Try, Try Again

In the clammy dawn, a railway inspector in Hamburg last week was making his rounds of freight cars on a siding. A car packed with crated machinery from Hungary caught his eye. From a knothole in one big crate, a finger beckoned. The inspector hurried over to the crate. Inside it a hoarse voice whispered: "Thirst, thirst." When police broke open the crate a young, dirty-bearded man, too weak even to stand, fell out into their arms.

At police headquarters the stranger told his story: He was a 28-year-old Hungarian named Imre Komoroczky, for six years a machinist at the Communists' prized Matyas Rakosi Engineering Works near Budapest. Though even his parents were ardent Communists, Imre took a dim view of the New Order. Once before, in 1950, he had tried to escape to the West in a packing crate, but the crate had broken open during transshipment in Prague. Imre was seized and returned to Hungary to spend 14 months in prison.

Out of jail and back at work, Komoroczky twice failed to meet his production quota and was sternly lectured by his bosses. "That did it," he said last week. "I decided to try again." One night more than three weeks ago, he slipped into a big, eleven-foot-high crate in which was packed a boring machine consigned to Sydney, Australia. The crate was lined with black creosote paper, and except for the light trickling through two tiny knotholes, was completely dark. There was no room for the fugitive to sit or lie down; all he could do was crouch on the metal plate at the base of the machine. He had read in a book on Yoga that meat increases thirst, so all he took with him for what he estimated would be a six-day trip was four bottles of water and two loaves of dry bread.

At 8 a.m. next morning, unaware of its contents, workers at Komoroczky's machine shop nailed up the crate and bolted it firmly to the floor of a flatcar. Soon afterward, Imre was on his way. Cramped and crouching, he shivered with cold as the car rolled westward. After the second day, he could not eat his dry bread. By the end of the sixth day, his drinking water was used up. It took the slow freight that carried his crate three days to get to the Czech frontier at Bratislava. It stood for seven days on a siding near Prague before moving on to East Germany. By the time the freight chugged into Hamburg last week, Komoroczky had been trapped in his crate for 13 days.

Why had he taken the terrible risk? "People in the West live so well," said the gaunt and exhausted refugee. "I wanted to, also."

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