A young Ilse Shea thought a lit-up Christmas tree was falling softly from the sky, but her mother knew otherwise in war-torn East Germany.

It was a nighttime target marker a bomber had dropped near the shelter where Shea, her mother and sister were fleeing to.

“It wasn’t a Christmas tree coming down from heaven,” said Shea, now 75. “It fell next to us and my mom was pleading with the warden to find the right key to let us in the shelter.”

Once inside, moments later, an explosion rocked the building. Part of the cellar caved in.

“There was utter darkness,” the Coeur d’Alene woman said. “The heavy dust made it hard to breathe.”

The bunkbeds, where her sister Irma had just been, were buried in rubble.

Shea recalls her mother Grete trying to dig out and, after several hours, voices of rescuers with shovels could be heard on the other end. Shea was the first to exit the cellar when a passage was created because she was the smallest, then others followed.

That was among several harrowing experiences Shea had growing up in what became Communist Germany after World War II.

Today is the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a barrier built starting in 1961 that cut off West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and East Berlin. The fall of the wall paved the way for German reunification.

“This is such an important event in world history and can’t be forgotten,” Shea said. “No one really knows what went on inside (East Germany) — only those who lived it.”

Shea said she never thought she’d see the fall of the Berlin Wall.

“It was wonderful that it came down because it was so sad that a country was broken up,” she said. “Ordinary people had no influence before.”

Shea recalls a time when she and her mom, in search of food to survive, crossed what was called the “black border” forest. They arrived at the forest in the back of a canvas-covered truck bed.

The man who gave them a ride warned, “People get shot all the time trying to get across.”

Shea said her mom didn’t know how long it would take to cross the forest nor if they were even headed in the right direction.

During the trek, they heard dogs searching for people trying to cross and witnessed a woman get shot to death. They woke up to an East German soldier pointing a rifle at them. The soldier, who told the two that nothing would happen to them, instructed them to follow him to an opening when he told them to run.

“We thought that we were going to get a bullet in our back,” Shea said.

Instead, the soldier motioned to the West German border guard about the two and disappeared back into the forest.

“A miracle,” Shea said, describing the moment.

Shea went to a home to ask for food without her mom because her mom said that people would be more likely to help a child who was alone. When Shea told the people that her mom was with her, they gave her two packages of food.

Shea pulled out what she thought was an “orange apple” that she’d never seen. Before Grete could tell her daughter that it was actually an orange and that she needed to peel it, Shea had bitten into it.

Finally, the two arrived at a relative’s house, where they enjoyed food and hot, soapy baths. Shea describes it as “dream heaven.”

Shea was 12 when she and her mother escaped to West Germany for good in frigid temperatures on a train in 1953. She dedicated her book called “Night Before Dawn,” which is available on Amazon.com, to her “courageous” mother. Her father had been killed in action during the war.

Shea recalled she and her mom were starving at the train station when a man gave them money so that they could finally eat. He pointed them toward the refugee center.

For the first time in her life, Shea was on her way to freedom in West Germany, where she finished school and learned her trade as a podiatrist.

Shea said being a part of the Russian occupation before the escape was “living the horrors.”

“The Russians were ruthless,” she said. “They had their Vodka and raped everyone from babies to the oldest women. It was really bad news.”

Shea said she became appreciative of Americans after World War II was over in 1945. She recalls U.S. soldiers giving East German residents chewing gum and being friendly.

“There was hope,” Shea said.

Today, Shea, who became a U.S. citizen in 1980, is proud to be an American.

“I love this country,” she said. “I’m very patriotic and become very protective if anyone says anything bad about it.”

Shea and her husband Michael visited the Berlin Wall in 1989 two weeks before it was destroyed.

“It was gloomy and very dark, and I’m not talking about the weather,” she said.

A platform had been erected for people to view the other side of the wall in East Berlin.

“It was the most sad and depressing view,” she said. “The streets seemed to be empty ... no street lights, no cars, barely anyone walking. One man stood alone, looking in our direction.

“The contrast between both sides was so stark. Lifeless and full of despair on one side, and hustle and bustle, lights, shops and lots of people on the other side. No one said much. Everyone just stared in disbelief. I cried.”

Shea said that she and her husband didn’t know that day that two weeks later Germany would be reunited.

“The wall went right through neighborhoods separating people who had lived next to each other for years,” she said. “Windows of apartment buildings, facing the West side, had to be plastered shut, so that the occupants had no way of looking to the other side. Many people lost their life trying to get across while the wall was still being built.”