Pilsen, Czech Republic  - Pavel Krovak pampers one of his most precious cars with anxious concern.

"I would never leave it parked in the street," Krovak said. "You know vandals. Someone could scratch the paint with a coin."

The 45-year-old public servant from the western Czech city of Pilsen is not talking about a luxurious sports car. The object of the tall man's passion is a Trabant, the Eastern bloc's long-derided compact automobile.

In the months before November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, thousands of East Germans escaping to the West abandoned their Trabants in the Hungarian countryside and along the cobblestone alleys of Prague.

For many years afterward, the cars could be bought for a song. Not anymore. Fans like Krovak have spun the East German automobile into an unlikely cult car that can sell for several thousand dollars.

Devotees show off their Trabants at events across Europe, of which the most famous is an annual meeting in Zwickau, Germany, the Trabi cradle, where production began on November 7, 1957, the 40th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power in Russia.

Unlike Western everyman cars, like the VW Beetle and Citroen 2CV, the Trabi has long been seen as a joke - an uncool symbol of what was wrong with Communism. To many, it epitomized the lack of choice in a captive state, its dysfunctional central-planned economy and environmental pollution.

Having almost no other choice, East Germans waited as long as 15 years for their Trabis. A place at the top of the waiting list was a hot black market commodity.

Because of metal shortages, the Trabant's body was made of Duroplast, a laminate consisting of phenolic resin and shredded cotton.

The car's two-stroke engine rattled and roared, producing pungent black smoke, as motorists often fed it a mixture of inferior motor oils and cheap solvents such as benzine and toluene.

But Trabi owners grew fond of it. "It was ridiculed by those who never drove it," said Krovak, who bought his first Trabi in 1982. "They had no idea how good a toiler this car is. It served until it dropped."

Even Czech President Vaclav Klaus, once a Trabant owner, hurried to its defence. "The Trabant was a superb car. And it drove a hundred (kilometres an hour). We were the fastest car on the road back then!" he told the Czech daily Lidove Noviny in July.

In the summer and fall of 1989, Trabants carried thousands of disgruntled East Germans to the West.

At first, hundreds fled via Hungary, whose liberal Communist regime began demolishing the Iron Curtain in May. After the German Democratic Republic restricted travel there in September, thousands stormed the West German embassy in Prague.

The emigrants left their empty Trabis behind, creating an eerie scene signaling that change was in the air.

"If I wanted to have a Trabant back then, I could have," said Jan Rippl, 56, who has lived opposite the embassy for nearly 30 years. "They would have given me the keys. To my family it felt like preying on a corpse that wasn't yet cold."

The Czechoslovak authorities returned most of the abandoned Trabis, perhaps several thousand, to East Germany, historian Oldrich Tuma said.

Soon after Communism collapsed, Trabants, whose production ended in 1991, began making their journey back across the border. "East Germans were getting rid of them recklessly," said Karel Milec, 62, who made discarded Trabis a focus of his import business in the 1990s.

Some owners gave him their Trabants for free, while others sold them for a symbolic 99 German pfennigs, the country's currency before it switched to the euro and equivalent to about 60 US cents at the time. (about 60 US cents at the time), Germany's cents before the country switched to the euro.

"I forged sales contracts in order to raise the price," Milec recalled. "The customs officers did not believe that I bought them so cheap."

Nearly two decades later, Manuela Klaut, a 29-year-old university administrator in Weimer, formerly a city in East Germany, learnt that bargain Trabis were hard to come by.

Last year, she gave up plans to buy one for a summer road trip to Ireland after finding out that Trabants had become collectors' items, sold on e-Bay, an online auction house, for as much as 9,000 euros.

Klaut, whose parents waited a mere five years for their Trabi because her father was a pipeline builder, adores its comic strip qualities: the round lights, the encircled "S" logo adorning the hood.

"It reminds me of Zorro," she said, laughing. "I imagine how a hero of the poor jumps out of a Trabi."

Still, she said she finds it ironic that the unsophisticated Communist-era rattle trap has survived its lows to become a nostalgic cult. "Now, 20 years after the transformation, they are still running," she said. "It is a sign of quality. It is a sign they last." (dpa)