Iron Curtain, or maybe because he had nothing else to do that Saturday before Memorial Day, Ray Stanjevich decided to attend an auction of an unusual collectible: an 8,000-pound section of the Berlin Wall.
He did not plan to bid on the concrete slab at the sale outside Atlanta last year. Where would he put it? What would he do with it? But he agreed to sign up for an auction paddle. And once bidding began, he joined in. When it was over, he'd bought a large piece of history for $23,500. "I was just gonna watch,'' he says. "Sometimes you get overexcited."
Americans have been excited about the Berlin Wall for a long time. When erected in 1961 to divide democratic West Berlin from communist East, it stood for oppression. After it was brought down in 1989 — 25 years ago this week, amid the crumbling of the Soviet bloc — the wall's meaning reversed. In pieces, it came to represent freedom.
Today, large sections of the 96-mile-long Berlin Wall are on display in scores of places across the USA. They are in seven presidential libraries, a Chicago Transit Authority station and a Las Vegas casino men's room. They're at CIA headquarters, the U.N., and the Hard Rock Cafe Orlando. A slab stands in the shadow of One World Trade Center.
Small pieces of the wall — mounted on wood, suspended in plexiglass, made into jewelry — now gather dust on bureau tops and knickknack shelves; the wall was so massive that smaller pieces are so plentiful as to be almost worthless. A piece the size of a baseball can now be had on eBay for as little as $10. But larger, 12-by-4-foot sections, like Stanjevich's, are more rare.

Ray Stanjevich is a Yugoslavian immigrant who bought a piece of the Berlin Wall and offered to let Gwinnett County, Ga., display it in front of the Gwinnett Justice and Administration Center. (Photo: Michael A. Schwarz for USA WEEKEND)

And wherever there's a piece of the Berlin Wall, there's a story about how it got there. Stanjevich's piece was brought to America in 1991 as an investment, rarely saw the light of day over the next two decades, wound up in the hands of a convicted swindler, and was auctioned to pay his victims.
This particular slab was cast in the 1970s — part of the wall's fourth iteration — and was already getting old by 1989. East German security forces had started work on what they called the "Year 2000'' plan for a new, improved wall. It never got to that. On Nov. 9, 1989, East Germany opened the border, and the wall began to come down in a glorious celebration. Some bits were chipped away by Berliners, and large, L-shaped slabs were hauled away by the government. Soon after, one piece was purchased by four investors from the Atlanta area, including Ray Sigouin and Roy Reaves. They paid $20,000 to a Hamburg firm that had found it in a storage yard. They hired a consultant who vouched for its age. They insured it for $100,000.
The slab's two sides tell the story of Cold War Berlin. The side that had faced west depicts, in vibrant colors, a human figure trying to leap over a graffiti-covered wall toward an American flag. The side that had faced east is virtually blank. (The style of graffiti places this piece in the north-south portion of the wall that divided Berlin, rather than sections that separated West Berlin from other parts of East Germany.) The four Atlanta investors planned to hold onto the wall piece as it appreciated. "They're not building any more Berlin Wall,'' Sigouin reasoned.
The market seemed robust. Chips of the wall were sold as souvenirs, in department stores and on street corners. In New York, two men crying "Fresh wall here!'' set up a booth on Fifth Avenue and in two hours sold $3,000 worth, at prices from $5 to $20.
Over the next decade, aside from a brief exhibition in 1993, the Georgia investors' piece languished in warehouses near Atlanta. Its owners couldn't agree on what to do with it. Reaves wanted to display it in Las Vegas and charge admission. Another investor wanted to sell it in pieces. Some wanted to display it during the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, but even that was vetoed.
In 2008 the investors sold the whole section for $40,000 to a developer who wanted it for a museum in a retail and office complex he was planning. Then the real estate market collapsed, and the wall reverted to the investment adviser who had helped arrange financing for its purchase: Ben DeHaan.
Five years later, DeHaan was convicted of running a $7.3 million Ponzi scheme. A receiver was hired to sell his assets to compensate his victims. The wall piece was the last to go. The receiver hauled it out of the warehouse, put it on display in front of City Hall in Suwannee, Ga., and scheduled an auction for Memorial Day weekend 2013.
Auctioneer Jeb Howell said it was the first time in years that such a large and vividly painted segment of the Berlin Wall had gone to auction. He had no idea what it might be worth.
All of which is how it came to Ray Stanjevich, a 53-year-old restaurateur whose family emigrated to the United States from Yugoslavia in 1971, when he was 10. The Stanjeviches had opposed the Communist Party starting with World War II and "were on the wrong side of politics" in their home country. They first settled in Gary, Ind., where Ray grew up happy, although he struggled with a language barrier at first. In 1989, Ray moved to Georgia. He opened the first of his five bar/restaurants in 2010. He's now divorced, with a 13-year-old daughter who until recently knew little about the Berlin Wall.
So on that Saturday, he was sitting on a bench before the auction, eating ice cream with his girlfriend/business partner, when the auctioneer invited him to participate. "Just here to watch,'' he said. But the auctioneer persisted, and in short order, a man who'd never even owned a souvenir sliver of the wall was holding paddle No. 163.
Some of the investors DeHaan defrauded were on hand. "Bid heavy and often, people,'' urged Bill Frye, who said he'd lost a fifth of his life savings by investing with DeHaan. Stanjevich did both and suddenly owned a piece of history. The piece remained outside Suwannee City Hall until three months ago, when Stanjevich arranged to loan it to Gwinnett County. It sits in front of the county's administration building, north of Atlanta, to be seen by as many people as possible.
"One generation has now lived without seeing (the Berlin Wall) or knowing anything about it,'' Stanjevich says. "If you don't remember history, you're bound to repeat it. We forgot about the Vietnam War and got into Iraq, and you see where that's got us.''
He's struck by the contrast between the slab's two sides: "It shows what freedom is here, vs. what it was in East Germany. ... That, to me, is worth a thousand words.''

From USATODAY.COM