risto never accepted life under the east german regime and tried to flee for the 1st time by train when he was just 18 he was arrested and put behind bars. when building began on the berlin wall on the 1st of august 1961 he knew he had to escape he saw how brutally the regime was cracking down on dissenters. as a young person at some point you have to ask yourself how long am i going to play this raid have how long can i take it and we're doing i want to cooperate with them to find myself a little nation who is a long as you're still studying you had to get all of this crap in every essay there had to be a commitment to socialism and if you needed good marks you just wrote that rubbish down. a short time later richter attempted to escape again he swam across a border river on the edge of berlin and made it to freedom he was in the water for 4 hours before he finally managed to get through a barbed wire fence and onto the shore on the western side on the eastern side he would have been shot. at the cauldron is off the foot so i had a guardian angel that night i knew there were alarms reg