ESCAPE AT DUSK

An anti-Communist underground in East Germany has been actively in operation ever since Walter Ulbricht's Wall went up last year. Its major task is providing hideouts for East Germans facing arrest for political offenses against the regime. Maintaining tenuous contacts with unofficial West German anti-Communist groups, it has spirited dozens of these victims of East German oppression across the Wall to safety in the West. Last week, in West Berlin, TIME Correspondent Ed Clark witnessed one such carefully planned escape. His report:

The escapee was a 33-year-old cabaret entertainer in an East German city outside Berlin. His satiric comments on Communist economic failures so nettled the government that a warrant was put out for his arrest. But the underground heard the news in time to whisk the comic to East Berlin. There, for ten days, they hid him in a different house each day, while contact was made with a group of West Berliners, all under 20, who agreed to aid in the escape. One of them was the escapee's sister.

Shameful Profiteers. In a West Berlin working-class quarter hard by the Wall, the youths found a spot where the Reds' auxiliary barbed-wire fence had fallen away, so that a ladder could be placed directly against the main concrete barrier. Then they prevailed upon a family whose apartment overlooked the break in the wire to let them use their flat; though some West Berliners who live near the Wall shamefully charge up to $2,500 for the use of their apartments in such escape plots, these occupants lent theirs free. Secretly, word was passed to the East German underground that all arrangements had been made. The resistance fighters plotted the movements of the Vopos and the Grepos in the chosen area, found a sheltered doorway where the entertainer could hide.

The escape was set for 8 p.m., when the still-gathering dusk made street lights and searchlights ineffective. As the hour approached, lookouts were posted in the streets and the entertainer's sister began washing the windows in the borrowed apartment, which was visible to the escapee crouched in the doorway on the other side of the barrier. If she swabbed the windows horizontally, the operation was off; diagonally--wait for an hour; vertically--the escape was on. Moments before 8 o'clock, some 150 yards down the Wall from where the actual crossing was planned, three homemade Molotov cocktails were tossed over the barrier to create a diversion; the rescuers had calculated the distance exactly, figuring that the effective range of the Communists' machine pistols was only no yards.

In the window, the girl's arm began to scrub feverishly up and down.

Collecting the Ladder. As columns of flames shot through the trees on the Communist side, three of the West Berlin youths, toting two 8-ft. ladders and a pair of wire clippers, raced to the Wall. Placing a ladder against the barrier, one of the boys scrambled up, snipped the barbed wire on top of the concrete, and lowered the second ladder down the other side. Hardly had it hit the ground when the escapee sprang from his doorway 55 ft. away and clambered up and over the Wall two rungs at a time. So nonchalant were his rescuers that before leading him away to join his sister they first carefully retrieved the ladder from the Communist side. Said one of the rescuers, who in a few weeks leaves to attend a U.S. university on an exchange scholarship: "I'm glad to know that before I leave for America I've accomplished at least one good thing here at the Wall."

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