The Gesture Was Hollow

Berlin will long remember a young East German named Peter Fechter who last summer tried to escape across the Wall and was shot down by the Red border cops. Wounded, he was left to bleed to death by the Communists, while U.S. soldiers, under strict instructions to avoid "incidents," were not allowed to cross a few feet into East Berlin and help the dying man. When a wave of disgust swept Germany, the Allies responded by a feeble gesture: they stationed an ambulance at Checkpoint Charlie in the U.S. sector to pick up any future wounded fugitive and take him not to freedom but back to East Berlin for treatment. Even this token move was proved hollow last week by a new burst of Communist bullets.

On Heidelbergerstrasse, practically in the shadow of the Wall, East Berlin security cops swooped down on a building where a fresh tunnel had just been completed. Eight men and women scurried through the passage to a West Berlin beer parlor at the other end, but one young man was sprayed at point-blank range by machine pistols. Three miles to the northwest, the Allies learned of the shooting and sped their ambulance to the border. But East German guards refused to raise the barrier, and the British army drivers did not force the issue; after an hour they turned back. A Red Cross ambulance also was refused permission to cross the border. One refugee reported that the wounded man died of a bullet wound in the forehead, but when a British officer attempted to examine him he was kept 100 yards from the shooting scene.

Others fleeing from East Berlin had better luck last week. A young electrical engineer clung to a homemade bucket seat attached to a crane while friends on the Western side wafted him 90 ft. across the Wall. Three teenage boys cut their way through barbed wire, and a coal miner, his courage kindled by schnapps, leaped 35 ft. from a bridge into a barge canal, then swam to the Western shore.

Meanwhile, East German Boss Walter Ulbricht, desperately attempting to justify the Wall's existence, hopes for a visit from Polish Party Chief Wladyslaw Gomulka and Premier Jozef Cyrankiewicz. According to one story current in West Berlin. Gomulka summoned the East German ambassador when he heard that he was expected to whitewash the Wall and told him angrily: "The only thing we know like it in history is the one you Germans built around the Warsaw ghetto."

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