Before East and West Germany were reunited, starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, there were many daring and successful escapes to the West, but the number of those that failed and died will never be known.
Having been only three years old and going on four, I have little to no memory of our own escape from East to West Berlin, and the subsequent evacuation to West Germany during the world's greatest airlift in 1948, other than that on that cramped flight, sitting sidesaddle aboard an RAF Dakota, a lady across the aisle was nursing a puppy dog in her handbag.
Everything else I had to piece together from what my older brother Karl-Heinz, who still lives in Germany today and is now at an age when Mozart had already been dead for fifty-eight years (he was born in pre-war 1932 and was member of the Hitler-Youth), wrote to me years ago:
"Wir machten wir uns bei Nacht und Nebel auf nach Berlin. Karl-Heinz, der schon im April 1948 seinen Führerschein gemacht hatte, fuhr unser altes Adler-Auto bis nach Potsdam, und von dort unter Salben von russischen Maschinengewehren ohne Halt durch die Kontrollen zwischen Ost und West über die sogenannte Friedensbrücke, die später in James-Bond-Filmen als Kulisse für Agentenaustäusche verwendet wurde, nach Grunewald/Zehlendorf in Westberlin. Danach kam die Berliner Blockade und in dieser Zeit wurden wir mit einem Kohlenflugzeug (Dakota) der Engländer nach Hannover geflogen." (for a translation, click here.)
So, nothing very daring here; I mean, my brother who was barely sixteen, even had a valid driving licence. No wonder I became a boring insurance clerk, then boring bank clerk, and finally boring accountant.
After having looked at all those dates in my research for this post, I noticed that my parents married on 18.10.1932 and my brother was born on 17.12.1932 which makes theirs a shotgun wedding. Well, there is no more reason to be ashamed mentioning it now: both my parents are dead, and my brother can't read this because he can't read English.
