"Don't Shoot! I Have a Baby in My Stomach!"

Wearing T shirts and jogging shorts, they seemed like any other young East Germans enjoying a summer afternoon. Suddenly Maigda Adryan, 22, and three male companions clambered over two fences, plunged into the sludgy river Spree and began swimming to freedom from East to West Berlin.

Ignoring shouts from a watchtower, they thrashed across the 100-ft. span of water, cheered on by tourists at the Reichstag, Germany's prewar parliament, on the other side. Before Adryan could get across, a gray East German patrol boat churned up beside her, nicking her ankle. A guard on board aimed his gun. "Don't shoot!" she cried. "I have a baby in my stomach!" With that, Adryan and her friends lunged to the safety of the riverbank, where they were pulled out of the water by onlookers.

Adryan was not so lucky last year. A native of Potsdam, 15 miles from East Berlin, she had been arrested when she tried to flee from Czechoslovakia into West Germany. Granted amnesty after spending several months in detention, she decided to try again after becoming pregnant in May. "There was a danger they might take my baby from me and put it in a state home," she says. "I knew we had only one alternative, and that was to try to escape." In July she and her fiance, Thilo Koch, 18, and two friends conducted practice swims during a camping holiday at a lake north of East Berlin.

So far, 14 East Germans have escaped over the Berlin Wall this year, six by swimming across the Spree. What made last week's exploit so remarkable is that Adryan and company plunged into the river at one of its most heavily guarded points, and in broad daylight. Perhaps, as they had hoped, the presence of so many Western tourists, including an alert British visitor who videotaped the entire escape, deterred the guards from shooting.

But they may have benefited from a change in policy. According to East German guards who have fled to the West, shoot-to-kill orders were quietly shelved last September, when Erich Honecker became the first East German leader to visit West Germany in a bid to improve relations between the two sides.