The photo of the balloon here really helps put the story into perspective.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190408181736/https://www.museu...

This reminds of a person I read about on HN years ago - a Russian guy who escaped from the USSR jumping off a cruise liner and swimming a couple of days to Philippines.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Kurilov

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Alone-Ocean-Slava-Kurilov-S/dp/965555...

It is interesting how dictatorships for resourceless countries needed to keep the people in like east germany or czechoslovakia. But current dictatorships with natural resources like Venezuela or Iran let dissent go. It makes them more stable sadly.

Disney made a movie about this called Night Crossing in the early 1980s. More recently, there's a 2018 German movie about it called Balloon.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082810/

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7125774

There were many "escapes", some weren't so romantic. E.g. for some escapees the drive to what they viewed as freedom was so intense that they did not hesitate to kill someone, e.g. a stewardess on a hijacked plane.

To see a bigger picture let's juxtapose these escapes with the life of Luke of Simferopol (N. F. Voyno-Yasenetsky). He was a surgeon and a bishop of the Orthodox church. He opposed the anti-church policies of the Soviet government, was sent into an exile into Siberia and nearly died there. Then the war came. So he wrote a letter to Soviet officials asking to be sent to work in a hospital near the front, where his surgical skills would be of much use. At the end he added: "When the war is over I'm ready to go back to exile".

One of favorite escapes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Papago_Escape

They built boats to sail down the Salt River, to the Colorado River, and to Mexico. Of course the salt river is almost always just a dry river bed. It's shocking to me that no dramatization of this escape exists

The Damn Interesting podcast (no affiliation, just a huge fan) had an episode on this topic if you prefer to listen to this story: https://www.damninteresting.com/up-in-the-air/

More interesting escapes from the DDR, this time by three brothers, who all fled separately:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethke_brothers

Was curious to know the calculations involved. Found them to be pretty simple.

Vibe-coded an online calculator for future escapists: https://balloon-lift-calculator.pagey.site

Since then, the trust of wives in their husbands' weekend projects has dropped considerably.

In Eastern Europe in 1979, those were big sums of money. What an extraordinary story

Reminds me of George Gamow and his wife's attempts to escape from the Soviet union by kayaking across the Black sea (first attempt) and the Norwegian sea (second attempt) until he was lucky enough to be given permission to visit the Solvay conference and was able to defect using conventional methods (Simply not returning).

My favorite east Germany escape stories is the escape is train driver’s Harry Deterling, that just drove the train into wall (which was not fully a wall by then if I understood correctly) https://www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/chronicle/_year1961/_mon...

The investment, planning, danger, and dogged persistence… incredible story.

A reminder of something much bigger, much longer, and far more tragic. People died, families split, a country divided.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_boat_people

The autobiographical graphic novel "Time Zones" by Sven Diekmann describes an attempted balloon escape from the GDR in 1977, but it was thwarted at the last minute [1].

It is a powerful book, quite chilling as it describes life under the totalitarian puppet government of East Germany. I also often found it eerily reminiscent of our current times.

I can highly recommend it, both for the suspenseful narrative and great visual storytelling. A great read for HS/college kids that are into history too.

[1] https://store.bookbaby.com/book/time-zones

[2] Authors website: https://www.svensiekmann.com/bio

Meanwhile in Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelir_Ant%C3%B4nio_de_Carli

I first read about this in Reader's Digest back in the eighties.

What's scary is that Russia plans to do this again.

But not that surprising when you look at Russian history.

Fascinating. Always enjoyed the near-history one can feel in east germany.

Europe is obviously very old e.g. I go to a pub back home that's 500 years old, but you can still sort of feel the concrete setting in some parts of Germany. Although saying that it might be that they haven't changed much since and I don't like the future chosen much elsewhere.

Or it's just the light temperature... In places that have kept their old street lighting I find it interesting to find angles that look the same now as they did in 1981 (or '71, etc).

Hast du etwas Zeit für mich?

Poor family members though

> East Germany immediately increased border security, closed all small airports close to the border, and ordered the planes kept farther inland.[6] Propane gas tanks became registered products, and large quantities of fabric suitable for balloon construction could no longer be purchased. Mail from East Germany to the two escaped families was prohibited.[12]

> Erich Strelzyk learned of his brother's escape on the ZDF news and was arrested in his Potsdam apartment three hours after the landing. The arrest of family members was standard procedure to deter others from attempting escape. He was charged with "aiding and abetting escape", as were Strelzyk's sister Maria and her husband, who were sentenced to 2½ years. The three were eventually released with the help of Amnesty International.

People - here in Germany as well as abroad - forget too easily what a sinister but also ridiculous state the GDR was.

Authoritarians everywhere belong on the dustpile of history.

The engineering ingenuity and determination required to pull this off is truly mind blowing. Building a homemade balloon under such surveillance is an amazing feat.

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How long did it take them to plan this escape?

One good metric of quality of life (which includes various freedoms) is how many people emigrate or immigrate.

Anybody who defends authoritarians has to explain why so many people want to leave and why the regime wants to keep them in. (With some exceptions such as China which weaponizes emigrants by threatening their families.)

> Propane gas tanks became registered products

Ha. Someone does a thing and the state moves in to regulate. Same as it ever was, apparently.

Item registration… not used to prevent crime, just to make it easier to document after it happens.

There was a mcgyver episode about this.

So much havoc caused by having a fascist/communist government in Russia, from partnering with Hitler to start WW2, through this stuff to Ukraine and it seems about half the evil in the world. I hope they fall one day and turn to something normal.

I'm amazed most of all they were able to keep it under wraps with 4 children involved. I don't think you could pay my children at that age $1 million to keep their mouth shut even under the same risks.

Other than North Korea, are there still countries that are literal prisons that you can’t leave?

It’s astounding to me that this was a thing. The fact that it’s so rare now is one of the quiet ways we have in fact progressed.

My elementary school showed the Disney movie about this at least once a year.

People will do anything to escape the fruits of marxism. Discoursers today should take note!

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>hey needed just ten minutes to inflate the balloon and an additional three minutes to heat the air.

That's faster than most professionals by a substantial margin. I guess when it matters you make it work.

This is so impressive. Survival of the fittest at work.

Odd how nobody ever builds a balloon to fly towards the communist utopias.

Wait... People want to escape from communist countries?

It amazes me that some people will somehow still have the audacity to defend communism...

The GDR was a showcase state that, much like the DPRK, being on the periphery of the communist block, was propped up by USSR so that direct comparisons with its capitalist neighbor wouldn't be so unflattering. One of the most important forms of assistance the GDR and other satellites received was cheap energy. In the case of the GDR, through the Friendship Pipeline. One only need look at the DPRK to see how vital this assistance was; it was only after the USSR collapsed and Russia turned off the spigot that North Korea started regularly suffering famines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_North_Korean_famine

And yet even with the high (in comparison to other communist states) quality of life people in the GDR enjoyed, people still risked life and limb to escape. You could leave Brazil under its various juntas, Chile under Pinochet, Portugal under Salazar, and Spain under Franco, yet the only option for citizens of the GDR and other communist states (in some cases, still today, e.g., Cuba and the DPRK) was escape and defection.

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- What capitalists did in 6 months that communists didn't manage in 50 years?

- Make communism look good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_nostalgia

>The family members included:

> Peter Strelzyk, aged 37

> Doris Strelzyk

> Frank Strelzyk, aged 15

> Andreas Strelzyk, aged 11

> Günter Wetzel, aged 24

> Petra Wetzel

> Peter Wetzel, aged 5

> Andreas Wetzel, aged 2

Was/is it common practice to omit the ages of adult women in Germany?

This true story moves us because it resembles much of human history, in which clever but powerless people struggle against morons -- morons who somehow gain control over a modern industrial state, then use that power to punish innocents who dare to assert simple human rights.

People in Moscow, in Gaza, in Tehran, in Minneapolis, are all saying, "How can I rise above this? -- where's my balloon?"

Too many morons. Too few balloons.