A hole underneath the fence

During a summer holiday in Hungary in 1989, Christian Weiss fled at the age of 13 with his family across the Hungarian border to Austria. Their escape began in Sopron (Ödenburg), where the family was helped by a woman in a flower shop, who told them about a suitable place for escape and handed them a map that was hard to acquire in the GDR. In the evening they were secretly driven by Austrian friends into a forest they had to cross in order to get to the border. The family members had to crawl on the ground in the forest until they came to a place where they had to run across railway tracks. The noise alerted two border guards. The family remained anxiously hiding in a bush until Christian walked out of the bush directly to the border guards. His parents must have been very terrified by this. “At some point, I felt that they had spotted us anyway and that it was merely a question of time before they’d catch us. Thus I stood up and I reached out my hand to them, saying: “a very nice evening to you gentlemen.” Then the family had to go with the border guards for a while. At first, they thought that they had been arrested. But then they stopped and the border guards stroked Christian’s little brother’s hair. They showed them where the border was. “They made this V-sign, victory sign, with their two index fingers and then a sign with their hands meaning ‘we haven’t seen anything’.” When the family reached the fence, they had to dig a hole underneath it with their bare hands. Christian remembers one of the most moving moments of his life: “We had to dig a hole underneath the fence and then, my mom, I think, went first, then my brother and then me. Meanwhile my father was trying to pull the fence upwards without injuring himself. When we were already on the other side of the fence, my father said: ‘Please, don’t leave me here’.”