East German Refugees Filled With Hope, Fear;Village Opens Its Heart to Newcomers
For the last five years, Katrin Clif lived in a single room with no bath, not even a sink. She was a sales clerk in a store that had nothing to sell, and she had a 2-year-old son with no toys and not much of a future.</br></br>Last Friday, in a small village near Potsdam in East Germany, Clif, 21, took out her only suitcase, put in clothes for herself and her son, and called her mother to say she was leaving, perhaps forever.</br></br>"My mother said, `You are young and you should be free,' " Clif recalled today. "We live only once. There is no going back."</br></br>Saying nothing to anyone else, mother and son left home, boarded a train and headed for the West. Clif had heard rumors of a breach in the Berlin Wall, but she was not sure whether to believe them, so she went to Czechoslovakia and crossed from there into West Germany and the helping hands of the West German Red Cross.</br></br>Now, less than 48 hours after leaving home, she is in the Rhine Valley village of Meckenheim, a place of apple orchards and pretty churches-in another Germany, another world. Clif and 842 other East Germans who have arrived here since Saturday are packed into a cavernous garage crammed with bunk beds, waiting for housing and jobs so they can begin new lives in a place they have seen only on West German TV, which almost all East Germans can watch.