Down the high-voltage lines across the border

It was around midnight of July 18/19, 1986, when Robert Ospald began to climb on a sixty-meter-high pole supporting an overhead power line charged with 380,000 volts. Ospald and his companion Zdenek Pohl decided to escape from Communist Czechoslovakia down the overhead high-voltage lines, because the lines weren’t blocked by barbed-wire entanglements like the roads on the ground. It was raining and a thunderstorm was raging. “In such a situation, you’re not cold. The adrenalin, as they say today, is relatively high. I hung the cart on a climbing rope and then I let it go for a meter or so,” he recalled. The cart was making loud noises which scared Ospald: “I wondered what it was and I was afraid that it would reveal us. It was a sort of a screeching noise, as if you were breaking small twigs. So I pulled the cart back to me and let it loose one more time and looked at it. And although the inner wheel had a relatively small diameter I could see five or ten centimeter-long sparks flashing over to the rope.” Meanwhile, Ospald’s companion Zdenek, who was called Franky, climbed on top of the pole as well: “And he was already eager that I’d call it all off but I said: ‘Let’s go. Here we have a chance. At home, in the communism that is said to last forever with the Soviet Union, we’re going to die. I wouldn’t stand it there. I don’t have that much time.’ So we went.”