If it had not been for 15 minutes... Chapter 11

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Meanwhile in Warzaw time was running out for us. Several days passed without so much as  a peep from West Germany. Not speaking any Polish didn't help matters very much at this point. With a lot of time on our hands, we reasoned that the STASI  found our empty apartment after a couple of days and begun a search for us across the entire country. In addition, perhaps wrongly, we were afraid that at some point the STASI would find a way to look elsewhere, like Poland and Checkoslovakia. The days trickled by very slowly while we spent our time in the hotel room waiting for a phone call that didn't come.

Finally, two days after our departure deadline, the phone rings. Its my uncle. " There has been a change in plans. Please proceed to Dabrowiecka Street 30 ".

We are dumbfounded but not knowing the details of the situation we had to trust the information given by Herbert. We check out of the hotel and hail a taxi, that proceeds to take us across downtown to Dabrowiecka Street.

As the taxi slowed down in its approach to our destination I turned in the direction of the driver - just in time -  because standing in front of a brown rough stone gate were several Polish soldiers. I practically yelled at the driver not to stop and to keep on going. We pulled around the corner. Mother and I were schook up. Where in the world were these people sending us? After a couple of minutes we decided that we should trust the message and asked the driver to go back. Again we came up on the soldiers and as we turned right into the driveway of the stone gate, much to my amazement the soldiers ignored us. The taxi made its way up a short driveway and stopped. We collected our baggage and approached a dark ornate door. Next to it was a sign with the West German flag hung.  What sort of place was this?

We knocked. No answer. Mom rang a doorbell. No answer. She rang it again. This time the door opened via a buzzer. On the the inside the building was all business. A dark stairway arched upwards on the right. Immediatly in front of us was a reception desk manned by a man in a business suite. "How may we help you? " he asked as we approached. "My name is Helga and this is Michael" mom answered. The man looks distinctly puzzled. "Ummm ..Yes?" he hesitantly answers with a blank look on his face. "We were supposed to come here" my mother explained. The man's face contorts into an even deeper lack of understanding. I'm looking at him thinking gosh this is really embarrasing. In a minute we'll get kicked out.  Mom looks at the man very intently and in a conspiratorial tone she says " Mother and Son? " . That was the ticket ! All of a sudden the man's face lit up "Oh yes yes ! Mother and Son ! They didn't tell us your names! Yes now I understand! Please come with me." he practically jumped around his desk and led us up the stairway. We were asked to wait in a small conference room. More men appeared and explained that because of the unforeseen circumstances the best they could do for us was a couple of field cots in a small closet like room. We needed to be very quiet in the daytime because the native Polish janitorial staff was sure to be Polish Intelligence.  In later years mom recalls " They really were some unhappy diplomats. It was a total surprise for them and they had to hide us in this small room with fieldcots . We couldn't even turn on the lights...."

Time passed and our deadline had come and gone.  Add to that the need to hide in the embassy, and our risk increased day by day. Yes, while we were on West German ground in the embassy we were safe, but we needed to leave the building st some point. Who knows what would be waiting for us.

While we were stuck in the embassy, a seperate drama began to unfold and culminate in our messed up schedule.

Approximately 1000 kilometers West of Warzaw is the small town of Chiemsee, located in the West German State Bavaria. Chiemsee, a very picturesque and old city, is primarily known as the site of one of Bavarias nicest palaces located on an island right in the middle of a lake.

A small non-descript house in Chiemsee is the residence of a gentleman to whom mother and I most likely owe our lives. We've never personally met Mr. Heinz or Horst H. , a former submarine captain during WW2, who although retired was in the employ of the BND as a industrial spy. His cover name was "Sissi" (and no its  not the same as an English sissy). His work entailed travelling through the East as a journalist, finding answers to detailed BND surveys. For example "How is East Germany using Microprocessors ?" or "How much does the AE100 cost? ".

In the middle of January 1979,  Mr. Heinz H. meets with his case officer "Bierling" , a West German equivalent of Stiller's position, in a hotel room in Rosenheim. Bierling explains that the work this time was to help two people out of Warzaw. If H. does his job to everyones satisfaction Bierling will help him to obtain an editorial position with the "Bayern Kourier" paper.

On January 14th  Heinz H. travels to Warzaw. The lining of his winter boots contained two fake passports created by the BND. His suitcases contained West German clothes for a woman and a teenager. H.'s assignment was to deposit the papers and clothes in a safe deposit box in Warzaw. On his arrival in Warzaw he compares the stamps and signatures he just received in his own passport by Polish immigration authorities to the stamps and signatures in the fake passports. As an expert in these matters he catches several discrepancies. " I saw different signatures and most important incorrect stamps in the false passports" he later recalls as excitedly as though he was still there. "On the C-page the photo had a stamp on it; on the backside there was no stamp from the Hotel; there was no exchange document from ORBIS the state owned Polish tourist agency. In a word it was a mess! "

On January 16th Heinz H. sends an encoded telegram to a BND cover address in the West Germany. "On my own authority I've reset everything to zero and started the plan again " he explains " I proceeded to destroy the passports and retrieved the clothes" . 

Sissi is ordered back to Munich immediatly. The BND will attempt to have new passports in Warzaw by January 18 - Stiller's defection day. But the Warzaw airport was innundated by the same cold front that had hit Oberhof earlier and was forced to close down operations. It took H. until January 18th, two days later, to arrive back in Munich for a meeting with his case officer. The BND was set up in the hotel "Sollner Hof".  Bierling was ready to flip out. According to Bierling H. had no apprechiation how important this job was. The two in Warzaw need to be out of the country at the very latest the day after tomorrow!

January 22 1979 - Mom and I spent what seemed like an eternity in the little embassy caboose. We were asked  early in the morning to get up and were escorted down the stairway to the foyer, and from there into what seemed like the basement. At the bottom of the stairs was a room which contained a big stainless steel vault door. The door swung open and the diplomats escorting us asked us to step through the round vault door into a conference room. All along we were to be extremely quiet and not say a word. The diplomat gestured for us to take a seat at the conference table. Slowly the door swung closed and after a second a green light right above the door came on. "Now we can talk" explained the diplomat. " This is a surveillance proof room".

I looked around as he spoke. With the exception of the table and eight chairs the room was empty. The walls and ceiling were covered with sound proofing material. The floor was oddly "high" from the floor of the basement room outside of the vault. 

The diplomat addressed us again " We have finally received your papers. And it is now time to take the next step. You will be travelling out of the country as Mrs. Ritter and son. Here are passports and airline tickets. We will take you to the airport and accompany you all the way to the entrance of the departure gate, but please understand that we cannot come with you through the passpport checkpoint. That is too risky. However, we will have people nearby. If anyone questions your papers you absolutely will have to pretend that you are West Germans and become obnoxious tourists. How dare these guys question you ! That sort of thing. We will try to "accidentally" show up if that happens and we will try to see if could pressure the people checking passports, but if it goes wrong we cannot be discovered as having part of this! Also, if you make it passt the checkpoint and into the transit lounge the chances of being discovered will decrease drastically, however, if you are discovered in the transit lounge itself we cannot help because we can't get entrance to it. "

Well there it was. The plan. Most of all we were happy that the papers had finally arrived. After so many days in limbo this progress was the best news.

"You will also need to leave all of the baggage you brought from East-Germany, change into these clothes " continued the diplomat as he pulled out several clothing items for mother and I.  ( One of these items, a light blue acryclic turtleneck sweater is still in my closet to this day as a memento of that fateful time. )

After we've changed, the diplomats escorted us to a waiting car. Two got into the front and mom and I got into the back. We must have looked a little bit like "deer caught in the headlights" because the fellow sitting in the front passenger seat almost turned around completely and spoke to us for what seemed like a long time. The trip to the airport took 30 minutes. Before we knew it, it was time to get out. We took our carry-on bags, the only baggage we had left at this point and walked into the departure gate. Mom and I had only been in two or three other airports in East Germany and the Soviet Union and so the Warzaw airport added to our stress by the mere fact of being new and unfamiliar.

I was guessing about the layout and structure of the walkay to the gate. Where was the ceckpoint? Where was the transit lounge? All of a sudden, so it seemed , we were standing in a very short line with one or two people ahead of us. Oh my god, it was the passport check! Time stood still. Everything slowed to a complete crawl and reality somehow looked much clearer than it normally does. I felt as though I was standing outside of my body watching myself hand the passport to the immigration official / border guard. It took forever. Finally he stamped it and returned it to me. We walked into an empty transit lounge.  Slowly, it seemed, we found a couple of seats in a row close to the windows overlooking the concourse. The entire transit lounge contained maybe three other people which only made matters worse. What if they were agents? After 15 minutes a very dapperly dressed pilot approached us and said " You are my only passengers for this flight. Would you please come with me". He actually meant mother, myself and one other person. We followed him across the tarmack and climbed aboard a Finnair plane bound for Helsinki . My thoughts were chasing each other fast and furious. "Who ever heard of a plane with only three passengers. Something is wrong! Watch out the third passenger has to be an agent! Whats the best place to sit so that we could keep an eye on him? " I continually expected to be caught even as the plane departed and made its way into the gray Polish sky. My nerves did not calm down until I looked out of the window and saw the sun glistening off the Baltic Sea below. At that point I  figured we were in international airspace and beyond the reach of either East German or Polish forces.

The plane landed in Helsinki and we were met by two jubilant members of the BND standing at the gate and waving to us. After a short layover we boarded a plane to Munich and arrived sometime after 5 PM on January 22nd 1979 in Munich.  All of us were picked up in a small convoy of several cars. After some time on the Autobahn we pulled onto a smaller side street were another car was waiting. On the instruction of one of the agents, mother left our vehicle and got into the backseat of the waiting car. For the briefest moment I saw Stiller's head appear in the rear window as he sat up to give mom a hug. After that he disappeared again from sight.

Our convoy made its way into Munich where we spent several days in a hotel. I will never forget the celebration of our first evening together in the West. We had made it! We were in the West!.

Continue to the Epilogue

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