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At that time, the local “MIGROS Clubschule” in my hometown offered short trips to Vienna, Berlin and other European destinations, specially designed for youth, students and apprentices to meet other young people from countries that had recently been at war with one another.
I was on the lookout for something that fit my holiday schedule and my earnings from summer jobs. The trips to Berlin were really attractive because they were subsidized by the city of Berlin, which was eager to build lasting understanding and human connections with Western countries after the Berlin Blockade by the Soviet Union and the ongoing political and military tensions of the Cold War. The City offered low-cost accommodation at their newly built youth hostel together with self-serve meals and a cultural program with contacts to young Berliners.
Our bus left in the evening in the direction of Berlin, on the freeways to Nürnberg in Bavaria towards one of the three approved border crossings at Hof/Gutenfürst. However, as we approached the village of Hof, our driver got a message that East Germany had just closed this crossing, indefinitely. Instead of only having to travel a further 160 miles to Berlin, we were forced to make a 425 mile detour to get there. The closest open border point was at Helmstedt/Marienborn, east of Hannover. That was our best alternative, using slow secondary roads which skirted the East German border all the way to the Autobahn connecting Hannover to Berlin.
As we approached Berlin in the morning, we encountered mile-long lineups in the road. The road had two lanes. In the left lane, transport trucks were inching forward. Passenger cars and buses were lined up in the right lane -- stopped and occasionally moving ahead a few car lengths. We were already hungry and tired after a long overnight bus ride, wondering when we would finally arrive at the West Berlin youth hostel.
Once we reached the control check point, a uniformed East German border guard came onto the bus. He collected and took away our passports, told us to stay in our seats and left for a small control office shack. We noticed that the guards were inspecting our passports under ultra-violet lamps. We could also see other guards with long broom sticks and attached angled mirrors on wheels inspecting the underside of our bus and other vehicles besides us, looking for stow-a-ways and suspicious equipment. After a while our guard came back onto the bus and asked for one of the travelers by name. Apparently, this person did not have a Swiss passport like the rest of us, even though our tour description specifically asked for one. This delayed us further, until he eventually was approved to proceed with the rest of us. I never found out what the problem was.
The long wait was scary. We felt like “undocumented prisoners” locked in on a bus until the guard had handed us back our stamped passports. This was part of their harassment tactics, beyond the normal slow processing of travel documents.
After the 12-hour delay, we finally reached the youth hostel in West Berlin. By then we had already seen and knew enough to expect a similar delay on our return trip, shrinking our Berlin visit by a whole day in total.
The following days we mostly went sightseeing as a group, visiting Charlottenburg castle and museums; the new downtown area around the Europa Center; the Kurfürstendamm shopping area; the partially rebuilt Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche Memorial Church; many bombed out city blocks still covered in weeds and piles of stones and bricks; and, of course, there was the obligatory visit to the Western side of the Berlin Wall near the Brandenburg Gate.
I also had a chance to attend a political/satirical cabaret performance in the evening; feast on meat/onion/sweet pepper skewers (known as “Schaschlik”) grilled on sidewalk barbecues; and drink the local specialty wheat beer (“Berliner Weisse”) later at night under bright lights.
Another night we all went to a downtown disco together with our young Berliner hosts. It was quite an experience for me, who had never been to a disco and who normally stayed away from girls. I even enjoyed dancing and talking with an attractive young girl, Dörte Schwertfeger (Dorothy). We exchanged mailing addresses after I found out that she was a member of an accordion band which was going to be attending a European accordion competition in my hometown within the next few weeks. She also knew another Swiss accordionist, the sister of a high school classmate of mine, whose family lived just a few hundred yards away from my home. So, I left Berlin in the hope of seeing Dörte again. We exchanged one or two letters, but never arranged to meet during the accordion competition. Which was just as well. I could not easily imagine myself ending up with a German father-in-law who might possibly have been a member of the Nazi party before 1945.
For my final day, I wanted to get a first-hand view of East Berlin, a look behind the “Iron Curtain.” However, none of the other Swiss group members had any interest in coming with me to cross over at the famous “Checkpoint Charlie.” So I went on my own.
I had my passport and visitor visa and purchased the prescribed amount of East German currency at the official unfavourable rate. Bringing back any East German currency was prohibited by East German laws. I either had to spend it all there or put what was left into a donation box to support an East German state charity upon leaving their country.
Suddenly I was on my own for the day in a completely foreign environment -- a drab, grey city governed by the “SED,” short for “Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands” (Socialist Unity Party of Germany), the ruling communist party.
I walked up and down the Unter den Linden parade boulevard which was still within sight of the barricaded Brandenburg Gate and the Berlin Wall, this time visible from the Eastern side.
Soon I started to feel hungry for some lunch and looked for street level restaurants. Eventually I entered one and looked around for a table. Unfortunately there were no empty tables. I approached a table with only one person so far and asked the man if I could share it with him. To my big relief, his answer was a welcoming “yes” and soon we were engaged in lively conversation. After ordering Eisbein mit Kartoffeln (which translates as boiled pork hock with boiled potatoes -- not a fancy dish, but at least I knew what they would be serving) I told him that I was a visitor from Switzerland, and he told me he was a commercial pickup truck driver. I must have gained his confidence rather quickly because he told me many things about his family and himself. Then he asked me what I had in mind to do for the balance of the day. I told him I wanted to look around town and then go to a performance of a political/satirical cabaret, to be able to compare it with the Western version I had just seen only days before. He immediately offered to drive me in his company pickup truck to his delivery destination and show me some non-touristy parts of East Berlin. I accepted without hesitation, even though in retrospect I should not have been such a trusting person… “Do not talk to strangers…” “Do not accept rides in an unknown car…” Those were the generally accepted admonishments at the time.
As he drove the pickup truck and nobody could overhear him, he told me many more things about his family, the economic hardships of the common people, the constant fear of being spied upon even by family members and that he had decided not to join the SED party despite jeopardizing his children’s working career, etc. Then I found out that he was about to deliver a load of silver ingots from his employer in Leipzig to a precious metal refinery. That increased my tension and I suggested that I should wait for him to do the delivery without me in the car. He reassured me that this would not be a problem. As he approached the refinery gate and the walls with barbed wire rolls on top came into view, the thought “too late” entered my mind. But the guard just waived us both through without “this extra passenger” deserving a single question. In a few minutes the delivery was complete and I was relieved as soon as the factory gate closed behind us.
Before I left the driver to go to the Cabaret performance, he gave me some valuable advice: “You will notice a number of members of the audience in military uniform,” said in a serious tone. “They are not there because they like satirical cabaret, but to spy on the audience and report any non-conformist behaviour, applause, or comments. Only clap in approval if others clap after an anti-western skit, never show any approval for critical comments about the communist regime or any of its leaders!”
After the performance, I headed back to ”Checkpoint Charlie” and to West Berlin. It had been a long, but instructive day. It was late. The train was nearly deserted. I had time to myself to think about the lingering effects of war. I would see them for the rest of my life, often unexpectedly and in unexpected ways. That’s what happened much later in my life when I met a man who had twice survived a firing squad, escaped, created a successful business after the war, but could not sign a legal document because, officially, he was dead.
To help you understand why and where I got the raw material for the incredible story of this man, let me start by explaining why I ever became interested in other countries.
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I, Andreas, was born during the Second World War in 1943 in a town called Schaffhausen, in Switzerland, close to the German border. My father was a patternmaker at a large foundry in town when he was not doing compulsory military service with Unit #7 of the small Swiss air force. We lived in a company apartment in a working class neighborhood.
I am the oldest of three brothers. Peter died at home at the age of 2½ of meningitis before penicillin became widely available. I remember playing with him. Urs died as an infant.
My dad always wanted to travel to other countries, but the depression of the thirties made that unaffordable. During the war, neutral Switzerland was completely surrounded by Nazi Germany; Austria (which had joined Germany in the Anschluss); Vichy France and Mussolini’s Italy. Battered and occupied postwar Europe was not a holiday destination, either.
A sense of being locked up in a miniature country is something that has lived with me to this day.
Ever since I was in elementary school I was not your average neighborhood kid. I read all the books on my father’s bookcase, mostly more than once. I read juvenile books about North American explorers; about teenagers growing up in indigenous Canadian James Bay families; teenagers growing up in California, in Argentina. I read the story of the shipwrecked “Swiss Family Robinson,” some Swiss Classics and books on twentieth century European history. From a collection of fairy tales from around the world, I discovered that not all fairy tale stories followed the pattern of those collected by the Brothers Grimm, which always started with “Es war einmal,” or “Once upon a time ...” and normally ended with “Und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind, so leben sie heute noch,” or “a princess and her rescuer living happily ever.” I really liked the postscript: “Und wenn Du die Geschichte nicht glauben willst, so zahle einen Taler,” or “If you do not wish to believe the tale, you must pay a silver coin.”
From my bedroom window I could see a part of Germany, the Büsingen enclave, an oddity which had survived from the Middle Ages. Early on, I was interested in international events and in meeting people from other countries and cultures, listening to foreign correspondents on Swiss AM radio, which broadcast from a location called Beromünster.
I often listened to foreign radio stations. Depending on atmospheric conditions, and time of the day or night, I could capture signals on the AM band; long-wave and short-wave from RIAS Berlin (Rundfunk Im Amerikanischen Sector); Radio Monte Carlo; Radio Luxemburg; Radio Vatican; Radio Moscow as well as neighbouring German and Austrian stations. The Swiss public network of FM stations (called UKW, for Ultra Short Waves) was still in its infancy and did not serve our border area well.
Together with reading daily and weekly newspapers from Switzerland, Germany, France, the UK and the International Edition of the New York Herald Tribune, these were my “Windows on the World.” I spent most of my pocket money buying newspapers at the newsstand at the train station or buying pocketbooks at the two main bookstores downtown. I also borrowed books from the main reference library in Schaffhausen, used their reading room for more of the latest newspapers and magazines and borrowed history books from the company library where my father worked.
So it will not surprise you that I was sometimes teased as “Ein Stubenhocker fährt nach Asien,” or “A Bookworm Travels to Asia,” the title of a book written by a Swiss priest, Josef Maria Camenzind, who had traveled overland through Russia and Siberia to China to explore the country in 1936, because he wanted to become a foreign missionary. Unfortunately, his religious order would not let him stay there. In their opinion, his weak health did not qualify him to be posted to China.
So, you see, it was only natural that I would pursue a career that would take me to the far corners of the world.
While I was still in high school I came to the conclusion that I wanted to emigrate. I was very aware of the social pressures and unwritten expectations of Swiss society. I did not like all the behavioral constraints. In a small country of five million at the time, where almost everybody knows everybody, I felt boxed in. Because of the country’s tightly knit social structure of family connections, schools, fraternities, religious, military and political party affiliations and business networks, there existed many opportunities for career and personal growth. These were the upsides for young people in Switzerland then. However, I saw mostly the unwritten constraints on personal freedoms by the entrenched establishment. Novel ideas were not welcome, as they might threaten the “holy cows” and the legends of medieval Swiss “military heroes.” Economic power, police and military were used to quash attempts at change. Many independent journalists, writers, artists and upstart businesses suffered from the repression for years.
This desire to escape affected my views on getting tangled up with young Swiss girls and women. I was of the opinion that most females had a strong attachment to their extended families and hometowns, and therefore would not be happy for long with a Swiss who had decided to emigrate. That only left those Swiss who had lived abroad in emigrant families or somebody living already in a country I could see myself emigrating to. The situation reinforced my natural shyness towards girls, since without any sisters I had nobody to get hints from.
Rather than fight against such impossible odds, I decided while still in high school to emigrate before turning 30, while I was still young enough to grow roots in a different country. So it was important to get a worldwide marketable university degree with an eye to becoming a manager for an international corporation.
