There are still chinks in the armour that has sealed off East Berlin since the early hours of Sunday morning, and in the last 12 hours brave and desperate men and women have found them to escape.
They are now queueing at the refugee reception centre at Marienfelde with thousands of others who came across to West Berlin on Friday or Saturday before the frontier was closed to spend the weekend with relatives, prepared to stay if the worst happened but ready to go back if it looked as if their own escape route would remain open.
Marienfelde is bursting at the seams; between midday Saturday and 4 p.m. today 6,904 refugees registered and many hundreds more with friends to stay with have been told to report back for registration tomorrow or Wednesday.
A woman railway worker on the S-Bahn had been allowed to go to her work this morning as the S-Bahn is staffed by East Germans. She slipped out of the office and an hour later was among the refugees in her uniform. Two young men got into a house facing the railway line which at this point forms the frontier. Yesterday at 5 p.m. they jumped through a window and made a dash across the lines.
Another man crept through a cemetery aided by signals from West Germans in the window of a house opposite who kept watch on the armed police patrolling.
A young couple took their 6-year-old sons to a frontier post. He slipped past the guard into the crowd of watching West Germans. They begged to be allowed to get him back, and on receiving permission disappeared themselves.
