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Sport 40: 2012
Naked, As We Were
Naked, As We Were
On the day before the drawing up of the balance sheet for the changeover to West marks we had set out with four trucks and two escort vehicles. Our mechanics in one of the escorts kept the heavy trucks, full of ingots, intact on all the roads of the eastern Ukraine and North Ossetia. Marked on our maps was the Ust’urt Desert (on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, but from the ‘road’ this sea was nowhere visible, the desert appeared as steppe). We were trapped. Local officials (or bandit gangs with insignia unknown to us) forced us to drive to an abandoned caravanserai. We had weapons. But the number of armed men surrounding us and what the use of weapons would achieve was uncertain. Once a week ‘representatives of the authorities’ brought provisions to the isolated place. So we spent the Day of German Unity glued to transistor radios as a last collective of the GDR. The cold penetrated inside the vehicles. We did not want to sacrifice any fuel for heating.
In spring we abandoned the vehicles. We buried the iridium ingots. After a march of 435 miles across two national frontiers we reported to the German Embassy in Tehran. We were twelve patriots. First we had tried the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China and been turned away. At the German Embassy they did not want to give us passports of our new Fatherland right away. They demanded proofs of our existence. We, however, had nothing but our knowledge of German and labels sewn into our clothes, indicating where they had page 299 been bought. The GDR passports and our weapons, which could have proved our identity, we had buried in a panic one night during our flight. Should we have hurried back to this hiding place, merely to prove to Foreign Ministry officials that we were involuntary ‘fellow citizens’? We lacked the elan of unshakeable conviction. When they got fed up feeding us in the relatively cramped accommodation in Tehran, they shipped us, by way of Aden and Port Said, to Rostock. As active Chekists we were used to assuming almost any desired identity. They, our enemies, had to believe us, ‘naked’, as we were.