Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [93]
She takes a deep breath and sits up straight. ‘I did used to listen to RIAS, western radio. It was illegal, but everyone did it. It was important to me to get news from outside. And, in the end, it was RIAS that saved me.’
Frau Paul and her husband, a boat builder, began to look for ways to be with their son. In 1961 and 1962 countless small communities of interest were forming in East Germany; people united by nothing more than a tenuous acquaintance and a desire to get out. A Dr Hinze and his wife lived in the town of Rathenow in Brandenburg, and they wanted to join their son Michael in the west. Michael Hinze had been studying sociology at the Free University when the Wall went up, and he’d decided to stay. Dr Hinze had spoken a few times with Frau Paul’s husband about building a yacht and sailing around the world. Clearly, that was not going to happen now, but it meant he knew of their plight. And his son Michael, along with some other young western students, was involved in a scheme to get people out.
Michael Hinze lives in West Germany, where I called him up. He’s softly spoken and humble. He doesn’t speak of what he did as if it were risking his own freedom to free others. He doesn’t even sound like a modest man uncomfortable with suggestions of heroism. His tone is more that of someone recalling how he once, step by step, and in the usual manner, repaired his car. ‘In 1961,’ he says, ‘I was twenty-three years old, inexperienced in these things.’ After the Wall went up Michael contacted a human rights group in West Berlin. ‘Someone there told me about a way to get people out.’
When the Wall was built, the GDR tried to block every avenue of escape. It altered bus routes, prevented its trains from stopping at stations in the western sector, set up road blocks along the border and stepped up patrols in the waters of the Baltic Sea. But it is impossible to seal off a country from the outside world altogether, and certainly impossible to do it in all places and for all methods of transport at once. Trains travelling from western Europe to Denmark and Sweden passed through East Germany, and they stopped at the Ostbahnhof in East Berlin on the way. With valid transit visas in their passports, West German citizens could travel through East German territory on their journey to Warnemünde on the Baltic Sea coast to catch the ferry to Malmö or Copenhagen. And at the station in East Berlin there was as yet no wall, no checkpoint between the local train platforms and the long distance ones. As it always had been, and as it is today, the check for tickets, passports and visas was on the train. A person with a West German passport and transit visa could board a train in East Berlin and ride out of there.
‘There were maybe eight or ten of us,’ Michael Hinze says, ‘students who were doing this. I’d say all up we managed to get about fifty people out in this way.’ Then he adds, ‘I was really no big wheel.’
The scheme was clever and simple. It consisted of turning an East German into a West German for a day. The students asked West German citizens to give up their passports for the cause. ‘We had no trouble getting hold of the papers. People were more than willing to help others get out of there.’ They chose those who resembled, in age and height and eye colour, the East Germans they were going to smuggle out. The passport-holder would send off to the East Berlin authorities for a transit visa. At the same time, passport-sized photographs of the East Germans were conveyed across the border into West Berlin. When the passports came back to their owners with the visas stamped into them, the students took them to a graphic artist who inserted the photograph of the person trying to escape. The complete passports were then smuggled back to the East Germans wanting to leave.
‘We would wrap five or six passports up in newspaper and stick them in the airvents of my VW beetle.’ Michael could travel to the east on a day pass. Along with the passports he would take over