The Time I Sneaked onto a Night Train from Communist East Berlin to Prague

August 1972. My brother and I stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin. We had just arrived from London on our first flight ever.

The flight was cheap by 1972 standards: just £14. In 2018 pounds that’s £181 (US$230), a lot of money for us: I was an undergraduate, and my brother had just started work.

We planned to continue our journey by rail to what was then the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (today’s Czechia and Slovakia). We would need to enter East Berlin to catch a train to take us through communist East Germany (more correctly known as the German Democratic Republic or DDR) .

A fortified wall had been constructed eleven years earlier to separate East and West Berlin. The Soviet Union administered East Berlin, while America, Britain, and France administered sectors of West Berlin.

Checkpoint Charlie

Checkpoint Charlie was the most famous crossing point between East and West Berlin. I took this picture of my brother standing in West Berlin looking towards Checkpoint Charlie. The buildings are in East Berlin.

Feeling like cold war spies, we walked up to the guard post. We were turned back because this crossing was only for people visiting East Berlin for the day. Travelers in transit through East Berlin had to enter East Berlin at Friedrichstrasse Station.

Friedrichstrasse Station

It was easy to get to Friedrichstrasse. Although it was in East Berlin, it was a stop on the West Berlin U-Bahn (underground railway). Remarkably, some of West Berlin’s underground rail network ran under East Berlin.

At Friedrichstrasse, a government official took our passports then disappeared into a room. After an uncomfortably long wait, our passports were returned and we were allowed to enter East Berlin to transit through East Germany for the next 24 hours.

Berlin Ostbahnhof

We planned to take a night train from East Berlin’s Ostbahnhof (train station) to Prague. An overnight journey nicely saved us the cost of youth hostel beds.

We had rail tickets, but no seat reservations. At Berlin Ostbahnhof we looked at the departures board, and noticed that seat reservations were mandatory on our train.

“Mandatory” is a word I take very seriously in a police state like East Germany. We did not want to end up being interrogated by the Stasi (secret police).

The train was fully booked, so we would not be able to travel to Prague that day. We wondered if there was some way we could get to Prague before our 24-hour visas expired.

In the information office, we couldn’t believe our luck when the clerk spoke good English and told us that the communist authorities had fired him from his job as a high school English teacher. He instructed us to confidently board the train. If seats opened up, we should just take them.

And that is exactly what we did.

The Journey to Prague

I don’t remember too much about the journey. The train was crowded, but eventually seats did open up; we slept intermittently. Our passports were inspected and stamped by government officials several times during the journey, but nobody ever demanded proof of seat reservations. The journey probably took 6 or 7 hours.

I do remember peering out of the train window at Dresden in the middle of the night. No buildings were more than about twenty years old, a reminder of the terrible firebombing the people of Dresden suffered during World War II.

Prague

We arrived in Prague early in the morning. We deposited our backpacks in Left Luggage at the train station and went for a walk through a city that was just waking up.

Later we picked up our backpacks and caught a trolleybus to a university campus where we checked into a student dormitory.

A student had scratched a cartoon on the door of the closet in our room.

I wondered if this was a remnant of the Prague Spring of just four years earlier. I suspect it was simply a commentary on studying in a small bedroom in a student dormitory.

For me it depicts my worst fears when we boarded the train in East Berlin.