Block That Midget

Three months ago, an Austrian youth hid his East Berlin fiancee in the small luggage space behind the seats of an Austin Healey Sprite. Then he ducked his head and gunned the midget sports car (35 1/2 in. high) underneath the last Communist barrier at Checkpoint Charlie with two inches to spare. Few believed that it could be done again, since presumably the Reds would now be suspicious of sports cars. Nevertheless, last week another enamored suitor with the same strategy in mind rented the same Sprite from the same West Berlin agency. Then Norbert Konrad, 26, an Argentine citizen of German origin, drove into East Berlin, cached his blonde sweetheart, Helga, in the car in the same way, and roared back to the West under the same peppermint-striped wooden crossbar. Belatedly, the Communists began fitting out the underside of the barrier with steel bars.

As the Berlin Wall approached its second anniversary, Communist police assigned to guard it were themselves defecting at the rate of one a day. At Checkpoint Charlie two guards, screened momentarily by a tourist bus crossing from the West, stepped smilingly over the white dividing line. On the River Elbe a 50-year-old boatman packed his wife and three children into a stolen motor launch, put-putted to freedom. Two men rowed a kayak across the Baltic to Denmark. The 20-year-old stepdaughter of an East German army colonel slipped through barbed wire south of the Wall, reported that East German youth is now more interested in acquiring blue jeans than party medals.

As always, many an attempt ended in tragedy. Near the border resort of Hohegeiss, a crowd of Swedish and Danish tourists watched horrified as a man, wheezing with exhaustion, struggled to climb a pole over the barbed wire. Rushing up with guns blazing, Red border guards kept pumping bullets into him even after he dropped to the ground, left the body for two hours in the weeds.

If there is a thaw in the cold war, the fact is not evident along the Wall.

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