‘The Faculty Unanimously Distance Themselves With Revulsion’ Charlotte Groh helped a friend escape from East Germany. Only decades later could she leave too. By Peter Friedman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-faculty-unanimously-distance-themselves-with-revulsion-1517613303
The Berlin Wall stood for 10,315 days, from Aug. 13, 1961, until Nov. 9, 1989. On Monday, Feb. 5, it will have been down for as long as it was up.
East Germany began to seal itself off from the West long before the wall was built. In 1952 Soviet troops helped East Germany close and fortify its border with West Germany, leaving only the Berlin border open as an escape route. Some 250,000 East Germans fled to the West every year for most of the following decade. This exodus undermined East Germany’s economy and threatened the Soviet Union’s five-year plans, which depended on East German manufactured goods.
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev kept urging East German leader Walter Ulbricht to reduce emigration by easing living conditions, as the Soviets were doing with their own “de-Stalinization” policies. Instead, in 1956, Ulbricht passed a law making emigration without permission—deserting the republic—punishable by up to three years’ imprisonment, as was helping others to desert.
The police combed through subways and elevated trains heading from East Berlin to West Berlin. Whoever seemed suspicious—carrying more than one suitcase could draw scrutiny—would be hauled off for interrogation.
I met Charlotte Groh at an East Berlin cafe in 1992, and she told me of her own involvement in someone’s escape. In 1960 Charlotte and her friend Erika Jahn were in their early 20s and working as schoolteachers in Mecklenburg. Charlotte visited Erika during Christmas vacation and found her in tears.
“I can’t stand living in the GDR any longer!” Erika sobbed, referring to East Germany’s official name, the German Democratic Republic. She said that she had relatives in Hamburg with whom she could stay while looking for a job. She had packed two suitcases to take with her. Charlotte volunteered to accompany Erica and take along one of the suitcases.
To draw less attention to themselves, they took separate trains from Mecklenburg to East Berlin. They met up at Friedrichstrasse and boarded an S-Bahn train for Gesundbrunnen in West Berlin. At the first stop inside West Berlin, a young East Berlin transit policeman entered the train, took Charlotte off with him, and questioned her in an interrogation room inside the station. East Berlin controlled the S-Bahn system in both sides of Berlin.
Scared, Charlotte told the policeman that she was meeting friends from her student days. He searched through her pocketbook, then returned it to her and wished her a good trip. Charlotte noted that the policeman had not written down her name and address. Had he, she would have stayed on in West Berlin and not gone back home. Nor did the policeman open Erika’s suitcase, which Charlotte was carrying. Charlotte admitted that it would have been “uncomfortable” for her if the policeman had opened the suitcase, since she had no idea what Erika had packed.
When Charlotte and Erika met up in West Berlin, Erika said that she would send a telegram from Hamburg about her decision to stay. This way the authorities would not suspect that Charlotte had helped her escape. Erika would also send a telegram to the school where they taught.
When Charlotte’s school reopened after New Year’s, a prominently posted notice declared: “A Special Pedagogical Assembly at 2:00 p.m. Attendance Obligatory.” The topic was Erika Jahn’s defection. Several teachers rose during the assembly to condemn Erika.
“You were a friend of Erika’s,” Charlotte recalled one teacher telling her. “Where do you stand in regard to her conduct?” Charlotte mumbled something about how fleeing the country doesn’t solve problems.
“What do you mean, ‘doesn’t solve problems’?” demanded the teacher. “Erika is a traitor to our socialist republic.”
The school director then read aloud a “declaration” for everyone to sign. Charlotte recalled that it stated: “The entire faculty unanimously distance themselves with revulsion from the treason committed by their former colleague Erika Jahn and strongly condemn her behavior.”
Charlotte, alone, refused to sign. The director berated her and demanded that she vow not to send letters to her friend. Charlotte replied that as Erika’s friend, she could not make that promise. The director said the assembly wouldn’t end until she signed the declaration.
Two hours later the meeting broke up anyway, after one teacher said that she had to pick up her child from the kindergarten. Another murmured, “Honesty is better than promises that aren’t kept.”
That Charlotte returned to the GDR after helping her friend escape was “one of the haphazard occurrences of life,” she told me. “Pure chance” ultimately led to her being stuck inside the GDR. This prevented her from visiting the West again for another 28 years.
During those three decades, she went from being a teacher to a journalist with Sonntag, the GDR’s leading weekly. Although a relatively privileged position within East Germany, it still left her yearning for freedom.
“I am an old lady,” she recalls her mother telling her. “What they did to me no longer matters. But for you, the GDR’s real crime was not only that they ordered people shot at the border, but that they deprived a whole generation of its future.”
After the Wall came down, Charlotte visited my wife and me frequently in New York. As we were scampering into the water at Jones Beach on Long Island, Charlotte said that she had realized a dream she had believed would never come true—she had seen the Atlantic Ocean. She truly was free.
Mr. Friedman, a former Fulbright scholar in Berlin, is the author of the novel “Ideal Marriage” (Permanent Press, 2004).
Appeared in the February 3, 2018, print edition.
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