I see plenty of stories of people escaping east berlin, the USSR, North Korea etc but surely someone has tried to go the other way at some point. Do they have stories I can read?
I'll give two examples from North Vietnam, one well known (in France) and the other more obscure but quite significant. And they involve two historians!
Georges Boudarel
Georges Boudarel, a philosophy graduate and a member of the French Communist Party, obtained from the Ministry of Education to be posted to Indochina in 1948. He wanted, as he later said in his autobiography, "a change of scenery". At the age of 22, he was appointed professor at the Lycée Yersin in Đà Lạt, in the Vietnamese highlands, then at the Lycée Auguste-Pavie in Laos, from which he was expelled after three months for political activities. Despite this (due to the shortage of teachers), he managed to obtain a position at the Lycée Marie-Curie, a prestigious French high school for girls in Saigon. During that period, he discovered Vietnam and the Vietnamese, but also the mentality of his French colleagues, that he later described as "hardcore colonialists" longing for the Good Old Days of French Indochina, who complained about the "people stuffed with books and theories who came to ruin everything", while unabashedly enriching themselves through private lessons, and through the illegal piastre trade. This environment "finished inoculating [him] with the anti-colonial vaccine".
In Saigon, Boudarel participated in the clandestine activities of a small group of French and Franco-Vietnamese activists, the Groupe Culturel Marxiste, which was in contact with the Việt-Minh. After two years in Southern Vietnam, Boudarel no longer felt comfortable with teaching philosophy to the children of the local elites (he had also become addicted to opium) and asked his contacts to get him to the other side. Mid-november 1950, he took a little bag, ate one last poulet à la crème, and left (in taxi!) for the jungle where he joined the guerilla, where he met other defectors of the French army, French and North-African. Boudarel was tasked by the Việt-Minh to do broadcasts in French for the La Voix de Saïgon-Cholon libre, a clandestine radio emitting from an outpost in the South, not far from Saigon.
In 1952, he was appointed propaganda instructor at the POW Camp 113, located in the Hà Giang in northern Vietnam, where he arrived after a long trek early 1953. Camp 113 held about 300 prisoners, most of them French. It was meant to "reeducate" politically the prisoners. Those "war criminals" (as they were called) were not subject to direct torture, but they suffered under a grueling and often murderous schedule of hard work and political education. Malnutrition, diseases, and lack of medical treatement took an enormous toll on men who were already starved, exhausted, and often wounded, resulting in daily deaths (Edwards, 2010).
Boudarel was responsible for "educating" the prisoners about Communist doctrine, and more importantly about the necessity of ending the war and repatriating the Corps Expéditionnaire (CEFEO). According to former prisoners, Boudarel also played a role in deciding who was eligible for release, and supported a food reward system according to which those who performed best in the education sessions would be given larger rations.
Boudarel left Camp 113 in December 1953 and settled in Hanoi after the end of the Indochina War. By that time, he had been condemned to death by a French military tribunal in Saigon.
During the next decade spent in North Vietnam, Boudarel became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist regime, notably after the distrastrous and violent agrarian reform and the repression against the intellectuals involved in the Nhân Văn–Giai Phẩm affair. He was himself viewed with suspicion by the authorities and left for Prague in 1964. In June 1966, France granted amnesty for crimes committed during the Algeria and Indochina Wars, which allowed Boudarel to return discreetly to his native land in 1967. He obtained a PhD in history and became part of the new school of (left-wing) French historians of Southeast Asia, with Daniel Hemery, Charles Fourniau, Pierre Brocheux and Jean Chesneaux. He was, by the late 1980s, a strong critic of Vietnamese communism, and only a few people knew of his past.
On 13 February 1991, as Boudarel was to present a paper at a conference in Paris, he was interrupted in public by Jean-Jacques Beucler, a former politician and a former POW at Camp 113, who accused him of having "blood on his hands". The media campaign that followed was brutal. Camp 113 was compared to a "Vietnamese Dachau" and Boudarel to a kapo. The Right and Far-right sided with Beucler, while Boudarel was (more or less) defended by left-wing intellectuals and politicians. Beucler and other former POW published books that incriminated Boudarel and painted him as a fanatic. A former POW sued Boudarel for "crimes against humanity", but the charges were eventually dismissed due to the amnesty of 1966, resulting in a change in French law making this type of crime ineligible for amnesty. Boudarel wrote an autobiography where he tried to defend himself, claiming that he had been motivated by his anticolonialism and that he had tried to limit the death toll in Camp 113, but his career was over. Boudarel was forced into early retirement in 1991 and died in 2007.
Gérard Tongas
Gérard Tongas was an historian, specialist of the relations between France and Turkey, and a history teacher. He arrived in Indochina in 1947. Unlike Boudarel, he was not a Communist, but he was a fervent anticolonialist who admired Hồ Chí Minh, whom he had briefly met in 1946 in Versailles. He was first posted as a professor at the Lycée Chasseloup-Laubat in Saigon, and then at the Lycée Albert-Sarraut in Hanoi, the prestigious high school in Tonkin which catered to French students and to the children of Vietnamese elites. Like Boudarel, he came to despise his French colleagues, that he saw as greedy, trafficking colonialists as well as poor academics, whose quality was "that of a village schoolteacher at best". Tongas, as he appears in his own writings as in the accounts about him found in diplomatic archives, was not exactly an easygoing character, and he seems to have been quite vocal about his opinions. In 1953, Tongas' contract with Albert-Sarraut was terminated and he was scheduled to be repatriated in France. Instead, he remained in Hanoi to found a private high school, the Lycée Honoré-de-Balzac, where he taught to children of "authentic nationalists, deeply francophile but ardent anti-colonialists and supporters of their country's independence" (Tongas, 1960).
Tongas and his wife, a teacher of English, were among the handful of French people to remain freely in North Vietnam after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. The others incuded diplomats, some remaining professors at the Lycée Albert-Sarraut, and the residual staff of French companies. Like part of the Vietnamese population in the North, Tongas welcomed the arrival of the Việt-Minh in Hanoi in October 1954. However, his private school was closed by the new authorities (ironically, the Lycée Albert-Sarraut was kept in operation for almost a decade for political reasons), and the Tongas couple was hired to teach French and English at the Chu-Văn-An school (formerly Lycée du Protectorat). Tongas' love for the new regime quickly evaporated, as he witnessed directly the authoritarian takeover by the new administration of all aspects of life in the new Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Somehow a privileged individual, he started recording what he saw and what was told to him, such as the increasing propaganda and indoctrination, and accumulated facts and figures about the country.
In November 1957, the disenchanted Tongas left Hanoi for France. In 1960, he wrote a 460-page account of his experience, titled I Lived in the Communist Hell in North Vietnam and I Chose Freedom, which was well received in anti-communist circles at the time, and often cited, eg the (criticized) figure of 100,000 deaths caused by the agrarian reform. It is indeed a "heavy-handed diatribe" (Porter, 1973) as Tongas was never one to mince words and had a way with colourful insults. Still an anticolonialist, he not only attacked the North Vietnamese regime but also heaped scorn on the few remaining French people in Hanoi, notably the diplomats of the mission led by Jean Sainteny, and on French policies. But the book is also more nuanced than its Cold-war-ish title implies and constitutes a fascinating document about the first years of the North Vietnamese regime.
Sources
While there is more to be said on the topic, u/kieslowskifan gives an overview of the different motivations several prominent defectors from West Germany to the East had in Did anyone living in West Berlin ever "escape" to East Berlin?