Other highlights:

* Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner begins a two-day official visit to Japan ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation finance ministers’ meeting in Singapore on Thursday.

* Diversified U.S. manufacturer Tyco International reports third-quarter results. Wall Street expects another drop in profit as the ongoing soft economy saps demand for industrial products.

By Evelyn Selig

I was 10 years old and living with my parents in East Berlin, when on the morning of August 13, 1961 we received news that the border between East and West Berlin was closed. At that time my father was working in West Berlin, in the French Section. (The Berlin we were living in after the war was actually divided into 4 sections - the American, French and British in the West and the Russian Section in the East).

Our lives were changed completely on that day. My father wasn’t able to go to work anymore. We couldn’t travel to West Berlin anymore to visit relatives, go to the movie theatres or go shopping. We felt like prisoners.

My father was a very active member of the Social Democratic Party. Shortly after the Wall was built the party was forbidden in the East and therefore had to go underground. My Father, of course, was very unhappy with the new situation and tried to find a way to get us to West Berlin. At some point he considered perhaps escaping through the sewage system to West Berlin - but my mother refused. It was too scary and unpredictable.

Living in East Berlin as a 4th and 5th grader, I felt like my family was different and that we had a secret life. Most of the kids in my class were members of the communist youth organization ‘Junge Pioniere’, but my father wouldn’t allow me to be a member. It would have become a problem getting older, but not so much at my age.

My father’s party friends in West Berlin arranged for us to get false passports with new identities. On November 27, 1962, we were picked up by a stranger in East Berlin in a VW Beetle car with a CD (Diplomatic Corp) license plate. At this point Diplomats only had to show their passports when crossing over the border. Later, the boarder guards kept track of how many people traveled by the car and how many of them returned.

It was hard for me not being able to say goodbye to my best girlfriend. We said farewell to some close relatives who kept some of our belongings, as we were not able to take anything with us - only double layers of clothing.

As a 10-year-old girl, I didn’t fully understand the danger and the risk we took as a family to escape. I remember sitting in the car while the boarder guard was looking at our passport. I tried to give off the impression of what I thought would be a girl from the West - confident, not afraid and a little bit arrogant. The driver got us safely through Checkpoint Charlie on Friedrichstrasse. It was a very happy moment as you can imagine. I always felt very grateful for our relatively easy and successful escape, especially thinking about all the other people who got caught or killed when trying to cross the border.

Some of our friends in East Berlin had to crawl into a very narrow space between the car’s built-in second floor. A mother with her child tried to escape the same way, but got caught when the child was moving and making noises. From that point on, the border guards used dogs and started to measure the height of a car to catch escaping people.

In 2006, I visited the ‘Museum at Checkpoint Charlie’ in Berlin - a museum about the Wall’s history. My mother and I were very emotional while remembering and feeling the suffering of all the people who tried to escape East Germany, but we also saw the good fortune of many people who made it like our family.

Our new life in West Berlin began, and my Father was able to work at the same company he worked for before the Wall was built. I appreciated that in the West, I could say whatever I wanted. In East Berlin my parents told me what things I should not tell anybody, like our political opinions, the fact that we were reading West Newspapers and watching West TV. In other words, all things that people in East Germany were not allowed to do.

It wasn’t until the amnesty in 1968 for all people who escaped that we were finally allowed to travel through East Germany and visit our relatives. After 1968, we were able to get a day visa and visit East Berlin. The border crossing was always a very unpleasant and uncomfortable experience. There was always the feeling that suddenly everything could change and we would be taken away. East Berlin always felt very grey and joyless to me, and people were very reserved and didn’t look healthy.

My father couldn’t imagine that the Wall might fall one day, but it happened overnight on November 9, 1989 - just like it was built, overnight.

At that point I lived in West Berlin and getting the news of the open border and people simply walking into the West, it blew my mind. It was a miracle! Soon after I felt there must be God. (I was an atheist up to this point in my life). I felt this change was not man-made!

Later I understood that if people are clear about what’s wrong, they are able to do the right thing. People have to know that they are not powerless. Everybody (all at once) walked to the West and nobody could keep them back!

Other highlights:

* Three days after unveiling its $26 billion buyout of Burlington Northern Santa Fe, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway reports results.

* AIG, the bailed out insurer, is expected to post its second-straight quarterly profit, helped once more by improvement in asset values.

*Chain stores ranging from J.C. Penney to Target to Gap report their October monthly sales results.

*Starbucks reports fiscal fourth quarter results. After months of slashing costs and closing stores, the coffee chain’s turnaround appears to be at hand.

*On the economic front, more strength is forecast for productivity in the third quarter, with the Labor Department scheduled to issue preliminary nonfarm productivity and costs data at 8:30 a.m. EST.

Also in the driver’s seat is Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne, who is expected to spell out plans for reviving the flat-lining automaker.

Other highlights:

* Cisco Systems leads the earnings parade with quarterly numbers that may reflect a recovery in tech spending. Comcast, Qualcomm and News Corp are also on the docket.

* Data highlights include the ISM’s non-manufacturing numbers and readings on the employment picture from Challenger and ADP.

* Reuters is also hosting an Auto Summit in Detroit and Paris. The day’s speakers include Ford President of the Americas Mark Fields; AutoNation CEO Mike Jackson; CAW President Ken Lewenza, Robert Bosch CEO Peter Marks; Honda Motor Senior Vice President John Mendel and DBT President Herve Borgoltz.

The deal, Buffett’s biggest-ever acquisition, is priced at a premium of 31.5 percent over BNSF’s closing stock price on Monday and values the railroad at $34 billion.

What has been the reaction on the Web? To start, Twitter is rife with Buffett back-slapping and sounds of trains chugging along to profit. “Rumor has it he’s going to set it up in his basement so he can play “choo choo” with the grandkids,” tweets Kathy_L.

Looking beyond Buffet high-fives, Joe Weisenthal at the The Business Insider sees Buffett’s move as a bet on continued U.S. infrastructure spending.  “Buffett — who has the ear of the President — is guessing, safely, that we haven’t seen the end of that (infrastructure stimulus) dream, that Obama will open up the government’s coffers for a major upgrade of the rail system,” he writes.

Is Burlington Northern a proxy for the U.S. economy? asks the WSJ’s Deal Journal. The deal certainly is big, as is the scale of the company.

Burlington Northern could also be a bet on rising fuel costs coupled with Chinese demand for U.S. coal, writes Frank Ahrens, at The Washington Post. Ahrens also points out the interesting theory that Buffett invests like an 8-year-old child. He owns candy, ice cream, pop and chewing gum businesses. “Buffett likes to own simple companies that he understands. Today, he completed his train set,” writes Ahrens.

But danieldone’s tweet seems to sum up the mood of the day: “Buffett is my hero.”

What’s your take on Buffett’s biggest-ever acquisition?

*  Results from Kraft will go a long way to answering the big question investors have regarding its offer to buy British chocolatier Cadbury: will it raise its bid, and if so, by how much?

*  Major automakers release sales results for October. Analysts and executives say industry-wide sales are tracking to hit their highest rate of the year — apart from July and August when results were turbocharged by the U.S. government’s Cash for Clunkers program.

*  At the second day of the Reuters Autos Summit being held in Detroit and Paris we speak with United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger and Daimler AG Head of Trucks Division Andreas Renschler.