Franciszek Piesik – from the Oder to the Nieder Neuendorfer See

Franciszek Piesik, born on 23 November 1942, grew up in Widuchowa on the Oder and worked in inland shipping. In September 1967 he left his wife and daughter in Bydgoszcz and went to the Polish–GDR border area, taking temporary jobs with forged papers and visiting his brothers on a dredger at Bielinek.

On the night after 14 October 1967 he disappeared from the dredger together with its rowing boat, which was found the next morning on the GDR bank of the Oder. He reached the Berlin area undetected and on 17 October was near Hennigsdorf, carrying wire cutters and sketches of the border.

Early that evening he stole a motorboat at Hennigsdorf and headed south, apparently intending to round a spit of land separating the canal from the Nieder Neuendorfer See, where the border ran down the middle of the lake. When the boat was noticed, he left it and his belongings behind and had to try to swim the lake instead, in water of barely ten degrees on the third day of his flight.

GDR border troops at first assumed he had succeeded. On 28 October his body was recovered on the West Berlin side of the lake; the post-mortem found mud in his airways and no signs of violence. After identification with Polish fingerprints he was buried in Heiligensee cemetery, in the district he had tried to reach.

Why he left Poland remains unclear; he had corresponded with people in Essen and Düsseldorf.