Word: westing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...scheme was designed to permit authorities to engage in the fiction that they were "expelling" disloyal citizens. In the end, this petty legalism only encouraged more to flee. As the freedom trains slowed along hills and at curves, daring East Germans hopped aboard and joined the flight to the West...
Barely recovered from gallbladder surgery, Honecker went on TV to accuse Bonn of trying "to turn East Germany upside down with a comprehensive % attack." West Germany flatly denied that it had reneged on a pledge to shut its doors to new refugees. "There was no such agreement," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Jurgen Chrobog. "We would never accept that German people should stand outside a German embassy with small children without giving shelter and care. The East Germans wanted to build a wall around our embassy. Now they're building a wall around themselves...
...refugee population had reached 5,000, then hours later, as the night turned bitterly cold, reopened them to families with children. A new round of departures was scheduled and then delayed. East German officials, moreover, insisted that the second group of trains make the trip from Prague to the West German city of Hof at night, rendering it more difficult for hitchhikers to board...
...took the Breite family barely 24 hours to abandon everything they knew and bolt for a new life in the West. Though their discontent had been brewing for years, Olaf, 28, and Marlies, 26, had never seriously contemplated leaving their East German village of Schonermark, near Potsdam, until Sept. 11. That night, shortly after midnight, Hungary began permitting East German refugees to cross over en masse into Austria. The Breites watched West German television coverage of the Great Escape and realized that the Iron Curtain had parted, but that it could be drawn shut again at any moment. By lunchtime...
...them farewell at 9 that night, when they piled their children -- Christian, 5, Susann, 3, and Katrin, 9 months -- into their worn getaway car, a 1972 Fiat. They packed just a pair of knapsacks, then took off on what would be a five-day odyssey to the West...