rm—processed. To get there, we walked down a hall, which, Max said, had usually been packed tight with refugees in the years before the wall. Now the hall was empty. At the far end, we entered a long, low-ceilinged room, dominated by a large green-topped table, where three officials were sitting. One of them, a slight, elderly man, was glancing through some dossiers. Two refugees, he said, were scheduled to receive their final processing that afternoon, and perhaps two more as well, if they could be found. He explained that the second pair were an old couple; the husband was partly blind and the wife totally blind. They were probably somewhere around the grounds, he added, but apparently they had got lost. I remarked to Max that the official’s concern for the old couple didn’t seem profound. “I know,” Max said. “It is unfortunate. It is not that we have no heart. It is just that we get to the point where we begin to think of a human being as an animal who gets used to everything.” The lost couple, he added, had no doubt been allowed to leave East Germany legally. Since the wall went up, the Red Cross has succeeded in securing official permission for six hundred and twenty East Germans to cross the border. Nearly all have been aged or infirm parents, who wished to be reunited with their children in West Germany. Close to ten thousand other applications for exit permits have been filed with the East German authorities and have been turned down.
The first refugee to be examined, the elderly official said, would be an eighteen-year-old East Berliner who had arrived in West Berlin two days earlier. Presently, he came into the room and sat in a chair at the far end of the table. A well-built youth with a round face, pink cheeks, long, carefully combed blond hair, and long sideburns, he was wearing blue jeans, a striped sports shirt, and black loafers with pointed toes. In response to questions put by the elderly official, he gave his vital statistics, and said that he had no relatives in West Berlin. He said that his parents were still living in East Berlin, that neither of them was a member of the Communist Party, and that he had belonged to none of the Communist youth organizations. After finishing the eighth grade, he was sent to a trade school but soon left to go to work in a steel mill. On his day off, he used to come to West Berlin to earn extra money by working in the wholesale fruit-and-vegetable market. He said that he had tried to keep this activity secret, because it was frowned upon by the East German authorities, who called it Schwarzarbeit (black work). One night a week or two after the wall went up, he was returning home late after celebrating a friend’s birthday. He had drunk too much and was being noisy on the street. Two Vopos stopped him and asked for his identity card, which he gave them. They then searched him and found ten marks in his wallet. They returned the identity card but kept the ten marks. The youth said that this made him angry, and he quarrelled with the Vopos. They arrested him, and the police subsequently found out about his record of “black work.” He said that this was a bad mark against him, and that he was sentenced to a youth prison for an indefinite term. The official asked on what charge he had been tried. “I don’t remember the paragraph of the law,” he replied, “but it was something about acting against the state.” He was released last May, and soon afterward began working out a plan to flee to West Berlin with three friends. They began their escape shortly before ten o’clock on a starless summer night, he said, and planned to cross the border in the vicinity of Teltow. He was not asked to be more explicit. By one o’clock, he said, he and one of his comrades were in West Berlin. The official asked, “What became of the other two?” The youth replied, “I don’t know. I guess they were caught.” The official looked through the youth’s dossier, and then told him that he would be registered the following day as a citizen of West Berlin. The youth rose, thanked the official, and left.
Max shook