 indignant about injustice and which is not visibly shocked is a shaking Germany.” One expression of indignation, less fleeting than a newspaper story, is the modest memorial erected by anonymous West Berliners to an unknown refugee, who was killed while attempting to swim the Spree. At about five-thirty one evening, I paid a visit to the memorial, which overlooks the river at the place where the slaying occurred. It had begun to drizzle. Only three people were walking along the riverbank, and there was no activity on the river, which was glassy and looked leaden. On the East Berlin side—some hundred and fifty yards away—the warehouses and other buildings lining the bank had apparently been closed for the day, though there was no way of telling, since all of the doors and windows facing the river had been bricked up. The gaps between the structures had been closed to form the familiar, desolate wall. Somewhere along that bank late one afternoon, a man in his early twenties stripped to the waist, tied a small leather pouch around his neck, slipped into the water, and struck out for the western shore He had reached the middle of the river when the Vopos spotted him and opened fire, first with rifles and then with submachine guns. While West Berliners looked on in horror, the swimmer was struck in the head, and sank. His body was recovered by the West Berlin police. His memorial, set in a small flower bed, consists of a cross made of rough wood painted black; attached to the crosspiece is a festoon of barbed wire. Beneath this is a framed photograph of the unknown refugee lying in a coffin and, at the bottom of the photograph, the hand-lettered words “Du könntest unser Bruder sein” (“You might have been our brother”).
In spite of East Germany’s unremitting and increasingly brutal efforts to keep its citizens locked up, some of the more daring—and more desperate—among them have continued to find a way out. There have been relatively few of them, but the wonder is that there have been any. In the twelve months following the erection of the wall, 12,316 East Germans escaped to West Berlin or West Germany. This figure was released on the first anniversary of die Mauer by the West German Refugee Ministry, which, in common with other government departments, in both Bonn and West Berlin, has been extremely reluctant to provide information about refugees—particularly any details concerning the time, place, or means of their escape. Through voluntary censorship, the same policy has been followed by the West Berlin and West German press. The reason for the secrecy is, of course, to avoid jeopardizing the escape of other refugees. While the ban is not applied severely to dramatic escapes that occur in public view or are accomplished in ways that have little chance of being used successfully a second time, the majority of the escapes have been reported in the West Berlin newspapers, if at all, with the utmost brevity. “Within the last twenty-four hours,” a typical item that appeared in October, 1961, read, in full, “some twenty inhabitants of East Berlin succeeded in escaping to West Berlin.”
At least a third of the successful escapes made during the first year of the wall’s existence took place in the first two months or so, when the border situation was confused and relatively fluid. On one day in September, 1961, fifty-three refugees reached West Berlin, six of them by swimming the Havel River. A few nights later, an East Berlin couple also swam the river, pushing in front of them a child’s bathtub containing their three-year-old daughter. For several weeks after the wall went up, quite a few refugees reported that they had been able to cross the border because the Vopos had looked the other way, or had merely fired a warning shot or two in the air, in an effort to avoid drawing suspicion on themselves. In some instances, the Vopos went even further. At a stretch of barbed-wire fence where two Vopos, aged nineteen and eighteen, were on duty, an East German mechanic appealed to the older one for permission to cross the border with hi