Since We’re Giving Thanks & the Subject of East Germany Came Up Recently…

...here's a Glenn Sacks East German travel story, circa 1984:

I was traveling late at night in a train through Czechoslovakia on my way to East Germany in the early 1980s. This was back in the communist era, and an American traveling alone in that part of the world was a rare sight, particularly a 19-year-old.

One time the train stopped and some police or security guards got on. They demanded my ticket and, for some unimaginable reason, I had lost it and could not find it. I also did not have any more money on me.

Two guards grabbed me and started dragging me down the hall of the train to throw me off. I would either spend the night alone outside in the cold some little town out in the middle of nowhere, or be taken to the police station and held or perhaps even jailed.

As they dragged me down the hall I grabbed the door of one of the compartments and quickly asked for money in Russian and in German, two languages which I had studied.

As they were about to drag me away, a gentleman named Helmut Hoppe from East Germany stood up and said he would pay for me. He paid for my ticket all the way to East Berlin, where I was able to get some money.

I told him how grateful I was for his assistance, and asked him what I could do for him.

Oddly, he told me that he was a tremendous fan of the Beach Boys, who he had heard on the radio from West Germany, and he asked me to send him some Beach Boys records. Not surprisingly, Beach Boys records were not sold nor played on the radio in East Germany at that time.

When I got back to the United States a few months later, I bought a couple Beach Boys records and mailed them to him. The packages came back stamped "Verboten" (forbidden). I tried to send him a tape, and it also came back.

After the Berlin wall came down in 1989, I looked for his address but I had lost it. I felt a little guilty for a long time that this man had helped me so greatly, and I had never been able to send him his Beach Boys records.

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