Authors: Paul Dowswell
Voices came over from the Western side. And footsteps. A heated exchange – a man explaining forcibly that the lorry was on the Western side of the border now and they were going to take it further. Then there were other voices. A guard explaining that the drivers had brandished guns and threatened them. That was why they had opened fire from the East, he said.
Even in their dark world Alex could not believe that.
Another voice, he guessed from the East, declared that they had challenged the lorry drivers, when word came through just as they were leaving the checkpoint. The vehicle, they were told, contained contraband.
The Western guard was getting angry. He was a high ranking officer, he explained, and the lorry was now on the Western side. They would search it thoroughly and inform the East German guards if the lorry was carrying anything illegal. Much to Alex’s surprise and relief, the Eastern guards accepted this without another word.
The lorry rocked a little as someone climbed into the cab. The engine started and they drove on for a short while. When they stopped, Frank and Gretchen began calling out for help. It took fifteen minutes for the lorry to be emptied sufficiently for the compartment to be opened. The door slid open and they were confronted by three men peering at them with anxious faces. Although he expected as much, it was a huge relief for Alex to see they were wearing the uniform of the West German Federal Defence Force.
Frank managed a startled grin. ‘
Guten Tag!
’ he said and put out his hand. ‘Thank you for rescuing us.’
Alex staggered out into the cold night air and bright lights that hurt his eyes. They were on the edge of the border crossing – it stretched back to the Eastern side, all flat concrete road, wide open on all sides. Over in the distant Eastern checkpoint buildings there was no one to be seen.
He was drenched in sweat and immediately began to shiver. Four West German guards were walking towards them with two stretchers. The bodies they carried were both covered by blankets. Alex turned his back on his family and was violently sick.
Colonel Theissen had let his routine paperwork slip of late. His department had been deluged with work concerning the forthcoming Olympics and the political reliability of the athletes who would travel to Munich. Theissen was irritated by this. These people had had the best their country could offer. Why would they sacrifice their futures when they stood on the threshold of Olympic triumph? A few of them, especially the younger ones, were exhibiting an aggressive rebelliousness. If there were defections, heads would roll.
After several days of assessing the athletes’ profiles it was with some relief he turned to more mundane matters. Kohl’s latest report was at the top of his pile. As was common practice with Western operations, the report subjects were now identified by codenames:
The operation to infiltrate LATCH, KEY, BOLT and LOCK, into West Berlin, executed in conjunction with CENTRAL EVALUATION AND INFORMATION GROUP and DIRECTORATE XVI, has been successful. It also gave us the opportunity to carry out preventative action in the struggle against anti-State trade in border violators. During operation, on night of 1st/2nd July, two professional human traffickers were liquidated. Previously discharged small arms carefully placed on bodies of ALBERT METZGER and HEINZ AMSEL to back up our defence that our border guards returned fire as self-protection measure.
LATCH ordered to report on weekly basis to Western Sector operative 122.
Theissen smiled to himself. Kohl had done well organising this action in such a short time. He had handled the last-minute change in the operation from counter-subversive surveillance to espionage in a very satisfactory manner. The idea of despatching the human traffickers was his too – a perfect opportunity. Theissen wondered if it was time to reassign Kohl to Western operations. Of course it was. Just as long as they kept him away from the Red Army Faction. He was certainly the right man for this particular endeavour. Theissen picked up his telephone and called Kohl into his office.
The first week passed in a daze. The shooting left Alex in a state of shock and the whole experience of being in the West was completely overwhelming. There was so much to take in. So much that was different.
Most things in the West smelled nice – it was one of the first things Alex noticed. The shops, the clothes, the people. It wasn’t that the East smelled bad. But here, people wore perfume or aftershave, they did their laundry in washing powder that gave a nice scent. Scent was a bourgeois indulgence you didn’t find in East German domestic products.
The authorities took good care of the Ostermanns: within a few days they had moved from a temporary hostel into a first-floor apartment close to Pankstrasse U-Bahn. Alex was astonished to be provided with such a fine new home, and so quickly. This one overlooked recently built government offices and was one of a series of apartment blocks that lined the street. The rooms were huge, with great high ceilings, and Geli and Alex had a bedroom each. Everything about the place was a constant delight. When they first arrived, Geli called to Alex, ‘Come and look at this!’
She beckoned him over to the bathroom and they peered through the door. ‘Hot and cold running water, black and white tiles, a bath AND a shower!’ she exclaimed. It was the height of opulence after a lifetime of bathing in the kitchen using a little tin bath and a rubber hose attached to the sink.
And there was central heating. They had that in schools and offices in the East, but not in people’s homes. You switched it on at a control panel on the wall and a gas boiler fired up and pumped hot water to radiators placed in every room. ‘They tell me it’s no more or less expensive than any other kind of heating,’ said Frank.
‘Imagine that,’ said Alex. ‘Being warm without having to lug coal up six flights of stairs.’
Alex couldn’t believe the shops. The bright lights, the gaudiness, the adverts selling everything from washing powder to luxury motor cars. It was complete sensory overload. In their first week the whole family were taken to the KDW – the biggest and most famous department store in Germany. Here they were reluctantly photographed by the newspapers, keen for a story on the latest escapers from the East enjoying the bountiful fruits of capitalism.
All the goods on display – it was unbelievable. ‘Look at this,’ Alex said aloud in wonder. ‘A whole aisle of fridges and another of washing machines.’
The clothes department astounded them too. ‘You could wear a different skirt or dress for every day of the year,’ said Geli.
‘If you had the money,’ said Frank.
The cheap little supermarket at the end of the street had the kind of goods you’d be lucky to find in the expensive
Delikat
stores in the East. Gretchen came back from there with carrier bags full to bursting. ‘Three different kinds of tomatoes. Five different kinds of apples. Bananas on the shelves every day of the week, for heaven’s sake, rather than once or twice a year.’ She was ecstatic.
It seemed that everything was different. Even the toilet paper. You could get it in white or green or pink or blue, and it was
soft
. The stuff in the East was a uniform dingy brown, looked like it was made from straw and sawdust, and was rough enough to scrape paint from a brick wall.
A few days after their escape Geli and Alex went to a café on Prinzenallee. Sitting in the corner sipping Coca-Cola, the preferred beverage of the Number One Class Enemy, they watched a boy come in and put a song on the jukebox. The chorus went on about school being out completely, or something. They didn’t quite understand the words but it was so loud and ‘negative-decadent’ Alex wanted to grab a guitar and play along with it. And here they were in broad daylight, just a short walk away from the nearest police station, listening to it in public and nobody gave a damn. Even some of the police had
long hair
here! Alex was so happy he could cry. He looked at Geli. She had tears in her eyes too.
Alex asked the boy what the record was. He looked at him as though he was an idiot. ‘Alice Cooper,’ he sneered and walked off muttering about ‘Dumb Ossies’. Alex wondered how the boy had known they were from the East. Maybe it was his prison haircut, which had yet to grow out. He cheered himself up by using all his free change to play the record three times in a row. It was a song they would hear a lot that summer.
The sun was shining brightly so Alex and Geli decided this was the day they would go to look at the Wall. It was a kilometre or two from their apartment and as they approached there was no sense of stepping into a forbidden zone, as there had been in the East. The buildings here were even occupied right to the very edge of the border. Close to the Wall they could see it had been covered from top to bottom, as far as the eye could see, with bold multicoloured graffiti. Oblivious to the stares of passers-by, Geli and Alex burst into hysterical laughter. They really were free.
As they stood there, a summer breeze blew over from the East, carrying a familiar whiff of compressed coal dust and temperamental old boilers. They had never really noticed it when they lived there, but now the smell of it made them both feel a little homesick.
‘I wonder what will happen to our apartment?’ said Geli wistfully.
Alex, with a mixture of regret and sadness, wondered what Sophie was doing. Somewhere over the Wall they could hear the distant chug of a two-stroke Trabi engine.
After a couple of weeks Alex began to have terrible dreams about the escape and the two men he had heard being machine-gunned to death. Whenever he thought of it, a wave of nausea passed through him. And in the early hours, as he tried to block the incident from his mind, his thoughts would turn to Sophie. He had told her they were going. Had she tipped off the Stasi? She couldn’t have, he told himself. Maybe someone else in his family had told a friend? But he couldn’t imagine they had. He reluctantly concluded that it must have been her. Perhaps it was because she was so angry with him when he left. Or perhaps, and this brought a lump to his throat, perhaps she had been reporting on him all along? They seemed to know so much about him – about as much as Sophie herself.
Alex consoled himself by reflecting that at least he wasn’t thinking about this in an East German prison cell. With nothing else to do, this sense of nagging guilt and nebulous anger would have gone round and round, eating away at him. It would have driven him insane. Fortunately, now they were here, there was plenty to take his mind off Sophie. He and Geli had begun to meet kids their own age in the streets and cafés around Pankstrasse. The newspaper stories just after their escape granted them a brief celebrity. But this faded quickly enough. With a growing sense of unease, Alex began to realise they were seen as rather quaint.
Part of the problem, Alex understood, was how little they had in common. Conversations here mystified him, with their references to characters like Asterix and Tintin. They had all read a book called
Lord of the Rings
. He had never heard of it. Nobody knew about his childhood TV heroes, apart from Sandman, and their eyes glazed over when he tried to tell his new acquaintances about them.
Alex and Geli both felt embarrassed about the clothes they had been given when they arrived or hurriedly bought with their refugee grant. Geli, especially, was conscious of the fact that her outfits looked cheap and gaudy compared to the West Berlin girls she was meeting. ‘Everything you wear tells the world how chic or dowdy you are, how rich or poor,’ she complained. In the East everyone wore five-Mark sneakers – they were all the same. Here you had a bewildering array of footwear. She looked at her hair and make-up and knew instinctively she wasn’t getting it right.
And it took a while to get used to people’s manners. In the East you always said
‘Guten Morgen’
and shook hands. Here, people barely looked at you, said ‘Hi’, and gave a little wave. They seemed informal to the point of rudeness. And people seemed so much more forceful. If you were in a restaurant in the East and there were four chairs around a table, then four people sat at that table. In the West, if a fifth person arrived, they would take a chair from another table and squeeze in. Sometimes they would not even ask the waiter if they minded. No one would do such a thing in the East. Behaviour like that would be considered brash and outlandish.
As they grew more confident with their new surroundings, Geli and Alex ventured further afield. In maps back in Treptower, West Berlin had been a white blank. It was fascinating to discover the city on the U-Bahn and S-Bahn, underground and overground. All the trains here were electric or diesel – unlike the chugging steam trains of the east. Everything was so modern.
Some of the U-Bahn trains they took ran part of their journey under East Berlin and through the ghost stations. Alex wondered, as they trundled under Alexanderplatz, when they would pass the exact spot where he and Sophie had sat to eat their sausages and feed the sparrows.
Every day there was something new to get excited about. They enjoyed daydreaming as they ogled the windows of travel agents. Pictures of Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, and the skyscrapers of New York, filled them with a restless desire to travel. ‘We’ll get part-time jobs and in no time we’ll have enough money to get to London,’ Geli assured Alex. ‘Then next year, maybe we can all go to New York!’