I had a machine pistol and a hundred and twenty bullets. Each of the two men had a revolver. We got close to the first fence. The guard was at the end of the road, and couldn’t see us. We climbed over, and moved slowly toward the post at the second barrier. I told the others to lie down on the earth, and I went forward. The guard at the post asked the password. I repeated it—’Gotha-Gorki’—and approached. I told him that some border violators had been spotted in the area, and ordered him to go make a check on a railroad bridge about sixty metres away. When he was out of sight, I went back to my friends and told them to come with me in a hurry. At this time, a train passed over the bridge, and we profited from the steam and noise to get to the barbed wire. Then I covered my two friends and the girl as they started to climb the fence. A couple of minutes later, I heard footsteps, and two guards came in sight from the direction opposite the bridge. I called out, ‘Stay where you are or I shoot!’ I wasn’t sure what they’d do, so I fired about thirty shots over their heads, and they had to take cover. By then, the girl had climbed over the fence, and so had one of my friends. The other one had got his leg caught in the wire and couldn’t move. I went over, and we all got to work and tore off one of the legs of my friend’s trousers. That set him free. Then we were all safe on West Berlin territory. It hadn’t taken twenty minutes from the time we left the car. My friends were so excited they didn’t realize we were already in West Berlin. I was backing away from the fence, to make sure the guards didn’t get any ideas, and my friends started running. I started running after them. We passed some people, who took one look and screamed. I guess they saw my uniform and gun, and thought I was trying to catch the others and chase them back to East Berlin. I threw away my gun and caught up with the three others. Then we met two policemen, and they called a car, which took us to Marienfelde. That’s all there was to it.”
I asked Rudi about Monika.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I called her the day I got here. She was very surprised. She said she was engaged and was going to be married, so I haven’t seen her.”
As for his relatives, Rudi said that he had not heard from them and did not expect to, but that he had learned in letters from friends that his sisters and their husbands had all been called in and questioned by the S.S.D. Three weeks before he escaped, he said, he had written a letter to each of his sisters in which he expressed a loathing of the capitalist countries and their criminal warmongers and everything else about the West. “This is standard practice,” he explained. “It is to provide some protection for the relatives. With this, they can say, ‘How could I know? This is the last letter I got from him.’ The authorities probably don’t believe the letter. They know why it was written, but at least it keeps them from proving anything. The letter gives the relatives something in black-and-white. The S.S.D. made my sisters and their husbands sign statements swearing they would never communicate with me again. Of course, my uncle denounced me—said I was a traitor and had been recruited by the C.I.A., and all the other usual things—so he has kept his job. I can do without him. Naturally, I hope to see my sisters again. It’s hard to tell when.”
Except for the bloc of defecting Vopos, the East Germans who have escaped since the wall went up are such a varied group that few generalizations about them are valid, though it is safe to say that they are even younger, on the average, than the pre-wall refugees, are much more apt to be artisans than intellectuals, and are, temperamentally, out of the same mold. “Before August 13th, it cost a refugee twenty pfennigs to get to West Berlin. Now it may well cost him his life,” a member of the West Berlin Senate remarked not long ago, and added, “The recent refugees are the kind of people who never stop looking for the chance, and when they see it, they jump.” The necessary post-wall qualifications were exhib