From Ivan@mindspring.com Sat May 11 09:51:28 EDT 1996 Article: 32290 of soc.culture.bulgaria Path: news.cs.columbia.edu!news.columbia.edu!panix!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in1.uu.net!news.mindspring.com!usenet From: Crazy Newsgroups: soc.culture.bulgaria Subject: The Border Date: Fri, 10 May 1996 15:14:03 -0700 Organization: MindSpring Enterprises Lines: 478 Message-ID: <3193BFAB.1579@mindspring.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: ivan.mindspring.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.0 (Win16; I) Status: RO ------------------------------------------------------------------------- DISCLAIMER: The material below (as well as the previous part named Escape) is copyrighted and it is not in the public domain. Thus, you cannot publish it in any form (Web pages included), copy it, forward it, distribute it or store it unless you have the author’s permission to do so. The events described are to a large extend autobiographical and factual, with few exceptions in regards to numbers and technical details of the actual security measures at the border. Some minor things were omitted while others were added, in the interest of Bulgaria’s national security. Also, what is described took place in mid 80s and much has changed since. Needless to say, the material is intended for entertaining purposes only. Ivan Vasilev, ivan@mindspring.com, May 1996 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Part II THE BORDER “Give me liberty or give me death.” Patrick Henry Having mentioned all these ways of getting out, one had to wonder if escaping was that difficult to begin with. Gee, the esteemed readership may remark, you had this bazillion options - at least one of them should work with no problems. Easy to say, but so hard to do. Most of these options were only a theoretical possibility, at least as far as I was concerned. Note that any information that trickled through the grapevines, was there because someone had FAILED to make it, someone got caught, someone got shot, someone broke his spine in fifteen different places falling out of a train. That was the kind of information that you were able to get. If anyone made it using a particular route, you never heard of it. He was out and gone - no one to talk about it, no one to discuss it. Even the Radio Free Europe, the most “subversive” of all subversive radio stations in Bulgaria, a station whose budget was funded directly by the CIA and a station ran at those times largely by Bulgarian émigrés, did not give out specific details on how to run away. They either didn’t know, either, for some reason, would not broadcast it. Whatever you learned, you learned internally, from the failures of others. The successes were always silent. It made you wonder, if all these people are failing at one thing or another, should YOU try it? These news were always welcomed, but they were at the same time most depressing. To me, the choices were rather limited and once I got to the bottom of it, the only way for me to get out was through the Yugoslavian border. Turkey and Greece were not a suitable choice. I knew nobody there. I had no Greek or Turkish heritage. There were no refugee camps in either Turkey nor Greece. Once in a while you might hear that a family or two of refugees have sought a political asylum in Greece and had received it. More often than not, you’d hear about people who were denied a refugee status and returned to Bulgaria. The Greeks were good people, but they had no reasons for pissing off the Bulgarian government (with which they were trying to maintain friendly relations) and some young dumbass who wanted to go west was a small fish to fry. Furthermore, they had no administrative mechanism to deal with this sort of thing. If one was accommodated, others would follow and they’d be swamped with refugees in a hurry. So for every one person they helped, there were ten others they returned. The situation in Turkey was even worse. Unless you were an ethnic Turk (which I wasn’t), you had to have a lot of balls to show up your sweet, Bulgarian ass in Ankara and ask for an asylum. Turks just plainly disliked Bulgarians and didn’t trust us. As far as they were concerned, you could be a Soviet spy. They’d keep you in jail and beat you to death, trying to get your spy-story. They’d beat you so badly, that if you didn’t have a spy story, you’d invent one, just to make them happy. Then it was jail time. And if you heard anything about Turkish jails, you should know that it is worst than rumored! Things with our southern neighbors were complicated by the fact that both Greece and Turkey were NATO members while Bulgaria was in the Warsaw Pact. What that meant was that the border was packed with guards. The place was as tight as a 15 years old virgin’s ass and if you think that you could go through it undetected, you must think of yourself as of an odorless, silent, and undetectable fart, passed by the above mentioned virgin in the deadest hour of the night. Was it impossible? Not really. Rumor had it that you could pay a “guide” some serious money and he could smuggle you out. How much you could trust a guide? I personally trusted no one. Besides, more often than not these “guides” were leading groups across the border that had little to do with politics. They were mostly criminal elements, smuggling drugs and other assorted goodies back and forth. Most of these people came right back to Bulgaria as soon as their business in Greece or Turkey was finished. It wasn’t the sort of people I wanted to mix up with ...although I eventually did, in another way. That was on top the fact that I had no business in Turkey or Greece anyway, as I explained previously. Ships, boats, barges and swimming weren’t my thing either. Ships did nothing for me, since I didn’t know where they went, how long it would be before I’d be discovered, if there would be an opportunity to get off at a suitable location etc. There were too many unknowns. I didn’t feel I’d have any control over what was to happen and that didn’t make me feel good. Boats and swimming didn’t excite me either. The only places I could get by boat or swimming in the Black Sea was Turkey or Romania. Neither place was very promising. However, I spend some time thinking about a swim across the Danube to Romania, hiking to Yugoslavia through Romanian territory and crossing the Romanian - Yugoslav border. There were few problems with that, one of them being that I had no idea what was on the Romanian side. Soldiers? Just wilderness? Countryside? Population? I had no clue. I was lacking intelligence on Romania, you might say, and without at least some basic information, you weren’t to get too far. I did know what was at the Romanian - Yugoslav border and I knew how to deal with it, but I had to get there first. Secondly, it was too damn complicated. One golden rule you should always follow is the KISS rule - Keep It Simple, St00pid! And crossing borders back and forth in the middle of the night, once swimming, the other time on foot, with few days in between of hiking in a communist country I didn’t know the language of and wasn’t supposed to be in, wasn’t exactly the simplest way to go about it. That idea had to be abandoned. Catching a barge on the Danube looked more promising. Barges weren’t uncommon - they’d be loaded with goods (coal, machinery etc.) and travel on the Danube westwards, often all the way to Vienna. Well then, westwards was exactly where I wanted to go and Vienna would have been perfect since there was the largest refugee camp in Europe. The question was, how can I get on one of those and how hard it would be to hide there for a few days. Unfortunately, I had no answer to these questions. I had no clue. So I left a big question mark in front of that option, in my great Escaping Routes List and kept it as something to be explored if nothing better cooked up. Swimming and crossing the border while in the Danube was also considered, although not as seriously. It turns out, they had a security fence underwater, so that was a no go either. When a barge comes along, they check the papers and if everything is in order, pull back the fence gates and let the barge go. One had to actually swim underwater, very close to that barge and try to make it with it. The other way was to swim to the fence and cut a whole underwater to pass through. Now, if I was Mr. Dick Marcinko, your NAVY Seal American hero, it wouldn’t be a big deal. Well, I was just a skinny, 20 years old dumbass law student and cutting fences underwater was a bit too much, even though I was an adventurous soul, as that will become evident later on. The real problem though was SCUBA gear. And SCUBA gear, along a number of other goodies, could not be obtained on the Bulgarian market, not even the black one (although I never seriously looked for it - it would be way too expensive, even if I found it). All that being said, I decided that turning myself into food for the fish would be something uncool, so I abandoned that idea as well. Trains, cars and trucks and the likes were the least likely to succeed. What bothered me about those was the fact that most of the “accidents” I heard happening to people were related to trains, cars and trucks. Too many people trying to go by that route and too many people being caught meant that the authorities were well aware of what was cooking and took the appropriate measure. I had no desire to be another number in someone’s files. I was a number in plenty of files already (just as any other Bulgarian was), but I had no wish to get into that particular file - the one with the names of dead people. Freight trains had no particular markings, so just by looking at them, you didn’t know where they went. Some of them may not even cross the border. Trucks and cars involved putting yourself at the mercy of someone, which wasn’t a good idea. That driver could be a cop, he could sell you out, he could crack under pressure at the border... either way you looked at it, it wasn’t good. And yes, I did trying to get married to a foreigner. But besides banging Swiss chicks in two sequential summers, I didn’t get too far. I guess, I didn’t look good for a husband, although I looked good enough for getting laid. It was a fruitless exercise, but not an unpleasant one, I might add. ...Not that it was always pleasant either. When you’re desperate, you’d do things you wouldn’t do otherwise and sweating over a 5’2” short and fat 30 years old foreign, female tourist wasn’t exactly the most fun, but... Freedom requires sacrifices. Besides, she had a good time. ...Mine wasn’t a bad one either, all in all. To summarize it, I didn’t managed to get married, so after two seasons I gave it up. And having exhausted all other options (and as a single, young male, I didn’t qualify for a trip abroad, although there were some most interesting complications in that direction I shall discuss another time), the only other way left out for me was Yugoslavia. So, Yugoslavia it was. What’s so special about Yugoslavia anyway, one might ask. What a Bulgarian refugee can do in Yugoslavia when the government in Yugoslavia was no less communist than the Bulgarian one? Yugoslavia being a communist country was actually very good since that meant a lightly guarded border. Who’s crazy to go to Yugoslavia, right? Well, the “crazies” were many. An interesting geographical feature of Yugoslavia was the fact that it bordered Italy. And from the Italian - Yugoslavian border to Trieste, where the refugee camp was, the distance was short and the trip -pleasant. It wasn’t for nothing that the Italians have decided to set up a refugee camp so close to the border! Interestingly, no Yugoslavians could take an advantage of that camp (or any other camp, for that matter), since they were able to obtain visas from their own government and travel anywhere they wished. Thus, they had one hell of a time getting the status of a political refugee. So when the Italians broke ground for that camp, they had someone else in mind, not the Yugoslavians. A major assumption on the part of many Bulgarians (the authorities included) was that once you got into Yugoslavia, that was the end of the journey and you were stuck. Even more interesting was the fact that there were cases of Bulgarians reaching Yugoslavia, staying there for awhile, trying to figure out how to get further towards the west, not being able to make it and coming back. How sad. You definitely were not stuck! You just kept going! Once you crossed that border, you’d get to the nearest town, take a train and happily travel all the way to the Italian border. You didn’t need any documents in order to buy a train ticket and nobody paid you any mind either. Your Bulgarian language easily passed as a Macedonian (irrespective of any scholarly claims of which language was what dialect of whose jargon and so forth - Serbs simply thought that you were a Macedonian, when they heard you speak) and if you happened to cross the border in Yugoslav Macedonia, that was even better. Yes, you needed the local currency, but that was easily obtainable in Sofia. Hopping a freight train (just to be on the safe side) was also an option. Once you got to the Italian border, you would attempt to cross it as well and ...that’s when you usually got caught! You got caught by the Yugoslavians and your faith was an interesting one. A lot of those people who tried making it to Trieste simply didn’t know that the Yugoslavs were running a refugee camp of their own. That was supposed to be a big secret. They didn’t want it advertised and tried to keep a very low profile. The United Nations was financing the operation and they were nominally in charge of running the camp, just as with the other camps in Trieste and Vienna. The stress however should fall of the word “nominally” since the Yugoslavs were really in control and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind who called the shots. The UN would be providing the money and the Yugoslavs would run the show. UN was giving them so many dollars per refugee, for housing, clothing, food, various administrative expenses and so forth. The Yugoslavs pocketed all these money and spent about one-fifth of what they really needed to spend on these refugees. The rest went towards building of the Great Yugoslavian Socialist Federation, as granddaddy Tito had envisioned it. It was a nice little business for them to operate and the Yugoslavs seemed to enjoy it. At the same time, it made them feel good and gave them some face to show in Europe, since they were also helping political refugees. Finally, the whole thing delighted them because they were pissing on the Bulgarian government and by an extension, on the Soviets and they enjoyed greatly pissing on both governments for a variety of reasons I shall not discuss right now. Either way you looked at it, it was a win-win situation for them. The only thing that worried them was a possibility of a massive flood of refugees to Yugoslavia which would put them in a rather uncomfortable situation. But they had ways of dealing with that possibility and they took all kinds of measures to prevent it, as it will be seen later. Crossing borders was a tricky business in those days. Tricky and deadly. Guards had no incentives to capture you alive. But they had plenty of reasons to shoot you dead. See, if they captured you, they got a three days vacation. If they shot you down, they got one week vacation. Any reasonable person would realize that more vacation is better than less. So, being reasonable and all, they’d rather shoot you. Death was the easy way to go for you anyway. Getting caught was pure misery. For even if they caught you alive, you’d never be sure you’d survive the beatings that were to follow immediately. They beat you on the spot and they beat you hard and long. If you made it through that, you’d be trucked back as a bloody mess. After endless interrogations, they’d ship you to Russia, to serve time in a labor camp, or would stick you in their own, homegrown camps. Belene was one of those. We’re talking about 15 years minimum (provided you can survive for that long). No parole, no gym, no MTV either. They wouldn’t even let you watch the World Series! Bulgarian communists had no awareness of the prisoner’s basic rights - that’s how bad they were. They wouldn’t even let you read Newsweek! :-( Another route for them would be to send you to a mental institution. More often than not they figured that a person who’d want to escape the Paradise of Communism is definitely sick in the brain and he needs to be cured. So they’d lock you in a high security mental hospital and drugged you and beat you until you died. That cured you permanently. Once in a while, if you aren’t very messed up, they might take you on a road show. Typically, your audience would be factory workers somewhere in the country, or maybe a high school (also in the country) where you’d lecture the captive audience about how sorry you were for what you did, how brainwashed you were by the “ filthy western propaganda” and how well your reformation process is going, now that you’re back in the folds of socialism, building the Most Perfect Society on Earth. You’d be lucky if they’d let you do that. The unlucky ones labored 12 hours a day digging trenches during the day and trying not to die during the night. My point is, you just didn’t want to get caught - that’s all. Why would I be going down south, towards Macedonia? Sofia is actually very close to the border, the land is rather flat and one might think that there is the best place to cross. Too many thought so and too many made that mistake. The flatter and the easier it is for you, the more exposed and easily seen you’d be. You were actually expected in those areas and catching you (or shooting you down) was just a manner of technicality. It was almost like an ambush. Some people were so stupid that they’d actually walk on a trail that led towards the border, smack in the middle of the day while loudly discussing how rich they’d become once they got on the other side. Most often than not, that trail led directly to the guards’ shack. Other times, they tripped a wire, set an alarm and got caught in 15 - 20 minutes. The other extremely was to go through the real mountains, climb the rock, rappel from it and so forth and in the middle of the night one could break his neck easily. An approach during the day wasn’t advised. Hence, few soldiers guarded such places. One could argue that this *is* the safest place to cross, regardless how hard it might be. I opted for a less radical approach and chose hilly (at times the hills were more like mountains), well covered with greenery region that isn’t very easy to go across, but yet not forcing you to climb with gear and to risk falling from a high place. The idea was for a place that wasn’t that complicated to reach and go across, but yet it wasn’t a popular crossing site and soldiers would not be expecting you. One could find regions such as these south-west of Sofia. That’s where I marked the map. Approach was another tricky matter. There was a “safety zone” around the border, let us say 5 km, to which access was forbidden. That is to say, if they catch you in that zone, you’d better have a very good excuse to be there! But the actual “safety cushion” around the border was much larger. Being within the limits of the cushion would make you a suspect just as well. The precise size of that cushion varied from place to place and it wasn’t formally defined anywhere. There were some populated areas, mostly small villages, that were close to the border. If you knew that there was nothing else between that village and the border, you can be assured that the cushion covered it. (An exception was fairly large towns which were very close to the border. But since none of these lied where I wanted to cross, I never bothered investigating the pros and cons of an approach through them.) Great many people got caught in that safety cushion zone, without even realizing what had happened. Here is how it worked: The authorities used the locals as a human alarm, of sorts. Every time they saw a “foreigner”, an outsider, a someone who didn’t belong, they would report him. To spot an outsider in a border village was an easy task. Everyone knew everyone else and if a local didn’t know you, you’re in trouble. Unless you had some kind of a cover, a legitimate reason for your arrival, you’d be reported. Most of the locals were suspicious of outsiders to begin with, even without Party indoctrinations, monetary rewards and the like. Few cops were planted in every one of those villages. Often, they’d be locals who’d live and work there, but have a second income in exchange for observing carefully who comes and who goes, where and why. The typical weekend warrior, who’d decide to go west, ram his backpack with food and clothes and take a bus to the nearest border village (so that he can start his walk to the border from there) was caught 10 minutes after he got off the bus. If you didn’t have relatives to visit, or deliver mail, or come for a special reason, that is known by the locals or particularly if you came with a loaded backpack and a compass in your hand, the game was over before it was even started. The cashier on that bus station called the number and a jeep came to gather you 10 minutes later. And you still weren’t in that official “safety zone” and you still kept wondering how they can arrest you in a place that anyone, supposedly, can come into or get out of. Tough. An interesting solution to that cushion problem was to *become* a local. The idea was that you could get employed in one of those small border villages, in a remote area, get established, learn your way around, buy yourself a goat and a flock of ducks, take that goat and the ducks to the pastures ...and one day take them to pastures of another country. Then not only will you have food and clothes with you, but you will also have live stock and building your new life in that new country with a goat and few ducks would be infinitely easier! Problem was, taking your stock to Central Europe was slightly problematic, so you dealt with those problems as they came. The whole idea of “becoming a local” could be easily put into practice due to the fact that the government had a program for encouraging young people with education to move to the country. Once you got out of school with a BS degree (in anything) you could sign a 5 year contract. The government provided you with some land and a house - for “free”! It also provided you with a salary compatible, if not higher than the average salary in the city. You, in return, agreed to stay in that village for 5 years and work there. If you had a family, or planned to start one soon, so much the better. Those villages in the country side were getting deserted since most young people there would try to go to the cities, and to Sofia in particular, in search of a better life. So there was hardly anyone left but old people and small kids (with their parents still running around town, trying to find jobs and get established). You, on the other hand, were young, educated, from the city and you could, in theory, reverse that trend by settling there, raising family, maybe getting some of your friends to come, demanding higher services, establishing some of those yourself and in other words, building that village and making it a better place to live. Needless to say, for a young person born and raised in Sofia, going to a place like that was equivalent to an emotional and an intellectual suicide. There was nothing there but a general store, a school (which sometimes dubbed as a hall for a variety of social gatherings) and goats and ducks. That’s it. Understandably, few wanted to take the chance and “become locals”. That’s particularly true since you didn’t know where you would be assigned. It could be to a border village or it could be smack in the middle of the Rhodope mountains. They didn’t have even a general store over there. Just you and the goats. That’s it. Hence, most decided to get a bus ticket and pop up in that village which was to serve as a base for their journey towards freedom. It was a rather short journey. What that meant was that you had to seek an alternative means to get close to the border, avoiding villages. Well, buses and trains all have destinations that were towns or villages. So you had to get off at a place in between, a place that was not a regular, scheduled stop and nobody would know you showed up there. Thus, the wisest possible option was to hop a freight train from Sofia, south-bound, running parallel to the border and then get off at a reasonably suitable location, close to the border, away from populated areas and when the train isn’t going too fast. Nobody would see you getting on and nobody would see you getting off. Perfect! You could have your backpack and your compass with no problems. Night time was preferable. From your train exit, you would walk to the border (anywhere between 2 to 6 days, depending on where you got off) and cross it. You would be wise to walk at night and sleep in the day, hidden in the bushes. Locals could see you any time. You would also be wise to chose a rainy, miserable weather. Your tracks would be flooded and dogs would no sniff you. Also, in a rainy and miserable weather, soldiers weren’t as eager to be running around the forest, patrolling. You suffered cold and wet, but so did they and you could pay with some suffering for the extra safety margin. That’s why, if you were wise, you’d chose the spring or the fall, when rainfalls are most likely. And thus, slowly, cautiously and silently, in the night and in the rain, you’d walk towards the border until you reach it. The border itself was usually barbed wire. Academically speaking, there are few major ways that you can get on the other side of a barbed wire fence. The one most subtle and intellectually appealing way would be to go around it. While that fence was not installed all the way around and while it was theoretically possibly to walk along it until you reached an end, that wasn’t the smartest thing to do. The wire was not installed only at places that were difficult to cross anyhow, so chances were that once you got to the end and even though no one maybe watching you, you still couldn’t make it trough. If it was easy to cross and there was no fence, you were assured that there were soldiers lurking close by. The other way was to go under the wire, which involved digging and people of education and intellect refrain >from digging activities, as much as possible. Another way was to go over it and yes, people have tried climbing this thing and leaving half of their flesh on them spikes, as a memorabilia to the others who’ll follow in their footsteps. Not to mention that on the very top, you’d have a wire that when moved sufficiently would trip an alarm. It was a an alarm that was tripped by a motion sensor - not necessarily an electronic one. By the time you climb down on the other side, the guards would be there to gather you or to shoot you - whichever comes easier. One may ask - why would they rig the top wire as an alarm, and not the other wires. The answer is simply - animals. They don’t want to be running back and forth every time an animal bumps into the fence. At the same time, no animal on the Balkans can trip a wire eight feet above the ground. Not easily anyway. The only animal that could do that was the human animal, climbing it. Finally, a fourth way to get on the other side of the fence was to go through it. To go through it, you’d have to cut it. To cut it, you needed something to cut it with. And if you didn’t come with something to cut it with, well, you just had to go right back home, get it and come back to it, you dumbass, you! Nevertheless, going through it was the easiest, most efficient and quick way. When crossing a border, quickness is essential, so the wise one would bring along wire-cutters, make a snip and get on the other side. So you cut the wire, get to the other side and celebrate, right? Not quite. It turns out, the wire has a low level voltage on it. Breaking the circuit by cutting the wire also trips an alarm and them guards are running to get you. So a sensible thing to do was to come equipped with alligator clips and some wire - or whatever equivalent you might be able to find.. You clip one end on the wire and then you clip the other one few feet away, on the same wire. Then you cut in between. The current keeps flowing through the wire - your wire, while there’s is this hole created in the fence. If you need to, you repeat the procedure again with the wire above it, so that you create more space. Once that’s done, you slip through on to the other side without alarms going off. Then you sit down, pop the bottle of champaign that you’ve brought alone specifically for that purpose and celebrate. Five minutes later two guards and a dog show up, shoot you dead and finish the bottle for you. Mmmmm, such a good champaign - yummy! It turns out, even though you didn’t trip any wire they came by as a matter of routine. Yes, my curious friend, you may not know it, but guards do like to walk down that barbed wire ever so often, just to make sure all is cool. Furthermore, you could bet your sweet, Bulgarian ass that they have a schedule for doing that. So even though you came along prepared, with wire-cutters, alligator clips and so forth, unless you were patient, you’d be in trouble. The wise one, upon reaching that fence, would lay low somewhere close (but not too close!) in the bushes and watch. Not only he should watch, but he should be timing as well. And after few hours of observation ( if you were prudent and wanted to take your time, you would watch them all night and make your move the next night), one could discover that every two hours or so, the guards show up. That interval would be different for different stretches on the fence. It isn’t very difficult to figure it out when would be the best time to go across (right after they pass), so that even though they see your wires and alligator clips later on and begin chasing you, you’d be too far away already. The set up was as follows. Every few kilometers there was a guard shack, with usually three people assigned to it - two guards with a dog will walk the fence continuously, while the other one will wait in the shack, monitoring the alarms. When a person trips an alarm, two alarms go off - one in the shack to the left and one in the shack to the right of the place where the security is breached. Both guards assigned to monitor the alarms (at each shack), leave their posts and rush to get you. But they don’t go directly to the place where you tripped the alarm. Rather, they drive/run half of mile on the other side of the fence, so that if you’re still moving, they’d just meet you from the front and shoot you. Meanwhile, the patrols will most likely see where you made it trough and they’ll go after you as well. So you’ll have two guards after you and two guards in front, waiting for you, without you even knowing it. You thought you’re already in Yugoslavia, right? Major mistake! That fence does NOT signify the border and it is NOT the border! The fence is simply a preemptive measure and not the real thing. Even though you managed to go across it, you were still in a Bulgarian territory and those guards will still be chasing you. Unfortunately, there is no sign informing you that this barbed wire fence isn’t the border, so you’re being mislead. How unfortunate! The real border, my friend, is on the other side of the fence, about a kilometer away. There’s nothing there to signify that this is the border, but big white stones, placed ever so often. What that means is that even though you manage to go across undetected, you do need to hole ass and get to the REAL border very, very soon! You lay low, figure the traffic schedule of the guards, figure if the time before they come back is long enough to let you make it to the border, bypass the alarms immediately after the guards pass you, cut the wires, cross and run like hell. You keep running even after you pass the real border since there have been cases when guards would chase you even in Yugoslavian territory! Dangerous for them? If Yugoslav patrols see them, they’d most definitely shoot at them. But Yugoslavs weren’t that many on their side, so chances were, Bulgarians could risk and go up to half a mile inside Yugoslav territory in the pursuit. The lesson there is that you never relaxed. As soon as you made it through the border, you still kept going as quick as you could and as silently as you could. If the Yugoslavs saw you, they may shoot at you as well. And you never knew if the Bulgarians have given up or how far behind you were they. So you kept going until well away from the border. [to be cont.] In the next (and probably last) part I shall describe day to day life in the refugee camp in Beograde, the people involved, what took place, etc. It shall be called THE CAMP. -= Ivan =- --- BBB