## What the Children Said About Freedom
One of the most cited elements of Halvorsen’s account of the fence encounter is the children’s statement about freedom. In his telling, they told him that freedom was worth protecting, that if they lost it they would never get it back, and that he should not give up on them. This statement, attributed to a group of approximately thirty children in a brief encounter at a barbed-wire fence, has been repeated in commemorative contexts so frequently that it has taken on the quality of a text.
It is worth being careful about this. Halvorsen’s recollections of what the children said are what he remembered, written down and recorded starting in the years after the event and repeated in many subsequent interviews. The children were speaking through the wire, some in English, some through interpreters, and the exchange lasted a relatively brief time. The philosophical clarity of “freedom is worth protecting” in his later account may reflect both what was actually said and how those words settled in his memory over decades.
This is not a reason to dismiss the statement. Children in West Berlin in 1948 were growing up in a city where the question of freedom was not abstract. Their parents discussed it at home. Their teachers may have addressed it. The newspapers, the radio, the gathered political meetings — all of this was happening in their city, in a context where the word “freedom” had specific and contested meaning. Children absorb this. It is not surprising that a child at the fence would articulate something in those terms.