It sounds like a cross between a John le Carré thriller and the Famous Five: the schoolchildren who tried to breach the iron curtain. I stumbled across their story by chance, because I also grew up in Marburg, a quiet university town on the banks of the river Lahn. My brother went to the same school as Tina and Barbara. Through old letters and school reports, and Stasi records, I pieced together what happened – how their giddy mission turned into a cold-war drama, triggered a small war at their school, and ended with their teacher being put on a secret service watch list. I tracked down that teacher, the schoolgirls, and the man ready to risk everything to get out. [...]
Barbara’s father, for example, was a refugee from the eastern German provinces that are now part of Poland, arriving in West Germany at the end of the war. Her mother was from East Germany, but left before the border was sealed. They abhorred the division, but there was another factor that pricked Barbara’s conscience. Like all German teenagers, she’d learned about the country’s Nazi past at school, and the importance of moral courage. Indeed, the school trip to the GDR included a visit to a former Nazi concentration camp, Buchenwald. Barbara often wondered what she would have done back then: look away, or resist? [...]
“That’s a nightmare for a teacher, definitely,” she says of the escape. But she still feels that the school reacted too harshly. The students were questioned in front of the entire staff, and later given a warning with the threat of expulsion. One by one, they were asked to name the masterminds of the plan. Barbara said nothing: “What was I supposed to do, make a cross against my own name?” The group stuck together. They wrote an apology to their teachers and peers, explaining that they’d helped Bernd “out of humanity”. Parents weighed in, defending their children. Newspapers called the teachers heartless, and strangers sent furious letters. Politicians publicly supported the students; far-left papers attacked them. What had been a personal decision became a weapon in the east-west standoff.
