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Nobody likes to leave their own homeland...

... the place where they opened their eyes upon this world.

Homeland also includes the circle you move in, the people there.

Homeland is not only a geographic space.

Homeland... very difficult to define.

Something that touches your heart, that comes from your soul

but if you must put it into words: point 1, point 2, point 3...

It doesn't work!

Things that have to do with a sense of security within our immediate family !

that is homeland for me.

It is a safe childhood. It's love!

Freedom is to be able to decide where you can settle down

and where you want to try your luck.

In Romania they told you: this is happiness.

The definition of homeland?

Well, I think the definition of homeland

is where you spent your youth, where you grew up, where you

This strikes a chord!

I have often thought of my father, who died back there in 1978,

and who always said We can't just leave everything!

This is what our ancestors have built over centuries, we can't get up and leave!

But that was the course of history and no one could avoid it!

... Germans from Romania...

... panic ensued...

No one wanted to be left behind...

like an epidemic of plague befalling the Germans...

It was a huge humanitarian action,

it was the liberation of ethnic Germans from Romania,

who wanted to leave Romania of their own free will

but weren't allowed to because of the political conditions.

It was the purchase of freedom!

I don't know of any precedent,

of any other such case in history.

I think the nature and dimension

of this operation were unique.

It began rather like an adventure,

which required quite a bit of courage and perseverance.

All sorts of things could have happened to me.

One had an idea of how the Eastern Bloc secret services worked.

It was risky!

Of course I took the risk, because I too believed in the cause.

I travelled as a lawyer ! as a tourist, practically !

without any diplomatic (or any other kind) of protection,

and one never knew who was on the other side.

The presumed partner was the Securitate, the Romanian secret police...

It had an extremely bad reputation in Europe.

As the Stasi ! the East German secret police ! used to do

the Securitate created a file on me File no. 3673, codename EDUARD.

Eduard, that was me!

Hüsch was a highly dependable, secretive man,

highly regarded by his own party.

He was the man to trust! And we did.

I mean, he did all that under four federal chancellors!

And this had to be approved again each time.

Back then it was a secret, and it has remained one, if I may say so,

to this day ! unknown to the general public.

Key politicians were aware of

the issue of this ransom, of course. They played dumb.

It didn't play any role in domestic policy.

We were interested in helping the people. This was our governing rule.

And if it was only possible through secret negotiations,

then these negotiations had to be carried out confidentially.

The governments washed their hands of this matter and passed it on to us.

They said: "Talk to them!"

"Don't ask us. They are the ones in charge."

But it was not true. Because behind us stood the government.

That is, both the German and the Romanian governments.

As far as authority and responsibility went,

we were not allowed to do what we did.

So from the point of view of law in Germany and Romania alike,

what we did was illegal.

The negotiations took place in a back room of the Hotel Ambasador,

which was not especially inviting ! I called it a sleazy dump once.

The first condition was: absolute confidentiality.

In case of breach of confidentiality, we would abort the mission.

Second: there would be no German lists [of names],

only confirmations for the number of approved emigrations.

The Romanian side expected some sort of financial compensation in return

through a method of payment that remained to be developed in detail.

In cash, in Deutschmarks...

with no receipts.

Romania's relations with Germany were, however,

better than its relations with any of the other Western countries.

This was justified, of course, because Germany was interested

in retrieving a number of ethnic Germans from Romania.

For the first time, the Federal Republic has welcomed a communist head of state,

the Romanian president Ceaușescu.

Thank you for offering us

these wonderful works by Beethoven.

Of course, on the Romanian side, there were no humanitarian considerations.

There were only strong economic interests behind it all.

The issue was quite unique

because there had been no expulsions

from Romania after WWII.

While Germans had to leave their homeland

in other European countries,

in Romania they were allowed to stay.

Romania had a different attitude

because it had acknowledged

how important the German minority was

to the economic development of the country.

That is why this problem reached such magnitude only in Romania.

The government has a responsibility towards people with German background.

According to our constitution, they are Germans.

So if they are in need, you are bound to help.

With Romania, it was emigration or nothing.

We could not help on-site. So only the alternative remained.

The deal was: if you pay, you can have them all.

All right, so we paid!

This is the suitcase in which the money was carried.

This briefcase that I used could fit about 6 to 6.5 million DM.

You had to press the notes a bit, if they were new.

That way more would go in.

If there were used notes, which are known to be rather dirty,

then you could not fit that many in.

But you still had to press them down a bit!

All right, imagine you had to carry 20 million.

I don't know how you set about doing that

You must do it while keeping absolute secrecy on the topic,

on the time, on the operations.

On one occasion I was even accompanied by a police escort.

I had to transport 20!24 million DM, to be precise.

There were amounts in the millions sometimes.

I had a gun, which I carried with me.

Of course, not in the Romanian Embassy.

Then I would leave it in the car.

But I carried it in the street,

or here, in my office.

This is the table where many negotiations took place:

calculations and the preparation of new contracts.

They were usually signed in Bucharest.

Well, there they had microphones, here we did not!

Top Secret

Confidential Agreement

Special Agreement

Bucharest - Nürnberg train ticket: 216, - DM

monthly emigration permits

11,000 persons per year

With Dr. Hüsch we did nothing other than settlements.

He would ask me for the lists.

I would present the list of those who had left,

not who had been approved.

The approvals were more numerous than the people who left,

as they could not all leave at once.

Based on that list, Dr. Hüsch would say

...they must enter Germany!

Some did not set foot in the Federal Republic at all,

but went directly to America or Austria.

So we said We are not paying for those!

Only for those who actually enter Germany.

And then we would calculate and Dr. Hüsch

would either provide a cheque or make a direct transfer.

I preferred direct transfers, which kept things simple.

Anyway, not cash.

This was the beginning of the list business, so to speak.

The accounting meetings took place every two or three months.

And that meant 2000 names or 1000, depending on the flow of departures.

In any case, they had to be ethnic Germans.

The only problem was what we should do with the ethnic Germans

who had Romanian spouses

We handled those cases rather generously.

Let me give you an example: in August 1983

we settled for February, March, April, May and June 1983.

According to our calculations, the Romanian side had to receive

11,534,636.90 DM.

After the amounts were calculated, they were recorded in a document,

per each month, where you had, for instance:

claims from Romania for March '83: 936 people.

Not identified: 42 people;

listed twice: 6 people;

not taken into consideration because of the second entry,

since we are not paying twice: one person.

And foreign ethnicity !

it should actually have been not of German ethnicity: 2 people.

"The approvals were more numerous than the people who left,

as they could not all leave at once."

So the result was 885 people, not 936, and we agreed to pay for these people.

... the calculation of the overall sum...

I do believe that Germany was well aware of the fact

that the emigration of the Germans from Romania,

the Transylvanian Saxons and the Banat Swabians,

meant the extinction of a centuries-old cultural tradition.

It was clear to me that Germany would pay for me as well.

It was a business transaction, you were handled by bookkeeping.

Needless to say, I didn't have a good feeling about it.

No question about that...

This is where I live now, in Sandhausen, Heckengarten.

Behind and around this area ! the burden: streets bearing the names

of Mörike, Hauptmann, Lessing, Brecht, Hölderlin, Kant and Hegel.

But if you look closely, though, they are only alleys.

Will everything be fine?

The view is straight over Odenwald.

And no sooner had I learned to write again that I now have to learn anew.

The new orthography requires it.

But this I can avoid.

The issue of family reunification originated in the 1943 treaty

between Hitler and Antonescu,

as Germans from Romania were allowed ! as it were !

to enlist of their own free will !

that is, as people said, of their own "compulsory free will",

in German military units.

The worst thing about coming to terms with the past,

regarding Nazism in Transylvania,

is that it caused ambivalence in the family,

because people could have two ideas in their own family.

Not all Saxons were that interested

in considering that being German was to be of the highest value.

There were Saxons who wanted to live with the Romanians.

Yes, you speak German, yes, you have your German schools,

but you do not feel you are part of this Aryan people!

So those people did not think in such terms.

And then there were others who swallowed this idea.

We were in a special situation,

as my father's uncle, Anton-Peter, was the Gauleiter of Banat

and his role was to spread propaganda so that the Swabians in Banat

should voluntarily allow themselves to be drafted into the German army,

and his own nephew, that is, my father, could not stomach this idea.

This led to huge tension.

Young men who had been soldiers

and had not served in the Romanian army,

but in the German Wehrmacht,

were discharged directly in the Federal Republic of Germany.

That meant that a son or a brother from the family was already in West Germany

and that's why they could talk of family reunification.

The parents wanted to be with their son, the brother with his brother,

the sister with her brother or the wife with her husband.

So there were always humanitarian points of view at play.

Expropriation began as soon as March 1945!

There was a special decree of the Romanian government,

directing that ONLY Germans were expropriated.

Those Romanians who had property were not expropriated before 1948.

For a Banat Swabian, the land, his land was actually everything

People simply didn't get that.

As soon as my great-grandmother heard that our land was gone,

that it had been nationalised, expropriated, she kept saying:

No! That cannot be. We are in the land register!

She could not understand that one's land could be registered

and then someone could come and say:

This doesn't belong to you anymore,

now you are at best a wage worker on your own land.

So that was a huge blow to our confidence.

After the war everyone tried to make do somehow in this country,

although they had been expropriated.

According to the motto life must go on,

people tried to make the best of the situation they were in.

- Hello Hansi! - Hello Franz!

I went to his house to say goodbye.

I cried, we had grown up together.

Plastic windows...

See... Here lies Katharina Bittenbinder.

She was his wife, my grandfather's.

But she died in Germany.

And now we want to bring my mother here, too.

She also died in Germany.

And then we're all here!

My mother told me that, when she was deported to Russia,

some 55-year-old women and 13-year-old girls went as well.

Some pregnant women were taken too, although they should have been exempted,

or women with children less than one year old.

They even deported two mentally disabled people,

who died miserably there, of course.

Wiseschdia had about 500 inhabitants.

All in all, around 200 people disappeared from Wiseschdia alone.

Only men over 45

and women over 30 were left in the village, and the children.

Besides them, all these villages were practically depopulated!

While being transported to Russia, between 15 January and !

! it lasted until 7 February 1945, when they arrived there !

my mother found out that she was pregnant - she missed her period.

Less than nine months later, on 30 September,

I was born in Nakievo, in eastern Ukraine.

She had taken two pictures of her daughters with her

and ! on the day of my birth

and then during her journey home !

she wrote this text on the back of these pictures:

Today, 30 September 1945, my little Hartwig Joseph was born.

I see him beside me, a small helpless human being,

so gentle and sweet like a flower.

After these bitter agonizing days, I feel deeply happy

that I may hold him in my arms.

He is my everything, the only thing I have here.

How happy ! she now speaks directly to her children !

how happy was I with both of you too, my little girls.

But I was not alone then!

There were so many people there who loved us more than one can say.

I am alone here ! here she changes perspective again and addresses her mother,

I am alone here, mother dear.

You don't know what it's like to be so alone.

And when I look at this photo of my sweet lovely little girls,

then this great sorrow presses upon me twice as hard.

Only when I am with you once again, will I thank our Lord for every day

that He allows me to live with my loved ones in our homeland.

This picture was taken in the autumn of 1946, so some 7 or 8 months

after I had returned home to Romania from the Soviet deportation,

with my mother, who is holding me in her arms here.

Today we see the Frankfurt skyline in the background.

In 1946, no one could have imagined that!!!

One more thing! There was this Baragan action in 1951,

the relocation of the Banat Swabians

who lived 30 km from the Serbian border.

They were abandoned in the middle of the Baragan steppe,

where they spent their first winter in earth houses.

After this, their trust in Romanians or in that society was totally lost.

They broke down gates and doors in the middle of the night

and they were suddenly there, these soldiers with their weapons

and none of us knew what was going on.

Then, within 2 hours' time they were all gone.

20 kilos each ! that is all that those poor people could take with them.

Then they were loaded into cattle wagons.

They waited 2 or 3 more days at the train station.

Then at some point they left,

loud sirens shrieking all around.

My mother suffered all her life because, whenever a train came,

she could still hear this locomotive.

That night was frightening to everyone in the community.

About a third of the people there were deported to the Baragan Plain.

That is the so-called Romanian Siberia.

After 5 months we heard that my great-grandfather had frozen to death.

I regard it as a great injustice that we, the Banat Swabians,

should have been thrown into the same pot with Nazi Germany.

We, the Banat Swabians,

started neither the First -, nor the Second World War.

But we were held responsible.

That left me deeply scarred and made me think:

you need to leave this place at some point.

And then sport came to my rescue.

The Floreasca sports hall in the capital.

The Romanian handball players ! in white T-shirts !

have successfully re-entered the arena of world supremacy.

Graduation exam: the difficult match against the world champions,

the Czechoslovakian team, was won definitively by the Romanian players

with a score of 21 to 13!

I was seen as an unpolished diamond

who could, later on, hold the flag of Romanian sport a little higher.

So I enjoyed certain privileges in this state that,

because of my ethnic origins, did not like me so much.

Then we went on a tournament to Hamburg, Essen Rheinhausen, Köln.

I stayed with the team ! we won all the matches!

I was standing there as a German

and they played the Romanian anthem. We all sang it. Me too!

Then the German anthem was played in Kiel or somewhere else

You know how the verse goes:

Two souls are dwelling in my breast!

Well, it wasn't easy.

I defected in Köln, at midnight sharp.

I had no idea about these things.

I went to a man in a pub and asked him:

Do you have your car here?

He confirmed and then things took their course.

I was separated from my family...

I assumed that I wouldn't get to see my parents and my sister,

! to whom I was very attached, for the rest of my life.

Of course, my father lost his position as a doctor.

That was a huge problem.

The death penalty was actually given for what I had done:

defecting to the West.

Since I was a soldier, I would have been condemned to death.

European Cup finals.

Hans Günther Schmidt in the centre.

He is the goal scorer of his club [Vfl Gummersbach].

9 goals in the European Cup finals against Steaua Bucharest alone!

Hansi Schmidt was above all ! for me, of course,

! less so for Genscher, who was not so enthusiastic about sport !

so for me, he was an important and well-known figure in handball.

We knew that he had come here with the Romanian team,

that he had defected and had then been sentenced in Romania.

Then there were extensive amnesty negotiations,

which also cost a lot of money.

The solution was to have Hansi Schmidt given amnesty and thus remove the obstacle

that prevented his parents' and his sister's emigration from Romania.

And it worked.

We said that if they were allowed to leave,

we would make another special payment, which we did.

Hansi Schmidt again!

Yes, the Gummersbacher is really first class!

If I remember well, we paid the equivalent cost of a dentist's equipment:

70.000 ! 72.000 DM.

The fact is that Romanians have fled

and all the German Saxons from Romania have gone away and left the land empty...

So why wonder now that there are more gypsies?

I mean, it is pure mathematics.

That is why there are so many gypsies, because everyone else has fled.

So this was the rear side, the bellows of the organ.

That was probably the upper side... of the bellows,

which was used to pump.

And this used to be there, at the back.

I remember, when we were children, you also helped pump air into the organ

We would do that every now and then.

When I left in 1979, it looked as if it would be another 200 years

before all the Saxons in Transylvania could leave.

And a lot of them wanted to leave!

But then it went quite fast.

Twelve years later, here in this village...

... there were practically no Saxons left.

I had a price.

But when I think that it was somewhere between 2 and 10 thousand DM,

then we were sold quite cheaply, weren't we?

In the 70's, a lot of Transylvanians wanted to leave Romania.

Some, for economic reasons,

others for the love of freedom, more or less.

I left because I could not stand the lying anymore

and I wanted to travel and see the world.

If you can travel ! that is how I imagined it !

then you can come back at some point.

Or you may travel a lot and never come back

because you have found something better somewhere else.

But freedom means being allowed to decide for yourself

where you want to settle down and try your luck.

There was this slogan ! Helmut Schmidt, take us with you!

and on the German side there was the statement in the press:

The Chancellor has taken care of it.

I could not comment on that. And I did not.

... humanitarian issues that regard family reunification

and marriages between citizens of both countries,

based on resolutions confirmed by bilateral and international documents

will continue to be handled in good faith.

They really swindled him. First they raised the price per capita.

Then, there was no guarantee regarding the number of emigrations.

That was already bad enough.

The existence in Romania

of a nationality of German origin,

today Romanian citizens,

should constitute a bridge in developing the relations

between Romania and the Federal Republic of Germany.

I really did not get my hopes up.

I already had a plan to get out one way or another.

I had had enough of the workers' and peasants' paradise!

That was one of my strongest reasons: to get away from the fabrications.

In the last couple of years before my departure,

during and after my military service,

I had recurring contacts with the secret police.

It's known that most people who talked to the Securitate were informers.

Otherwise, the Securitate came and broke your teeth.

How come they did not break your teeth? So you must have been an informer, right?

They hinted repeatedly that we could actually work well together

and that it would be mutually advantageous.

I always played the card of my nationality and said:

How come you want a German?

How come you want me as a collaborator

when my relatives are in Germany?"

Those were considered the least safe people, the greatest traitors

But apparently they wanted me for that very reason.

What bothered me most was their deviousness ! the fact

that they were always so subtle and got you into embarrassing situations

in front of your colleagues, friends and relatives.

In 1979 I arranged to escape with a friend.

We planned it in detail and when the decision was made,

we left Sighișoara quite easily and a couple of days later

we crossed the green border into Yugoslavia.

I was glad to be alive,

and that my bones were sound and that I still had my teeth!

One evening a couple of weeks later, a fellow from the Securitate,

whom I knew, came with another one to my grandfather's door !

! that was in Lörrach [Germany], for I was living at his place.

They wanted to recruit me, they wanted me to work with them,

for the good of Romania.

Probably in Germany, as a Romanian agent.

It wasn't difficult for me to get rid of them.

They went away and I never heard from them again.

Then I left Germany for Switzerland and worked there.

In 1980 I left for Canada.

Something bothered me in Germany.

It was not that half-utopian country that the Saxons,

the ethnic Germans, had dreamt of.

Something was missing.

The human factor, as Graham Greene called it.

Something that should be there.

It is not enough to have a full fridge, to drive the newest car.

What is missing is the human element

I am very grateful that !

this sounds really cynical now, but that's how it is !

that history took the course that it actually did.

I liked to dress well and

wanted to stand out through clothes that came from the West,

for then I would be somehow different,

probably ! I felt ! somewhat better.

That's what I wanted when I was eighteen.

Germany was the country where you could shop to your heart's desire.

I can still well remember a Neckermann slogan:

If to Gina you aspire, Neckermann's for your attire!

They meant Gina Lollobrigida.

And I clearly aspired to Gina!

So I was craving this consumerism!

If the devil had proposed a pact to me, running something like this:

Hartwig, you now have the opportunity to dispense with your past,

with the last 31 years, and replace them

with a purely German experience.

You have no more Romanian background,

I would have accepted this offer with delight in 1976.

Only later did I gradually begin to discover

what a huge treasure it was, and still is, to have this particular background,

namely not altogether German,

not purely German.

And in no way, IN NO WAY, would I want to do away with that.

I am glad that I spent my childhood in Banat and not somewhere in Hessen

and this because I was very well prepared

for the globalised world due to my experience in Banat,

where there were so many national minorities.

My sister came to Romania and took pictures of me.

My sister's boyfriend

went to the passport issuing authority in Frankfurt with my pictures

and applied for a passport with my photos.

Since we were of similar ages and heights, no one noticed.

I had booked a trip to the Bulgarian Black Sea coast,

without an overnight stay ! a 16-hour trip that was approved.

Then in Bulgaria I took his passport and went to Istanbul with it.

And in Istanbul I went to the Hilton Hotel

and I spent two nights there, looking onto the Bosphorus.

I really thought I was entitled to that!

I am frightened when I think about it today, but that's the way it was.

This reconstructed mediaeval tower is what I imagined Germany to be.

These skyscrapers were not here in 1976 yet.

Not one of them, I think!

I was 31 years old back then, I was healthy, well trained.

A couple of years later I already started to pay taxes !

! quite steep taxes!

I think I was a good deal.

If I had something of a cultural shock,

it was the permanent building sites in Frankfurt.

Building sites everywhere! And it is the same today.

Then at some point I complained and someone told me:

that's the way it has to be in healthy capitalism. Building all the time.

If nothing is being built, then it is not good! It seems to be true.

In fact, in Germany too, as Jack, the normal consumer,

you are nothing more than just that ! a consumer.

The man who goes to work in order to earn money

so that he can come home and spend it as fast as possible,

so that he can go back to work the following day,

so that he can have more money in order to buy himself something else

that he absolutely needs and without which he cannot live.

I only want to have a small farm.

That is why I had a reason

to come back to Transylvania and to Romania,

because agriculture is really neglected here.

If you think how much unused land there is here,

how many people work in other countries to earn a couple of euros

and here everything lies untilled

It is a country with a future.

Therefore, the future does not lie in the West for me anymore,

but in the East. That is, in Transylvania.

The decay of the country happened gradually,

so that one could not quite perceive its scope.

But in the early 80's everything happened so fast

It was the showdown!

And suddenly we read in the newspaper and heard on the radio

that the Romanian state had issued a decree

stating that Germans were allowed to emigrate

only after they had paid back all their education costs.

This would have been a very large sum of money for us,

so we would definitely not been able to pay anymore.

And suddenly the state requires you to pay your tuition fees

in foreign currency.

And it was known that this foreign currency

could be obtained either from relatives abroad,

or from the black market. Both ! illegally.

And I spoke to many people: there was general panic!

We would not have wanted the intellectuals ! the engineers, the teachers...

... the lawyers etc. to leave. It is normal!

After having studied free of charge...

For both parties admitted to this:

here you did not pay for high-school, university, Ph.D's and all that.

On the contrary. They were given stipends.

So they were even subsidised!

That is a beautiful lie of the Romanians.

First of all, there were many children; there were many retired people.

The proportion of active population was perhaps a third or a quarter.

We took over the entire burden of retired persons.

We took over the entire burden of the children's education, costs included.

I do not mean burden as imposition, but as expenses.

We were supposedly getting trained people in return.

We could not employ a Romanian teacher here ! even if he was German.

He needed qualifications for that.

These people did not have the money to pay.

So I made a point of this to Ceausescu, so that he should understand

that we did want the people, on the one hand,

but that he should not exaggerate.

The press should write better about our relations.

They always write about what happens.

The more journalists attend, the more balanced coverage we get.

We have found a loanword for that, that is: plurality!

Yes, but let them write the truth!

The ultimate truth, Mr. President, we are in search of.

German foreign minister Genscher negotiated with Romanian president Ceausescu

that the special tax collected over the past months

from Romanians willing to leave the country should be abolished.

Romania had called the now abolished special claim

from emigrants tax on education.

Germany officially announced: Genscher has achieved this.

It was not the case.

It had been stipulated in the agreement for a long time.

The price was the increase of the cost per capita.

Do you want to buy vegetables?

No, but this is worth looking at.

Look, they have lamb gigot. And lamb chops.

But you have to be able to cook it.

42 Euros a kilo!!!

Crazy!

People came from Germany saying my horse, my car etc.

and did not say a word about the rest:

Watch out, homesickness will be a problem.

They will not welcome you with open arms.

You go there and you want something. No one said that.

Not that it would have stopped us.

There was simply no freedom to breathe!

Black!

... a little shadow here...

When you go to a concert that you like, which touches you

words are almost powerless.

Only the feelings matter.

It is stupid to say It was overwhelming!

Maybe it is an exaggeration.

It is difficult to define.

Yes, homeland is like music.

We did not know that Germany was paying for us.

We were not aware of it.

Maybe towards the end

But we did not make the difference between the two types of payment.

We thought that if we were paying, that was all there was to it.

I got into this passport business. Let's call it a business.

The Germans were so naïve,

that if you entered their yard and said: Listen, do you want to leave?

they would look at you and give you the money in 5 seconds.

And so I started little by little

and got to figures you would be astonished to hear.

What range of figures are we talking about?

You can imagine I didn't keep track.

But I would estimate in the millions!

Tens of millions of Deutschmarks, around 7 billion Lei

The German state was paying an amount,

and probably the Romanian Communist Party,

through its good leaders,

was careful to round the sum.

And let me tell you one more thing: no member of the Securitate

or the Police could work without the backing of RCP,

the Romanian Communist Party.

And there,

! pardon my French, which might not go well with television !

there were some cavemen saying: More! Faster! Better!

Things always revolved around two people,

whose names were repeatedly mentioned: Bogdan and Capraru.

This is Nicolae Capraru's house.

Here was the springboard for the Germans, in this house.

It has an entrance in this street,

where they would go in, and an exit in the other street.

Capraru worked with a Securitate officer whom I knew very well.

He told me to keep an eye on him, to take care of him...

How could I keep an eye on him? The Germans were going in

as if it had been Mecca. 20, 30, 50 of them every day. To pay.

Then we rang. At the fence. The house was a little farther away.

And then this man came out, walking slowly, grumpily.

What did he say? Ce vreti?

What do you want?

We want to go to Germany.

Education?

Philology: 14,000 DM.

Polytechnics: 16,000 DM.

Children? 10 years old. They don't have to pay.

For me it was 6,000 DM. For my husband, who had a degree: 12,000 DM.

So a total of 18,000 DM. The daughter was still a minor.

She did not have to pay.

The kitchen table was a greenish wooden table.

And on it ! plenty of one hundred DM notes.

All blue. In little stacks, but this high.

The recklessness of the payments

and the lack of any guarantee

You didn't even get a receipt or anything!

You just gave him 15,000 DM...

and he lived in an absolutely regular house

I had also heard of people who had already paid

and had been waiting for their passport for 10 years and it had not come

I had no confidence in that system.

I did not know about that; it would only have increased my aversion.

But that would not have made a difference.

I was not a key minister or a major politician,

but my personal aversion would have been increased,

thinking that we have to pay a load of money to this Ceausescu,

this unlikeable character, so we can ransom people,

and then these people there have to pay extra money

so they can get out of there.

That was just an additional disgrace, to be honest.

You should have seen the demand And I wasn't the only one handling it all.

I told you there were several networks.

And not only in Timisoara, but also in Brasov, Arad, Bucharest, etc.

I stepped into a church.

The priest went:

We thank the Lord that there are 5,200 of us,

we are ethnic Germans, and so on...

A month later: We thank the Lord that there are 4.400 of us left,

700 have gone away, etc.

This happened once, twice and then the third time

the priest said: Herr Bucur, when do I get to leave?"

They knew me by now.

Don't you think the people who'd paid waited quietly.

I talked to him and... in the end, the priest left too.

He just closed up shop and left.

And then a call from Capraru!

He had never called before.

No, never!

You can come now.

So we went, buoyantly, grinning from ear to ear

We got there and then Capraru was the first to come out.

In handcuffs. And then Bucur came out and said:

So! You all want to go to Germany, do you?

I'll show you Germany, he said in his offhand manner.

And him... him we'll lock up straight away.

He meant Capraru. Well, that sounded convincing.

I caught Nicolae Capraru from Timisoara red-handed,

carrying 2,211,000 German marks.

Of course I arrested him and took him to the Police Department in Timis

in order to investigate him.

But no sooner did I set foot in the Police HQ

than I was called in for questioning.

And my colleagues from the Securitate told me to leave Capraru alone,

to let him go on with his business but to watch him.

I could have lifted Capraru ! catching him with foreign currency !

and opened a case file on him. He would have gone to prison.

Prosecution... all by the book.

So that I shouldn't do that,

they allowed me to confiscate some money from him every now and again.

And those were, so to speak, the achievements of the Police.

But the money came... Let's say it got into my hands.

I had to draw up minutes and then hand it in.

This money ended up in the Romanian Foreign Trade Bank.

I kindly ask you to go now, people are starting to gather round.

Three people have come out already.

Of course it was a huge burden for the Germans who wanted to leave.

We did not want that. And it affected our prices.

Large sums were paid. I know cases ! 42,000 Deutschmark...

And cases of even larger amounts have been reported.

And we paid four, five or seven thousand!

Those who left for good had the right to take a 70-kilo parcel.

People who left as tourists took their bags.

They just carried a bag and that was that.

And then he [Bucur] came and showed us: These are your passports.

We got tourist passports.

We knew that we would lock up our house,

our two-room apartment, get into the car and drive off!

And that it would be a one-way road!

Then, when we arrived at a transit camp in Karlsruhe, we realized:

Goodness, we've got debts of 30,000 DM to repay to our friends!

One of our friends had even taken a loan from the bank.

And so, for a year we scraped money together and

saved, saved, saved!

On this land, Romanians, Germans,

Hungarians and other nationalities

have been living and working together for centuries.

It stands to reason that everyone

can learn in their own language in schools,

that they can organise cultural activities in their own language.

But also together!

We knew that the Securitate...

... was keeping an eye on us.

I think the best way to understand this

is to read the poetry published in German in those years.

It is imbued with melancholy and an apocalyptic atmosphere.

And hopelessness.

There was no meaning there. The sun was up, above the stadium.

There had been no meaning there for a long time.

Soon it would get cold again.

And the next loathsome winter would come,

and the president's next loathsome speeches

and the next shortage, the next weeks without milk,

the next days without bread,

the evenings without electricity, the next media rubbish,

the next ID check, the next humiliation and the one after that.

It was enough.

Stirner looked over the stadium.

Behind it was the gloomy steaming industry, the silent country.

He stood up, went to the cupboard, placed the typewriter on the table,

took the cover off, inserted two sheets of paper into it,

carbon-paper in-between, and started to type:

To the passport office.

We hereby apply for permanent emigration.

Our reasons are...

Many people risked a lot by applying for emigration.

By applying for emigration, you became an enemy of the people.

There was no official form by which you could apply.

There were hand-written models;

you knew what the application should contain from those who had applied before.

Then one learned from clerks, typists -

who had secretly typed

- what this application that people filled in should contain,

and these forms circulated on the black market.

I applied for emigration in 1986.

Because I couldn't see any possibility of living in this country anymore.

We knew, for example, that we, German-speaking writers,

would not be able to live in this country anymore.

This railway station will stay in the memory of all the Germans in Banat,

or of those who have emigrated.

The night that they spent here was the night

when they said goodbye to their relatives,

and they always had the feeling that it was goodbye forever,

as one didn't know back then

whether one would ever return to this country.

Then everything was programmed according to a certain timetable.

People had to be there before midnight.

The train left in the morning around 5.

Then the relatives were all thrown out of the waiting room

and only the person who was leaving was allowed to stay.

Then they were lined up here on the platform,

guarded by soldiers with machine guns and sometimes with dogs.

Then you took your suitcase after having gone through customs.

Then you got on the train.

In a file and under command,

... like convicts.

They made people feel that they were betraying their fatherland.

These are emotional moments that keep coming to your mind.

It was actually the saddest moment of the emigration,

because you knew it was the end.

Not the beginning!

We left from the Curtici border crossing.

With a heavy heart, having left half of our life back there.

It was always so uncertain

you didn't know when you would see each other again.

We were tired and heading for an uncertain future.

You also worried about the family that stayed behind.

It was not easy.

The bus! The bus is coming!

We came to the country of our ancestors.

We definitely had that feeling. We were prepared for that.

We had always known that, we had always carried that within us.

Namely that we had always been Germans.

We came from the only Eastern Bloc country

in which Germans had had the freedom to speak their language.

We were very fortunate, we must say!

This even included being able to take a German Abitur in Romania,

so we didn't have any language problems.

This was a very great advantage for us!

The adaptation was difficult

because things here were quite different from a dictatorship.

But we were so positive

and only wished to find a job

and integrate more or less into the new environment.

We managed to do that quite fast and well.

And we were grateful for that.

When the Soviet Union broke off relations with the West at the end of 1983,

all the arrangements for visits to Germany were cancelled.

Whether it was Honecker, who had already been invited,

or the Polish president, whatever his name was,

they all cancelled, under pressure from the Soviet Union.

Only one came. Ceausescu ! whom we actually wanted the least.

But he came!

Kohl said: If we manage to get that hardliner, Ceausescu, to relent,

then the last hardliner Honecker,

in whose behaviour we are very interested,

will not be able to resist.

We would also make humanitarian improvements.

This man did not accept to be dependent.

That is, if he lacked funds,

he would not settle matters at his own expense,

but at the expense of his people.

Just look at his decision to repay all the external debt of the state:

he let his people live in such poverty!

What people endured in Romania back then was almost unbearable.

This man was utterly ruthless.

Romania has no external debt left,

it no longer pays tribute to anyone and is truly independent,

both economically and politically!

Oddly enough, it wasn't just us, but the entire population

who were convinced that it could not go on like this.

On the other hand, however, people lived with the fear

that this regime would last forever.

So this was a contradiction in itself:

they saw the end but they were also afraid that it wouldn't come.

And that it would get even worse.

The whole country suffered from a psychosis of fear

and despair, of bitterness.

There was an apocalyptic atmosphere!

He terminated our agreement on 4 December 1989

and fell from power on 20-22 December.

Dear viewers, Nicolae Ceausescu and Elena Ceausescu

have been detained by groups of citizens and soldiers

while trying to flee abroad.

This one isn't working!

This one must be tuned first,

and then the sound will be beautiful and pure!

We'll do it next time!

Andronic! Last action...

We had no winner, it was an equal result.

Everybody lost and everybody gained. It was a win-win situation.

That's the most important point.

If yourself believe you are the winner, you shouldn't show it.

It was first of all a humanitarian question.

From our point of view. From yours and from ours.

No, it was business. No, it was business!

We didn't consider it business because it...

... it was a business...

Lost? Lost!

Loss of people, indeed, but gain of money.

A gain of money, lots of it...

I agree it was a great loss for Romania and a gain for Germany.

But mostly it was a gain for liberty.

That's right! And humanity.

But the liberty cost you cannot evaluate.

Yeah, we are thinking in the field of human rights...

Why did it have to happen this way?

Why did fate deal us this card?

Why did we have to walk this hard road?

The operation was profitable for the Federal Republic,

not only for the people in question.

I mean, we won back our fellow countrymen.

Their knowledge, their expertise,

their cultural input ! we won it all back, to ourselves, so to speak.

I feel very good here. I particularly feel very good in Bavaria!

I am happy with my life as it is!

As Romans used to say: veni, vidi, and then we'll see what happens!

And now we'll see what happens in Transylvania, right?

I bow to Germany! All my respect!

If someone else, other than Bucur, maybe a second Bucur,

had asked for one more payment, rest assured that the Germans

would have paid ! only to be able to take home their own people.

The reunification of the nation: you'll never see Romanians do that!

For all its brutal nature, it all went so smoothly!

We were able to help over 300,000 people.

What more could one wish for?

One can only say: Thank You, dear God!

Shall I hold this glass now? No. Just drink a bit.

See how everything is ruined there!

And how many children are there in this village?

Lots! - How many? 20, 30, 50?

... and he says to my husband: Why did you marry a German?

And how do you get along with the Germans?

Shall I tell you something...? No. Just shut up.