Man with a Suitcase

Blond, blue-eyed Bernd Schmidt was captured at the age of 18. That was three years ago, when he and some other West German teen-agers went to the Leipzig Sports Festival in Communist East Germany. One day, passing a stadium exit, Bernd Schmidt was caught in a throng of girls who came pouring from the field after a gymnastic display. Schmidt recalls: "Some were carrying their hoops high over their heads, others were rolling them. Suddenly, someone dropped a hoop over me. Everyone laughed."

Bernd Schmidt had been captured by Maria Hoelscher, an elfin girl with saucer-like brown eyes and a ponytail. He had to return to his home near Mannheim and his job as an apprentice lathe operator, but as soon as he saved enough money for them to marry, Maria planned to leave East Germany and join him. Then the Communists built the Wall, dividing the lovers as well as Germany. Last week Bernd Schmidt went again to Leipzig. He met Maria in a Weinstube and they tried to think of a way to smuggle her out.

Prenatal Pose. ''Could I fit into a suitcase?" she asked. Looking at her trim 5-ft., 100-lb. figure, Bernd gulped his drink and said they could try. If caught, Maria thought it meant three years in jail for her, ten for Bernd. "They'd accuse you of being a Western slave trader." They paid $6.50 for a brown plasterboard suitcase that was 4 ft. by 2 1/2 ft. by 16 in.

Next day, carrying the empty suitcase, they went to Eisenach, the last railway stop before the West German border. The train pulled in, and the two rushed up to the platform, got an empty compartment. Bernd opened the suitcase; Maria assumed the prenatal position--head on chest. He carefully forced back her shoulder, got the lid closed by pressing it down with his knee. She gasped with pain as he belted the two straps. Then he moved the suitcase--which had been punctured in several places to give Maria air--into the corridor and returned to his compartment. Police and border guards, working methodically through the car, looked at Bernd's papers; one guard asked where his luggage was. Bernd said he had shipped it on to West Germany by rail express. The guards glanced casually at the suitcase in the corridor, went on to the next car.

Loudspeakers at the border control point of Warthe ordered all passengers to leave the train, with their luggage, for another check. Bernd leaped down to the platform and was about to pull off the suitcase when he saw that an East German railway guard was eying him. It was the same man Bernd had told he had no luggage. An African got off the train, too, and hoping he could not speak German, Bernd cried to him in broadest dialect: "Let me help you with your bag!" The baffled African, thinking Bernd was asking for help, obligingly took hold of the handle, and they shuffled past the Red guard.

Quivering Snow. Bernd left the case on the platform, irrationally pushing snow on it in an attempt to make it inconspicuous. After passing through the Communist control point, he returned to the platform, was horrified to see the suitcase was quivering so much that snow was being shaken off the top. Bernd frantically grabbed the suitcase--but the handle came off in his hand. Desperately, he hugged the case in his arms, heaved it back on the train and stumbled on beside it.

Minutes later, the train rolled past the barbed wire of the border. A sign whipped by, announcing entry into West Germany. Bernd walked to the suitcase, loosened the straps, raised the lid. Maria, still shivering and blue with cold, looked up. "We made it," Bernd murmured, lifting her out. She clung to him and cried. When she could finally talk, it was to say: "Thank God . . . Thank God . . ."

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