(4 of 5)
But under terms dictated by the Honecker regime, the special refugee trains were required to travel back through East German territory before depositing their human cargo in Bavaria. The face-saving yet ultimately self-defeating scheme was designed to permit authorities to engage in the fiction that they were "expelling" disloyal citizens. In the end, this petty legalism only encouraged more to flee. As the freedom trains slowed along hills and at curves, daring East Germans hopped aboard and joined the flight to the West.
That solution proved astonishingly short-lived. Within a few hours of the first transfer, new arrivals began showing up at the Prague embassy, many of them drawn by news of the safe passage of the first group. East Germany, believing that its agreement was for a once-only exodus, reacted angrily to Bonn's decision to allow more refugees into the compound.
Barely recovered from gallbladder surgery, Honecker went on TV to accuse Bonn of trying "to turn East Germany upside down with a comprehensive % attack." West Germany flatly denied that it had reneged on a pledge to shut its doors to new refugees. "There was no such agreement," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Jurgen Chrobog. "We would never accept that German people should stand outside a German embassy with small children without giving shelter and care. The East Germans wanted to build a wall around our embassy. Now they're building a wall around themselves."
Day after day new throngs poured in. There were so many abandoned Trabant and Wartburg automobiles on Prague streets that police began towing away any vehicle with East German stickers on it. On Tuesday, Ambassador Hermann Huber ordered the embassy gates closed when the refugee population had reached 5,000, then hours later, as the night turned bitterly cold, reopened them to families with children. A new round of departures was scheduled and then delayed. East German officials, moreover, insisted that the second group of trains make the trip from Prague to the West German city of Hof at night, rendering it more difficult for hitchhikers to board.
Some trains did pass through Dresden, where up to 15,000 besieged the city's main train station, only to be driven back by police wielding clubs and water cannons. The crowd, which included casual onlookers as well as those trying to get on the trains, overturned police vehicles and pelted police with rocks. A total of 7,600 East Germans from Prague reached safety in Hof the next morning, and 600 more arrived from Warsaw the following day, bringing to 15,000 the total evacuated since the embassy occupations began.
East Germany's decision to permit the mass departures was almost certainly occasioned by the approaching national anniversary. But the larger dilemma remains unresolved. New travel restrictions do not address the root causes of widespread popular disaffection in East Germany. "It's like taking an aspirin for a toothache," said a Western diplomat in Prague. "It may relieve the pain, but it won't fix the problem." As the rioting in Dresden made only too clear, the refugees who had the good luck to act are hardly the only ones who want out. In Leipzig, 10,000 East Germans marched through the streets demanding change and shouting the name of the man who inspires them: "Gorbi! Gorbi!"