The roof of a Trabant automobile as a launch pad for a flight to the West

In 1949 the Bratislava bridgehead was the first location where the land border with Austria was set up by means of barbed wire barriers. At the beginning of the 1950s, the Iron Curtain was gradually built along the 106-km-long border with Slovakia. The arrangements near Vysoká pri Morave were particularly delicate. Nowhere else along the Morava did the river bank on the Slovakian side come so close to a main road. Installing the Iron Curtain here would be no easy feat. This particular crossing was the intended goal of Kerstin Hahn and Ulrich Trauwein from the GDR on 23 October 1988. They parked their Trabant near the high fence. Now they had to act quickly: they had to climb onto the roof of their car, then cut a sufficient quantity of barbed wire to be able to slip through. The border patrol fired off several rounds of ammunition. In spite of being fired at, the couple managed to reach the Austrian side of the Morava, where an acquaintance was waiting for them. These events were observed at the scene by Peter Ščepán. He was subsequently accused of not having done more to prevent the couple’s escape. For him, life along the barbed wire was not an easy one. ‘We often felt like we were animals in the zoo‘, he said. But he believed that all of that would eventually come to an end. And just one year later, his prediction turned out to be right.