Polish victims who died at the Berlin Wall: Franciszek Piesik and Czesław Kukuczka

Two days later, on the afternoon of 17th October, he reached the boarding stage at the “Betriebssportgemeinschaft Baumechanik” near Hennigsdorf, equipped with a wire cutter and a sketch map showing the course of the border along the water. Here he stole a motorboat. He subsequently travelled along the Havel canal to a lake (the Nieder-Neuendorfer See), where the border ran through the middle. To achieve this he was first compelled to make a diversion around the headland that separated the canal from the lake. The locals regarded this piece of land as an extremely dangerous marshy area. To this day it is still unknown why Franciszek Piesik succeeded in reaching the headland but did not round it by water, which he originally planned to do. He left his boat on the headland and walked to the banks of the lake where he abandoned his jacket, along with a briefcase containing his personal documents. From here he had to swim a distance of roughly 200 to 300 metres in water that was around 10 degrees cold. The report drawn up by the East German border guards says that he succeeded in crossing the border in the midst of the lake at around 18:15. That said, the border guards did not intervene, something that was held against them later when the incident was investigated internally.

Nonetheless Franciszek Piesik failed to reach his longed-for destination. 11 days later his body was taken from the Western part of the lake. The abduction excluded any possibility of a third party act. Piesik's airways were full of mud. Thus the most likely reason for his drowning was hypothermia. It took 2½ months for the Polish military mission to provide the West Berlin services with a personal description and fingerprints to confirm the identification of the dead man. Six months after the incident the body of Franciszek Piesik was buried in the cemetery at Berlin-Heiligensee. Piesik’s motives for fleeing to the West remain unclear. Today a pillar bears witness to the tragic events. It is situated at the “Berliner Mauerweg“, where the body of Piesik was found.  

The case of the fireman Czesław Kukuczka, who was born in 1935 in Kamienica near Limanowa, was even more dramatic. No one knows how he got to Berlin and what happened until the 29th of March.

Around 12:30 a.m. on the same day Kukuczka entered the building of the Embassy of the Peoples Republic of Poland, which was then located at Unter den Linden. He told the doorman that he wanted to hand over an important document and was led to a room in the Embassy without any further checks. Here he was greeted by Colonel Maksymilian Karnowski, who worked in the Berlin operations group attached to the Polish Ministry of the Interior, along with a further colleague in the Embassy.

Kukuczka demanded that they provide him with a licence to travel to West Berlin before 15.00; otherwise he would blow up the Embassy and, with the aid of his accomplices, three other buildings including the Polish Information and Cultural Centre in East Berlin. Whilst he was making his demands he pointed to a tightly packed bag attached to his knees in which he claimed there was a self-made bomb. A loop resembling a fuse was hanging from the bag and during the conversation the man was nervously holding it the whole time. Kukuczka was able to convince the two men that he had learned how to build explosives during his military service.