“A year later I went
back to the country and stole my wife. Nobody knew I was coming.”
Albani had no idea what happened to the unassembled submarine
he had abandoned when he escaped to France and never returned. He had sent
drawings to each factory to manufacture the parts. The authorities had no idea
what he was going to make with all these separate sections; some of them were
conical, like a piece of pipe, with flanges and bolts; they looked like
something designed by an idiot who did not know how to do a flange because his
flanges were inside instead of outside.
Once he escaped, Albani hatched a plan to bring his wife to
Paris. “I made a trick car because I wanted to steal more people, not just my
wife. But my best friend escaped too and my plan now focused solely on her. I
modified the car in such a way as to fit her in.”
How did he get away with stealing her without papers and
hiding her in a car across so many borders? Albani answered with pride and
aplomb: “I’m an engineer.”
There is a modified Volkswagen in the International Spy
Museum in Washington, D.C., in which people have been hidden and taken across Checkpoint
Charlie between East and West Berlin. The two sides were separated by the heavily
guarded Berlin Wall of Shame built by East German communists who wanted to keep
their oppressed subjects inside the “socially just and egalitarian communist
paradise” they built for their citizens. It was such a miserable “paradise”
that people were willing to chance being shot and possibly die in order to
escape it.
From August 13, 1961 until November 9, 1989 the Berlin Wall
was a stark reminder of the division between the free west and the communist-enslaved
east. Before the Berlin Wall was erected, 3.5 million East Germans managed to
cross the border between East and West Berlin. After 1961, there were few
successful attempts to cross by low flying aircraft, running through the barbed
wire, hidden in cars, and other unconventional means. But many were shot and died trying to escape.
The Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam gives the official figure of
those who died trying to flee to freedom at 138, from an infant to an 80-year
old woman, but researchers at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum estimate the death
toll to be significantly higher.
Albani hid his wife inside the modified rear bench. He
created a slight space; the floor went down two inches in the Citroen DS by
cutting the springs much shorter, taking the cover and reversing it. The space
was far from comfortable; it was a fetal position inside the bench. He sized
the space by using his friend who knew what he was going to do.
To throw off the sniffing dogs at the border, he used a
spray repellant for animals. “Maybe it was Tiger Balm,” he joked.
While in Paris, Albani toyed with the idea of a phony
passport for himself and his wife but it was very difficult to alter a French passport.
The pictures had small rivets on which Republique française was written in very small font, and you
needed a microscope to see them. Counterfeiting such a passport was impossible.
A very good friend, a Moroccan Jew with a lot of dark and curly hair like him
offered his passport. “But I don’t look like you. But I don’t look like myself
either.” He showed Albani his passport. This man was 22 years old and Albani
was 28. The saving grace was that the passport had been issued when he was 14
and he did not look like himself either.
“You don’t have to change the picture! Look at all the
countries I went through with this passport.” Indeed, there were 45 visas, from
Iran, to Nepal, to France, Sweden, to Germany. “Nobody stopped me; I went all
over the world.” And he did, he had lots of entry stamps. The French passport was good for 16 years,
until the age of 30. Albani took his passport.
After posting an ad on a college campus that he was going to
Romania with his best friend, a really good driver, and had two seats available
in the car, three guys called and asked how Romania was, they wanted to go. It
was fashionable to hitchhike. “I chose my married friend who had a week old
baby. He risked his life to come with me to get my wife. The other three guys had
no idea what we were going to do.”
To make the trip even more dangerous, Albani foolishly bought
a BB gun, a high speed, high precision target practice gun as a gift for his
sister and put it in his luggage.
It was still dark when they left at 4 a.m. in a completely
modified Citroen DS. Their intended route was through Germany, Austria,
Hungary, and then Romania. They were driving through Paris, in a roundabout, had
just entered it, when two gendarmes, very tough guys, on motorcycles with
machine guns on their backs, cut them off, almost hitting a wall. The other cop
drove and stopped by the driver’s side and put a gun to his head, literally touching
it. They spread eagle the rest of us on the car and on the nearby wall. More gendarmes
arrived for backup. They checked the luggage and I.D.
Apologizing for inconveniencing them, the gendarmes explained
that four hippie looking guys had broken into a bank 20 minutes earlier and
killed the guard. They were looking for those culprits who were armed with
machine guns.
“They let us go, very apologetic, you can make a complaint,
but someone was killed, and they were driving the same red Citroen DS like you.
When they stopped us, I almost peed in my pants. The whole time, I was thinking about my
sister’s BB gun, my modified car, and I just knew we would wind up in jail. My
French friend did not know I had the BB gun, I told him later, he said I was
crazy. It looked like a real gun.”
Getting closer to the German border, with his friend driving
like a maniac, 100 mph, rotating lights appeared in the rear view mirror and they
had to stop. But the poor cop on the motorcycle did not see the blocked isle
for a bus stop and he hit the concrete side and spun wildly all over the road but
recovered. Visibly shaken, he asked for IDs.
The passengers were scared that he was going to arrest them
for driving so fast. But he told them to slow down and let them go very
graciously without a ticket.
The German border guards pored over Albani’s French passport
but let him go. The stop at the Austrian border was short. But then they got to
Hungary, a strict communist country. There was barbed wire everywhere, control
towers, guns, lights; it was frightening, dozens and dozens of cops armed to
their teeth.
In no time their luggage was spread in the grass, and everything
was taken out of the car; they were looking for contraband, cassette recorders,
western goods, Kent cigarettes, cosmetics, foreign currency. But they found
nothing.
“We got to the Romanian border, guards were lazy, moving
around very slowly, but checked the papers very carefully. We spoke only
French. I was in the car, inching our way in line. A cop, military guy, with a
gun from 1916, probably our age or younger, was looking at our smart car, never
saw a Citroen before. He checked the car
out; I opened the hood, the trunk, etc. He tested the seats, but the springs in
the rear benches were much shorter which made the bench quite stiff. Why is the
back bench so hard, he asked?”
He pulled the bench; they were in such a rush to leave, Albani
forgot to bolt the bench back in place. He pulled the bench and saw the cover,
some dirt, glue, straw, a penny; all set up to look like a bench would look. He
could have pulled the cover easily and revealed the hidden space, but, once
again, they got lucky, he never did.
On the way to Cluj, they stopped in a village to eat Romanian
meat balls called “mititei.” It was Sunday, everyone was out drinking, the
smell of grilling meat was overpowering; a guy came by and, in his drunken
stupor, called them bastard capitalists and threw a rock through the rear door
window and shattered it.
The local policeman was horrified and forced him to pay for
the window. The cop was very apologetic to the foreign visitors. The poor drunk
looked like he could hardly afford to pay for his booze much less replace the
broken window. They declined and left in
a hurry.
They replaced the window with a piece of plastic which took
a really long time to find in the miserable “socialist paradise,” where it was
hard to even find a piece of plastic on the black market at ten times the
price.
The trio found two girls infatuated with “foreigners” and they
offered them free overnight accommodations in their homes; if caught, this
generous offer would have landed them all in jail. They visited the old city and
churches in Cluj and then went to Feleac. They had to cross a ditch, Albani
asked the driver to raise the hydraulic suspension of the Citroen in order to
avoid being stuck but he declined. He was sure the Citroen could handle it. Once
in the ditch, the cap of the low-hanging gas tank sheared off and the gas
drained everywhere.
The girls helped push the car onto the highway, but the gas
tank was now empty. “We could not fix it, what do you do, go to a garage and
say, hey, I have a modified compartment with a gas tank hanging too low, would
you fix our sheared gas cap? You have a gas tank under the driver’s seat? Boom.”
They went into the city, knowing that copper pipe was impossible
to find. At that time, nothing could be found in Romania unless it was bought
on the black market. But Albani bought two plastic tanks in a warehouse by bribing
one worker willing to sell it to him.
“I had to become Romanian again because you could not wheel
and deal in a warehouse as a foreigner.” To appear Romanian, he had to cut his
hippie hair into a “fashionable” crew cut and ditch the western clothes because
they were too easily identifiable, the quality was “too good.”
It was illegal in Romania at the time to have long hair. If
the police caught you, they shaved your head. An actor was trapped once in a daily
occurring raid in Bucharest; he was playing a hippie role in a movie and needed
long hair for the duration of filming. Cops shaved his head and he had to
finish the movie with a wig.
Accidentally pulling out foreign money out of his pocket
instead of Romanian lei, Albani explained to the barber that he had just
returned from Germany and that’s why he had French francs. For owning foreign
currency, Albani could have gotten a year in jail, it was the minimum
punishment. Again, luck was on his side. Barbers and hairdressers were information
collectors for the secret police, they were compensated informants and everyone
knew that. He paid quickly and disappeared.
“I had a capped canister of 10 gallons of fuel in the car
and that is how we drove all the way to Paris. I found a small tank of two
quarts to put it in the engine compartment when crossing the border. It was
red, so I had to find black paint. Black paint was not available but I did find
some tar for roofs and made the small tank black. We left, it was raining
heavily and we had a broken window in the back. Nearing Bucharest, a green
secret police jeep followed us, passed us, looked inside, we had French plates,
we were driving by the book, we found them two miles later stopped on the right.
It happened three times. Later we realized they were picking up hitchhikers from
various villages and dropping them off to make extra money and to get a bag of
potatoes, onions, or a live chicken.” It was still cheaper to travel this way
instead of taking the rickety state bus.
They made it to Bucharest too early in the day and could not
find his wife. They drove twice around Bucharest to kill some time and then
stopped in a coffee shop. Seated next to them was a former colleague from
IPROMET with a good memory of faces. “Albani, I thought you defected to France
a year ago.” He pretended to be the Frenchmen he impersonated while his heart
was beating hard and beads of sweat were forming on his brow.
Finally, it was dark enough and drove to Marin’s apartment
who was to bring his wife to him. Instead of Marin opening the door, an older
acquaintance, a full bird colonel in the Secret Police invited them in. Albani
froze.
“Come in, have a drink, what are you doing here, why did you
come back? He knew everything. I went to college; I came back because I did not
like France. I gave him a snow job. I thought momentarily, when survival
instinct kicked in, about hitting him on the head with a heavy seltzer bottle
nearby.”
When Marin returned, Albani found out that this colonel had
been kicked out of his apartment by his estranged wife. He was a very good rugby
player from a team that was sponsored by the Secret Police. The biggest rivalry
at the time was between the railroad workers union, the secret police, and the
military. Each sponsored a team and conferred high ranks on the best players. “As it turned out, he was not a squealer, he
was one of us. He never talked. One year later he died in a car accident. It
was pretty sad.”
Marin left to pick up Albani’s wife. She was living in a
building that was adjacent to the Secret Police headquarters that was guarding
the president. You cannot make this stuff up. The villa had all the communication
equipment and, in summer time when the windows were open, you could hear all
the radio police chatter.
Fate intervened again – his wife was not home. She knew Albani
was coming but was in Brasov with her sick mother. He had sent her a note on thin paper placed
inside a pen with General De Gaulle’s picture on it. He had called and emphasized
the word “general” several times. She eventually
understood and read the note inside the pen. Henri, his French driver friend,
and Marin went to Brasov and told her to take a few things, and, when the car
stopped at the curb, to jump in. They drove back to Bucharest and left for
Paris.
Choosing the Yugoslavia, Italy, and France route, they
stopped at the border with Yugoslavia and had to cross a ditch filled with a
chemical to prevent mad cow disease. Luckily, the ditch was only 2-3 inches
deep and did not plug up the breathing hole of the compartment where his wife
was hiding. But the chemical fumes were terrible. Maybe Albani’s animal spray
deterrent worked or the dogs smelled the chemical in the ditch, they did not
react when sniffing the Citroen’s back bench.
At border crossings, there were only two passengers in the
car, Henri and Albani. The third Frenchman stayed in Romania for more
sightseeing. Driving through each country, Albani’s wife would come out of her
hiding.
“I went inside to have the passports stamped and some guy
told me in Romanian, even though I had French documents and was dressed in
western clothes, driving a Citroen DS, didn’t you pass by one year ago, which
was true. I did not react. He said again, looking sideways, you passed by here
a year ago. Again, I did not react. He stamped the passport and we left.”
Between Romania and Yugoslavia, there was no sign telling them
how far they were from the border and at some point, the border suddenly appeared,
two blocks away. And his wife was
sitting in the car, no passport, no nothing.
So they pulled into a field of corn, put her in and crossed the border.
The road eventually ended into a Yugoslavian checkpoint in
the mountains, they could not even turn around. They stopped in the small
parking lot to put his wife in again. They opened both back doors and acted like
he was cleaning the car of trash. Henri went in to buy some candy. There was no
time to be scared. As they inched toward
the border, the car started sputtering and died.
It was the crossing point down to Trieste. The guards were
nice, pulled back the car and promised to fix it. “Don’t worry, you don’t have
parts here. The road is going down. It’s
a spark plug. They pushed the car onto the Italian side, into the parking lot
in Italy, and checked our papers. I took my wife out of the hiding spot later. Apparently,
I had forgotten to reconnect the two tanks, the fake and the real one.”
She almost died in the Mont Blanc tunnel; they did not know how
long it was and that they had to drive through it for 40 minutes.
“It was night time, the ventilation was not good, the border
was right before the tunnel and I could not stop and take her out, so she
stayed in for the entire Mont Blanc tunnel. When she came out, she was coughing
and choking.”
In France they were all in the car, Henri was driving like a
maniac, the car was not insured, as if it mattered at this point. They had insured
the car by phone for two days only and were not sure if it was still valid. Stopped
for speeding, they had to explain why his wife had a Romanian I.D. card.
Sent to the Paris prefecture to declare her, the police took
them to the Secret Police and they just knew that they would be arrested and
fined. Instead, the policemen laughed heartily. “We just knew our border guards
were stupid, anybody can come through, and they have no idea what they are
doing. They can’t catch anybody even if they import a tank.” Asked if she was
persecuted in Romania, and after answering yes, the secret police issued her
papers to stay in France.
So she made it to Paris and to the free world with a lot of
luck and God’s providence. But, they did not live happily ever after - they were
married “ten years minus three hours,” as Albani likes to say. They immigrated across
the ocean to the land of the free where they both still reside today.
Copyright: ILEANA JOHNSON 2016
