Even as a child, I was in love with history – the kind of kid who kept better track of historical dates than baseball stats. That was what drove me into journalism, where you can have a front seat at watching history unfold. And nowhere did I feel that more than being in Germany in 1989 as the Berlin Wall fell, signaling that the Cold War was ending.

As a reporter, of course, you’re supposed to remain objective – interviewing people, collecting facts, and using them to form a story without getting emotionally involved.

But in Berlin, which had gone through such a tumultuous century, I was overwhelmed. Tears came to my eyes as I watched East Germans crossing the border with such joy in their faces. In East Berlin, I flashed a peace symbol at the stern-looking guards at the Russian Embassy. “Mir i druzhba,” I said. And then they smiled and flashed a peace symbol at me. “Peace and friendship,” they said – the English translation of what I’d just said in Russian.

Walking alone in a wooded park in West Berlin one night, I saw that somebody had left a ladder propped up against the Wall. I climbed up and peered over the top to watch the machinegun-toting East German soldiers patrolling the other side. After a couple minutes, I felt somebody pulling at my leg. At first I worried that it was a cop and I was violating some kind of law, but then I saw it was simply a middle-aged man with a hammer in his hand, hoping to chip off a bit of the Wall. “Can I get up there?” he asked in German. “I’m from the East, and I’ve been waiting my whole life to do this.”

It was such a unique and hopeful time, in which the entire world seemed to be changing for the better. There have been plenty of darker times since then, of course, and I’ve had a front seat to some of those too, whether in the Yugoslav war in the 1990s or the Middle East after 9/11. And after being based in Central Europe for several years, I’m particularly concerned about what’s happening in Ukraine right now.

But I still think back to those glorious days of 1989, when rays of light shone through after years of darkness, and I hope that eventually we’ll be able to find our own version of the fall of the Wall.