Another Trip to East Berlin and a Fast Forward...

Hi,

So, we are in East Berlin and it is June, 1987. I was at the bottom of Leipzigerstrasse, near the Volkspolizei HQ, when I noticed a huge slab was missing in the Wall. Being a curious soul, I decided to check this out - the land mines, trip wires... the whole 'shoot to kill' picnic. I stepped inside and, all of a sudden, there was a flurry of sirens going off and within a couple of minutes I was being fronted-up by Vopos. Insisting I had no need to escape as I had a passport, they let me go. I got back to the Palast Hotel and - guess what - I didn't have a passport, as the Stasi had confiscated it.

It came the time for me to check-out and move on. At the reception desk, a concierge told me the Stasi still had my passport. Fine. I told them to take my luggage to the finest suite and then to invite everybody on the ground floor to lunch in their Jade Restaurant... and to send the bill to the Stasi. My passport was returned with half an hour.

Fast forward to 1992 and I am entering Jersey at St. Helier Airport. Walking through to rendezvous with my lift, a lady sticks her head out of an office doorway and asks if I have got a minute... she was Special Branch, so I said okay. Inside the office, she asked if I had a passport, which I produced. She thumbed through the document and the conversation went something like this:
"You are an engineer?"
"Yes I am," I replied.
She thumbs further through the passport and comes to a stamp for entry into East Berlin.
"Were you an engineer when you went to East Berlin?" She enquired.
"Yes," I again replied.
She carries on thumbing through the passport and comes to an entry visa for Poland; thumbing through to the end, she can find no exit visa. Hmmmmmm...
"Isn't it illegal to leave Poland without an exit visa?" She asked, in the surefire knowledge that in 1987 it most certainly was.
I had now missed my lift, so I thought I would have some fun.
"It was illegal in Poland... what the legal status was in Jersey, you would need to enlighten me... I am all ears."
She disappears for half an hour or so.

Next, out comes a Chief Superintendent. He says he needs to know how I got out of Poland and back to the Western side of the Iron Curtain without an exit visa.
"Well... that's just it... the need to know. You don't need to know," I told him.
As you can imagine, he became irate.
"I most certainly do need to know," he insisted.
I told him we couldn't have every Tom, Dick and Harry walking around with that kind of information.
"You don't look like a spy," he suggested.
I asked him what a spy was supposed to look like, before launching into Le Carre in 'The Spy Who Came in From the Cold'.
"Spies are sad individuals... queers, henpecked husbands, bored civil servants... obsequious, oily little men."
Him and the woman disappeared for another half hour or so before coming back and saying there was a car waiting for me, lol.

Oh... how did I get out of Poland? I didn't... I never went in. Like they say... why spoil a good story with the truth...

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