Annemarie Salzmann crawls through the wire at the Heidekrautbahn embankment

In the year the Wall was built, 17-year-old Annemarie Salzmann met her future husband while both were looking after East Berlin children in Eberswalde. He wanted to leave because he did not want to serve in the army; she was training as a kindergarten teacher and could not see why she should explain communism to three-year-olds. They began to plan an escape.

A friend of her boyfriend had crossed in Rosenthal, on the northern edge of the city, where the border was largely unlit and there were no mines. In March 1962 the couple took the tram there after dark with overalls, to be less conspicuous in the open ground, and strong leather gloves for the barbed wire.

The field they chose was a triangle between the Wilhelmsruher Damm and the Quickborner Straße, with a guard post on each road; they could hear the guards and their dogs, but no patrol came. They crawled towards the wire in fog. When the full moon came out they thought of giving up, but after a quarter of an hour the fog returned.

The border ran along the embankment of the disused Heidekrautbahn: barbed wire first, a roll of wire lying on the tracks and a tightly strung fence behind them. Wearing the gloves, they held the wire apart for each other and got through, snagging on it, into West Berlin. They moved to the Rhineland and married; they had left with nothing but what they were wearing.