The Berlin Wall is long gone. Its notorious prison still stands.

On Feb. 5, 1989, Chris Gueffroy was the last person to be shot dead trying to flee East Germany over the Berlin Wall. And it was to the Keibelstrasse prison, in the shadow of the wall, that his mother, Karin, was summoned two days later “for the clarification of a fact.”

She told a policeman there that her 20-year-old son was “like a wild colt, you can’t hold him back,” she later recalled. The East German policeman told her that Mr. Gueffroy had “committed an assassination attempt on a military officer” and had “died a few hours ago.”

A peek into old East GermanyJailed for opposing the regimeWitness to intimidation and beating