Polish President attends fall of Berlin Wall anniversary events
Polish President Andrzej Duda took part in the events marking the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the German capital on Saturday.
During the main observances, held at the memorial site of German division on Bernauer Strasse, extending along the former Berlin Wall, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and German Chancellor Angela Merkel paid tribute to people who died trying to escape to the West.
Duda said at the ceremony that the day is an ocassion to remember the iron curtain which, in a symbolic way, fell with the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
"Berlin, Europe and the world and were divided into an eastern part and a western part, and we (Poles - PAP) found ourselves as a nation, as a state, behind the Iron Curtain in the Soviet sphere of influence," he said.
After the ceremony, Duda and the presidents of the Visegrad (V4) Group countries - Czech Republic's Milos Zeman, Slovakia's Zuzana Caputova and Hungary's Janos Ader
laid a wreath at the monument commemorating the Visegrad Group countries' merits in overcoming communism. This was followed by talks at the German President's residence in Bellevue Castle.
Later, Duda visited the former Nazi German concentration camp in Sachsenhausen and laid flowers at the memorial plaque devoted to 183 Polish professors from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, southern Poland, and from other Krakow universities, who were arrested and deported in November 1939 to the Sachsenhausen camp, under the so-called Sonderaktion Krakau operation.
