THE GREAT BALLOON ESCAPE

A family dares to ride the winds to freedom

- Jürgen Petschull

MARCH 1980

WHEREVER PEOPLE ARE CAGED, some will always make a break for freedom. Over the years thousands risked death and imprisonment to flee the oppressive conditions of communist East Germany. They climbed the hated Berlin Wall, tunnelled beneath border barriers and dived underwater at night to swim to asylum in the West. Many of them never made it. Some paid the ultimate penalty and died in the minefields or strung out on the wires of the 'death strip' along the border. But still they tried.

This is the remarkable story of two East German families, who, 10 years before the Wall would come down, built a hot-air balloon—and dared to ride the wind to freedom.

SETTLED AMONG CORNFIELDS and green valleys with pine forests marching towards the horizon, the towns of Pössneck and Naila seemed identical in the 1970s. Geographically they were only 64 kilometres apart. Yet politically their inhabitants were not even on the same planet.

Naila was in West Germany, and its 9,700 residents were free. But Pössneck, with 20,000 people, was in East Germany. Television aerials on the rooftops of houses there faced toward Naila; it was through TV that people in Pössneck were constantly reminded of how much better off people were on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

On 7 March 1978, in his home on the outskirts of Pössneck, 35-year-old electrical engineer Peter Strelzyk sat with his friend Günter Wetzel, a 22-year-old bricklayer and truck driver.