Yeah, we got on a train to Yugoslavia (Sarajevo I think) and got off in Prague and my dad left for a couple hours to buy tickets to West Germany for us all. That part wasn't so hard, from what he said, you just had to navigate the bureaucratic nonsense properly and you could get your tickets, the problem was actually using them and getting through the border.
This was all planned years in advance, my parents knew they wanted to leave the country pretty early on in their marriage, they didn't want to raise a family there. Mind you me and my 2 sisters were already born when we left, I was 8 and my sisters were 5 and 2 or something like that. So staying at immigration camps was hard on us, but now we're well established and financially secure in Canada so it was worth it.
They couldn't tell us about any of the plan in advance, because of the risk of us telling a friend or someone at school. So for all I knew we were going on our first ever summer vacation to another country. We packed for such a trip too, and didn't take anything that would look out of place... such as clothes for other seasons, valuables, etc. I think my grandparents (from my mother's side) were the only people who knew. The story of my grandpa is that during world war 2, all his brothers changed their name to the German version and joined the Hitler youth. My grandpa was the only one who refused, and instead went into hiding and had to steal food from the Germans to feed the family. So.. If you had a secret plan that involves giving a big middle finger to the enemy in charge of our country at the time, and it involved something being done for the family, my grandpa was a guy you could trust.. with your life.
My dad travelled every once in a while, that was allowed under communism under specific conditions. If you had a family that stayed behind while you travelled somewhere in the west for example, and you filled out all the right paperwork and figured out how to traverse all the stupid communist bureaucracy, and you waited a year or two or however long, eventually you might be allowed to travel to Austria, or wherever. So my dad went on a couple trips like that and I think figured out a lot of the bureaucracy. I know he hated it. I vividly remember still as some boating authorities took away his boating license once because he sat on the boat the wrong way. He understood that he shouldn't have done that, but the problem was that he knew that due to all the bureaucracy it would take him literally years to get his license back. It wasn't because that was the punishment, but it was just a horribly inefficient system and everything took a super long time. So basically he said "F it" and forgot all about his license, because it wasn't worth the hassle trying to get it back. So anyway, my parents are both relatively bright individuals, they both have physics degrees, were teachers in Poland, which all in all doesn't mean a thing I know, but they sat down and figured out what would need to happen if we wanted to leave. They came out with a plan and it worked. T
The one thing that didn't work was that when we got off the train in West Germany, the only thing we could do is try to contact my aunt. Some 2nd or 3rd removed type aunt, or something like that, but my dad basically bought us train tickets to the city where she lived in West Germany. She had no idea we were coming, and the only plan we had was to call her. Well, she didn't pick up. This was well before cellphones of course.. so all we could do is wait around and call her from a payphone every half hour and hope for the best. Well, eventually it got dark and we were basically there with nothing except all the stuff you might take on a summer vacation to Yugoslavia. Which doesn't include much money or many things you can sell to acquire money. So staying at a hotel was right out. We had no choice but to go to the closest police station and explain that we are refugees. When you do that they put you in a refugee camp and they move you to another one a couple weeks later. Then to another one, Then another.. and on and on until they find a house or apartment for you to live in. Temporarily, until you figure out if you want to stay in Germany forever and try to make a life for yourself there or if you want to apply for asylum in another country. My parents' plan was to end up in a country where English was spoken, since my dad spoke English fairly well and even taught it. We considered every country where English is spoken except India, I think, but Canada was the easiest to get accepted to, so we ended up there. My parents wrote a letter to every single Polish parish in Canada to try to find a sponsor, which is a part of the deal. We only got 3 responses, and only 1 of them said they would cover everything and we wouldn't have to pay anything back. Which is why we ended up where we did, in southwestern Ontario, about 3 and a half years after we crossed the iron curtain.
A couple years after that the iron curtain was no more.. and our country was free, once again, after so many years. We never thought of returning though, Canada has been amazing to us and we've fallen in love with it. All of our next-generation families are planting their seeds here.
