East German Escapes

April 1983 saw two young man on a flying high wire swoop to freedom by firing a cable attached to a steel-tipped arrow from the roof of a five-story building in East Berlin down to a lower rooftop in West Berlin's Neukoelln district.

Two other families sailed to freedom in a home-made hot air balloon after piecing together bits of nylon and bed sheets to make a frighteningly fragile escape craft. Separately, a 17-year-old girl made it to the West concealed in a cable drum.

An East-West escape of a different kind was made in October 1976, by Martin Kasten, a young doctor working at a State hospital in Boltenhagen, an East German coastal town. As searchlights swept across the beach every few minutes, he set off on the most perilous swim of his life.

His body smeared with pounds of fat and wearing a frogman's suit, flippers and snorkel, he entered the water at midnight. Eighteen hours later he was fished out of the sea, exhausted, by a Swedish ferry board bound for the West German port of Travemuende.

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