On This Day

September 16, 1979. Two families crossed from East Germany into the West in a hot-air balloon they sewed themselves.

Peter Strelzyk was an electrician; Günter Wetzel a bricklayer. Same plastics factory, and an idea that started with a TV program about ballooning. It took them a year and a half: cloth bought in distant cities under cover stories (“tent lining”, “sails for our sailing club”), fabric tested with a vacuum cleaner and a glass tube, three balloons sewn on an old pedal machine, six kilometres of thread.

Their first flight, in July, came down 180 metres short of the border, inside the mined zone. The Strelzyks picked their way out in nine hours, hiked fourteen kilometres home, and made it just in time to call in sick. The balloon was found. In August the Stasi published an appeal for the “perpetrator”. So the two men built a bigger one.

On this night, a thunderstorm finally gave them the right wind. Two couples, four children, aged two to fifteen. Twenty-eight minutes of open sky, minus eight degrees, the burner dying and relit with matches. Then ground near Naila, in Bavaria, ten kilometres from the border. Wetzel broke his leg landing. Police found them, and the first thing the men asked was whether they had made it to the West. (The police car was an Audi, which they took as a good sign.)

Within days, letters from home were forbidden, and the border grew tighter than before. Everything the families stood on was new.

What I keep: the sewing. Nobody gave them a way out. They bought cloth, and made one.

Have a date that matters? I write On This Day letters. [email protected]