Finally in the West!

“The moment we arrived at the chapel I knew that we were safe in the West,” Hans Heine recalled, When Heine and his girlfriend reached the chapel on a cold April day in 1972, the area around the Chapel seemed appeared impassable and lonely. Hans Heine, who had fallen in love with a woman from East Berlin during a one-day visit of the city, identified the German-Bohemian border as a suitable place for his escape plan. After they had spent a holiday together in Prague, he and his girlfriend went on foot from Marienbad to the FRG. This chapel was the first thing he could clearly identify as being on West-German soil when looking on an old, worn-out map. Rejoicing about their fortunate getaway, they wrote into the visitors’ book: “’Today we safely made it across the border’. Yes, this is how you can express happiness. Or: ‘My God’ or ‘Hallelujah’. Yes, that’s the kind of moment you’d call redemption, when you shake off all your worries. The moment when you can say: ‘now we are safe and they haven’t noticed us’.” Leaving the chapel behind, the young couple hitchhiked from there to a police station in the nearest village after Mähring.