Red Cross Tries to Reunite Families Split in Flight From East to West : Europe: Not all of those heading for West Germany are seeking new opportunity. Some are escaping unhappy homes.

“Please find my husband. He has left us without a word,” begins a letter to the West German Red Cross from a woman in East Berlin.

“We urgently need him to be able to live,” said the letter, dated Nov. 23, 1989.

Enclosed was a photograph of a boy and a girl playing a tuba and a flute behind a table decorated with Christmas candles on a white cloth.

The woman believes that her husband is among more than 400,000 East Germans who have left for West Germany in the last five months.

Most emigrants left for West Germany for political or economic reasons, and there were tears of joy on the border.

Some, however, fled personal problems.

The Red Cross Tracing Service in Munich, originally set up to find soldiers and civilians missing after World War II, has been swamped by more than 25,000 inquiries from people left behind by relatives in the wave of emigration from East Germany.

The cases, officials say, include about 2,500 men who abandoned their wives and children, and another 500 women who deserted their husbands.

In a former army building in the Bavarian capital, Red Cross workers try to find the missing relatives in files covering 320,000 East German settlers interviewed at reception centers.

“In 20% of the cases we get a message (that) they found each other. But the rest will take time to solve,” said Klaus Mittermaier, director of the Tracing Service, which has had to add 10 people to its 65-member staff.

“We have no idea where people go after they’ve passed through the reception centers,” Mittermaier said. “Some don’t even show up at the centers after crossing the border.”

Some of those missing don’t want to be found.

Tracing Service officials offered a reporter a look at some open cases--handwritten letters from East Germans deserted by their loved ones.

Some letters provide detailed descriptions of the missing person. Others give only the name and the hometown.

A 38-year-old taxi driver in Dresden said goodby to his wife and two children, ages 5 and 13, on Nov. 4 and left for work.

“On Saturday he left as always, close to four o’clock for the night shift, and did not return,” the wife wrote.

His employer--not his family--got a telegram from him in Nuremberg, saying he had crossed into West Germany.

“Why does he not make contact?” his wife asked.

“If we had an address, we could at least speak to him, straighten things out. We are certain he would come back home then. The children ask for their father. The little one cries at night, the elder one is lagging behind in school and I am so down I cry all the time.”

The help from the Tracing Service is free but the Dresden woman did not know that.

“Please let me know if the financial costs exceed 50 marks ($30) because I am afraid I don’t have any more money,” she wrote.

A young couple abandoned their 2-year-old daughter in Leipzig in early December and emigrated to West Germany. Authorities in Leipzig turned to the Red Cross for help in finding the couple, who are suspected of child abuse.

A woman in East Berlin is looking for her 19-year-old son. She believes he went to West Berlin Nov. 11, two days after the Berlin Wall was opened.

“Before he disappeared, we had a big quarrel. Please help us find him so at least we know where he is,” she wrote.

“A woman who loses her child will look all her life for him,” Mittermaier said.

One man in a small East German town wrote to the Tracing Service asking if it could help to find his wife, who left for West Germany with their four children after a dispute Nov. 8.

“She hasn’t been in touch to this day because of various fights--she is so stubborn,” he wrote.

An East German man wrote to his son in a Nov. 28 letter addressed to the Red Cross in West Germany, hoping the Tracing Service would find the boy.

“Everything is fine here,” the letter began. “There is no breakdown, no price increases.

“Chancellor (Helmut) Kohl has been on television and urged East Germans to stay at home. . . .

“Write to us and say if you are coming back. We have kept your apartment. Your furniture, clothes and cutlery are all there. We are continuing to pay your rent.”

A woman in Karl-Marx-Stadt is looking for her husband, who left in a blue Skoda car for Hof in Bavaria two days after the border opened. He had said he just wanted to take a quick look at the West, but never returned, she wrote.

“I really don’t know what to do anymore. You are my last hope in life,” the letter said. “You are my last hope!”