East German Stories

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My husband's family is German and the areas that his parents come from fell into East Germany when the country was divided up after WWII. His parents got over to West Germany before all the walls and barbed wire and so on were erected. But these are a few stories about people who got out after that and before the reunification. Lutz, not technically a family member, simply walked up to a border crossing and told the guard that he wanted to visit family in the West. He was jailed for a year before a West German relative paid a high bounty to have him released. Regina and Roswitha didn't actually get out. But they were allowed out for a visit in 1988 for my father-in-law's 60th birthday. The amount of paperwork and time that it took to arrange this is pretty mind boggling. Their husbands and children weren't allowed to go with them, of course. And the family here had to pay for everything. Maik got hold of a copy of a newspaper that had been smuggled in from the West. There were ads in there for people looking for pen pals, so he wrote to one of them. Barbara was an Austrian girl and she came to visit him. Eventually they got married and he was allowed to move to Austria. Austria was neutral so this was much easier to arrange than if she had been from a country that was allied with Nato. Joachim was on a skiing trip in Hungary. Basically he just went out into the countryside and walked over the border into Austria. East Germans were allowed to visit other Soviet bloc countries such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia. And the border between Hungary and Austria was nowhere near as heavily policed as between the Germanies. He said he just couldn't live in East Germany with the government the way that it was. Another discussion reminded me of this and I just thought I'd share.