Boy Meets Freedom

Flickering klieg lights lit the sky on one spot along an East-West Berlin frontier one night last week. American Movie Director Victor Vicas was shooting a film called No Way Back. The plot: boy soldier in the Soviet zone meets German girl, boy loves girl, boy and girl flee to freedom in the West. Cameras whirred, the "Red" leading man escaped the Vopo extras amidst a spatter of fake bullets, someone yelled "Cut!" and the director got ready for the next scene.

An assistant director beckoned Vicas into the shadowy ruins near by. There stood a trembling, high-cheekboned lad in Soviet uniform. "Ich Kamerad," he said. "Bringen Amerikansky Offizier!"

Ninety minutes earlier, Private Leonid Ashkhenin of the Red army, Tommy gun slung across his chest, had paced back & forth guarding the showy marble Russian war memorial in Berlin's British sector. He had orders to bar visitors at night, but an elderly German couple had strolled by, and Leonid let them pass. A Red lieutenant came out of the guard shack, snapped at Ashkhenin: "For what you just did, you can be shot tomorrow."

This decided Ashkhenin, a 20-year-old draftee from a village in the Urals. A moment after the officer left, he scampered across the street into the densely shrubbed Tiergarten, and hid out there, hugging the ground, while a Russian party tried to find him. Then he ripped off his epaulettes, tossed away his Tommy gun and ran toward the first lights he could see, the kliegs of No Way Back.

Director Vicas, who is Russian-born, heard the soldier's story and then asked him: "Boy, have you thought what you've done? If you go back, they'll punish you, certainly. But this way, you'll never again see your mother or your friends."

"I cannot go back," said Ashkhenin.

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