ineer drunk, and raced it across the Spree. When more careful watch was placed on excursion boats, twenty-six East Germans who had managed to embark on a government cruise ship that provided Mediterranean vacations for so-called “deserving workers” and “reliable” intellectuals disembarked at Casablanca, wandered off into the city, and never returned. When, soon afterward, the East German authorities directed that such holiday ships confine their cruises to the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, and Cuba, many East Germans began escaping across the Baltic to Denmark and Sweden in sailboats, folding boats, and row-boats with outboard motors. When, in June, East Germany sealed its hundred-and-ninety-mile Baltic coastline with an immense “control strip,” forty-one young East Germans got themselves appointed to their country’s delegation to the World Youth Festival, held in Finland, and from there departed for the West.
On my last day in Berlin, I paid a visit to the Marienfelde reception center, accompanied by a friend named Max, who is the Berlin correspondent of a West German newspaper. Max had offered to drive me to this now historic way station because I was curious to see it; neither of us expected to run into much activity there. Marienfelde, I found, is a complex of three-story apartment houses, in the southern part of Berlin, which before August 13th sometimes accommodated as many as thirty-three hundred refugees. Now it has hardly any, and more than half of its capacity has been converted into permanent residential quarters. It was mid-afternoon when Max and I arrived, and Marienfelde looked deserted. The only person I saw on the grounds was an elderly man working on the lawn. Inside the Administration Building, we were met by a staff member, who wore shiny black leather gloves over artificial hands (in government offices in Berlin one so frequently encounters employees with artificial limbs that in time one tends not to notice), and he directed us to the room where refugees are—to use the disagreeable but proper term—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 p