COVENTRY — It’s a long way from Berlin, but this suburban town has a secret — shards of the infamous Berlin Wall, which the people of East and West Germany started tearing down 20 years ago Monday as the Soviet Union began to unravel.

The mementos belong to John R. Assalone, a former state representative who describes himself as having “compulsive travel disorder.”

Assalone recalled on Friday that he “would drop into Berlin once in a while,” and when he tracked the growing uprising of citizens against the Communist regime in East Germany, he called up his daughter Veronica, then a freshman at Northeastern University. Why didn’t they hop a plane and go see the action, he suggested.

“We arrived in the early hours of Nov. 9,” he said, “so early that we had to wait for a hardware store to open. We bought a hammer, chisel and a couple of heavy cloth bags. We took a taxi to the wall and arrived early enough before all hell broke loose. There was a great buzz in the atmosphere. We were not only amazed at the size of the wall but at what was at that time the ‘killing field.’ If you were able to get over the eastern wall, including the barbed wire, then you would have to clear a shooting gallery which was about 100 yards of open space overlooked by towers with armed guards to the western boundary, and then make it over the western wall. As you might imagine there were not many escapees.”

He described the confusion of the wall’s guards “as thousands of people started coming over, around and through the wall, and things really started to heat up.” He said that, at one point, there seemed to be more police officers than people who were tearing at the wall, “and [the police] were really confused as to what to do. But it was clear that orders were given NOT to shoot. On the western side of the wall there were federal, state and local police. … By the evening, it was one great party.”

Getting their trophies back proved no problem.

“Air travel was simpler then,” Assalone said. “We buried our cloth bags under our seats.”

He arranged for a company in Providence to seal wall fragments in Lucite, and sold them along with letters of authenticity.

He said he and Veronica made about $5,000 from their venture, but Veronica persuaded him to donate the money to McAuley House, a Providence charity.

tmorgan@projo.com