Escape Routes
While the Warsaw Pact was at full strength, life in Eastern Europe was less than palatable for much of the population. At that time,Western planes would often drop pamphlets describing a life of luxury on the other side.It was easy for people to draw parallels with their own dreary existence and, no wonder, many thought of ingenious ways to escape.
In the early days, when the borders were still partially open, a common method was to put some extra panels inside a truck, panelling off a small area for people to hide in. Many went into panic during the meticulous searches by the border police and wet their pants with fear. Some were caught.Other emerged pallid - a whiter shade of pale--on the other side. A variant of this technique was for people to be added to packages of items such as paintings, to be sent across the border as bits of rail freight.
Some people went out and bought themselves kayaks, becoming midnight paddlers across the icy Elbe river. A few daring souls early on even managed to get across Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, dashing across the line, parallel to the marching Soviet soldiers on parade.
Yet others went through the painstaking process of stitching together metres upon metres of silk to make their own parachutes for gliding down from one of the mountains in an isolated part of the border region.
Many of this attempts paralleled the escapes of British prisoners of war from German camps during World War ∏. And just like those days, not all escape attempts were successful. Quite a number of those who tried to escape ended up in paralysis, some of them paralyzed for life. |