In the early hours of November 28, 1989, seven weary figures crept through the darkness towards Romania’s border with Hungary, led by a shepherd in a sheepskin cape.
As they approached the border they had to take cover in a freezing ditch while the Romanian guards seized a man and a woman attempting an illegal crossing a couple of hundred yards away.
Somehow they eluded detection. By dawn they stumbled across a milestone marking the end of Romanian territory and the beginning of their liberty.
One of the group was Nadia Comaneci, a former teenage Olympian widely regarded as the greatest gymnast of the 20th century. Days later she boarded a Pan Am flight from Vienna to New York in a defection to the West
