photo #9391081

What an amazing story. Definitely lets you know how desperate people are to escape socialism and communism… and HERE, in the good old US of A, idiots like NYers, 25 years after Muslim terrorists attacked their city, have voted a Muslim, who is pushing socialism, into office. Go figure! ~~~~~~ In the dead of night on September 16, 1979, eight people crammed into a tiny homemade gondola, lit a fire beneath a patchwork balloon stitched together in secret, and prayed it would carry them to freedom. Hans Peter Strelzyk was an electrician living in Pössneck, a small town in East Germany. His neighbor Günter Wetzel was a bricklayer. On the surface, they were ordinary working men living ordinary lives under the watchful eye of one of the most oppressive surveillance states in history. But beneath that surface, both men burned with a single obsession: getting their families out. Together, their group totaled eight people, including their wives Doris and Petra and four children ranging in age from young boys to teenagers. The planning began in 1977 after Strelzyk read a newspaper article about hot air ballooning. He and Wetzel studied every technical detail they could find, teaching themselves the physics of lift, heat, and gas consumption from books and magazines. They calculated that they needed a balloon with an envelope of roughly 1,200 square meters to carry all eight of them. Building something that large in secret, inside the attic of a private home in a police state, was almost incomprehensible in its difficulty and danger. To avoid suspicion, the two families bought fabric from different stores across different towns, never purchasing too much in one place. They used taffeta, cotton, and assorted synthetic materials, whatever they could gather without raising questions. Doris and Petra spent countless hours sewing the panels together by hand and with a home sewing machine, working only when neighbors were unlikely to notice. The burner system was constructed from scavenged propane cylinders and metal piping, engineered entirely from scratch by men who had never formally studied aerospace or engineering. Their first attempt came on the night of July 3, 1979. They drove to a remote clearing near the border, inflated the balloon, and launched. For a few terrifying and exhilarating minutes it worked. Then the fuel ran out. The balloon descended and landed back inside East Germany, just short of the border. In their panicked scramble to escape the landing site before being discovered, they abandoned the balloon entirely. Within days, the East German secret police, the Stasi, had found the wreckage and launched a massive investigation to identify who had built it. The families knew the Stasi were closing in. Rather than fleeing or surrendering, they made the almost unbelievable decision to build a second balloon, this one even larger and better engineered than the first. Working at a pace driven by pure desperation, they constructed a new envelope over the following weeks. This balloon was approximately 25 meters tall when fully inflated and required a completely rebuilt burner system capable of sustaining heat long enough to clear the fortified border zone. On the night of September 15 into the early hours of September 16, 1979, all eight of them gathered in a forest clearing near the town of Heinersdorf. They inflated the balloon, climbed into the small gondola basket, and rose into the darkness. The border between East and West Germany below them was one of the most heavily militarized in the world, lined with tripwires, attack dogs, watchtowers, automatic shooting systems, and armed guards with orders to shoot to kill. The balloon drifted silently above all of it. The flight lasted approximately 28 minutes. They flew through cold air at an altitude estimated between 6,000 and 8,000 feet, the flame roaring beneath them, the children gripping whatever they could hold. When they finally descended and landed in a field near the town of Naila in Bavaria, West Germany, they did not immediately understand they had made it. It took a few disorienting moments before the reality sank in. They were on the other side. They were free. The story captured the world's imagination and became front page news across the globe. Walt Disney Productions turned it into a film called Night Crossing, released in 1982, which dramatized the families' ordeal for international audiences. The original balloon fabric, the burner equipment, and the gondola were preserved and eventually put on display at museums in Germany. The Strelzyk and Wetzel families settled into new lives in West Germany, the impossible dream they had sewn together scrap by scrap finally realized at 6,000 feet above a guarded border in the middle of the night.