A few days later, Wolf drives the three of them through West Berlin in his cream and brown VW van and they scope out sites along the border with East Berlin. Nowhere is off limits: they scamper round the Reichstag (West Germany’s parliament building, which backs onto the border) and even the Brandenburg Gate. But neither site works: the soil is too crumbly, or the water table too high. Then they come up with another idea. Something that on the face of it seems crazy.
Bernauer Strasse.
It’s crazy because this street is not tucked into a quiet corner of Berlin, but back in 1961, it was the site of the city’s most famous tourist attraction: the Wall. For Bernauer Strasse is the street that the Berlin Wall carved in two, where people threw themselves from windows the week after it was built. The eastern side is deserted, grass now covering the cobbles, border guards patrolling day and night. But in West Berlin, the road throngs with tourists from as far away as Asia and Africa. Open-top buses drive along the mile-long street so they can see the Wall up close. Now and then the bus stops and the tourists disembark, walking up special viewing platforms overlooking the Wall, where they pull out long-lens cameras and zoom in on blank faces that look back at them: inmates in the world’s first human zoo.
As well as the tourists, Bernauer Strasse bustles with those who live on its western side. It’s the hub of a district called Wedding (or as some call it, ‘Red Wedding’), a working-class area, once the heart of the city’s communist movement. It’s always busy: families promenade with babies in prams, groups of women in flimsy dresses buy groceries, children in pinafores play in makeshift sandpits, swinging upside down from climbing frames, and factory workers in flat caps smoke cigarettes during their lunch-break and watch the world go by. Observing all of them from guard-towers over the Wall are the men in green and black – the VoPos, with their binoculars and Kalashnikovs.
And it is here, under this street swarming with tourists and monitored by VoPos, that Wolf, Mimmo and Gigi want to start digging. It’s partly because of the soil under Bernauer Strasse: it’s firm, less chance of being buried alive by a collapsing tunnel. And since Bernauer Strasse is higher than other parts of the city, the water table is lower – less chance of the tunnel flooding. Finally, they want to dig here precisely because it is so crazy: who would suspect them?
Now they’ve decided on the street, they need to find somewhere discreet to start digging. They need a cellar, somewhere on Bernauer Strasse where the VoPos over the Wall won’t see them wandering in and out in mud-spattered clothes. On a bright April morning, just as the horse-chestnut trees are beginning to bloom, Wolf, Mimmo and Gigi take a walk down Bernauer Strasse. Peering through doorways and windows, they look for an empty building or apartment, but it’s hard to tell which buildings are occupied and which aren’t. Halfway down the street, just a block away from Bernauer Strasse station, they come across a four-storey building set back from the street. The front is smashed in – bombed during the war – but a section at the back is still intact.
Creeping round, they come to a courtyard. It’s quiet – no sound, no sign of movement – and in the corner, there’s a door. Pushing it open, they tiptoe up the stairs, emerging into a large room. It’s the sound they notice first – the efficient whirr of machinery at work – and following that sound with their eyes, they see hundreds of plastic cocktail straws flying out of an assembly line. Just as it sinks in that that they should not be here, they hear footsteps and a plump, blond man appears: ‘What are you doing in my factory?’
Mimmo and Gigi step back, looking at Wolf, deferring to him and his German. Wolf’s chest tightens. He knows the Stasi have spies in every part of West Berlin. If he tells this factory owner about their plan to dig a tunnel and he turns out to be informant, they could be kidnapped, driven over the border to East Berlin and thrown in a Stasi prison. He needs a cover story, and Wolf’s brain – now racing – gives him one.
‘Oh, we’re a jazz band; we’re looking for somewhere quiet to rehearse where we won’t disturb—’
Plump blond man laughs. ‘Don’t tell me fairy stories!’ he says. ‘A group of young men wanting somewhere discreet on a street right next to the Wall? I know what you’re up to!’
As Wolf prepares to run for it, the factory owner tells them his name – Müller – and starts sharing his story, describing escaping from East Germany after his porcelain business was confiscated by the government.
Wolf listens. There is no way of knowing if Müller is telling the truth; this could be a cover story, a way of reeling them in so they spill secrets. But, having guessed what they’re really up to, Müller is now telling them they can dig from his cellar, and not only that, they can use his water and electricity, and Wolf, Mimmo and Gigi find themselves saying thank you as Müller gives them a key and tells them they must tidy up after themselves. Then they leave, laughing at their luck, still wondering if they’ve done the right thing to trust him.
Now they have a cellar to dig from in West Berlin, they need to find a breakthrough site in East Berlin, somewhere close to the Wall so they don’t have to dig too far.
There’s only one place they can think of: an apartment on Rheinsberger Strasse belonging to a Bulgarian engineer they know a little. It’s perfect: just three streets away from the Wall. They hear that the engineer is having his birthday party the following week, so, after wangling an invite, one afternoon Mimmo and Gigi queue at the checkpoint, use their foreign passports to cross the border, then make their way to the engineer’s apartment.
At the party, Mimmo and Gigi drink a little, chat and dance, and slowly edge to the hallway where they see a bunch of keys hanging on a hook among the coats and hats. Sneaking downstairs, they try each key until they find one that smooths into the lock and the door opens, revealing a small, dark cellar. It’s perfect. All they need now is a copy of the key, so that when Evi, Peter and their baby – and the other escapees – come to the apartment on the day of the escape, they can get into the cellar. It is Mimmo who has the idea of running to a shop to buy plasticine and pressing the key into it, before returning the key to the peg. Back in West Berlin, Mimmo takes the makeshift mould to a locksmith, who makes a duplicate key.
The diggers are now all set: they have a digging site and a breakthrough point. They agree on a date for the escape: 13 August – the first anniversary of the building of the Wall. It’s four months away – should be enough time to dig the tunnel.
They aren’t the first to dig an escape tunnel; others had tried, but most ended badly – either betrayed by Stasi agents or the ceiling had fallen in. From those attempts, they’d learnt a few lessons: don’t get spotted before you reach the Wall, make sure the earth holds firm and most important of all: make sure the Stasi don’t find you.
25
Concrete
IT IS JUST before midnight on 9 May 1962 and the night is warm and muggy. Mimmo, Gigi, Wolf, Joachim and Manfred (Joachim’s friend from back home) squeeze into Wolf’s windowless van and drive to the factory. They’ve got a small bag with them. Inside, some hammers and chisels.
Arriving at the factory, they walk down to the cellar where they pace the floor, muttering, looking for a good digging spot.
They’ve never seen a real tunnel before, never met anyone who’s dug one, but they’ve seen footage of some on TV – those that failed – and that’s sparked a few ideas. With a piece of chalk they draw the outline of a rectangle on the floor in the corner of the cellar. Like surgeons pencilling the site of an operation, they want absolute precision when they break into the floor, no unnecessary mess. The area marked out, they kneel down, pick up their chisels and begin.
No one can remember who made the first blow, because after a while, they’re all at it, hacking into the concrete floor again and again, the sound ricocheting off the walls of the cellar and returning in a maddening way. Chips of concrete fly up and the smell of hot metal fills the room, their nostrils filling with dust. It’s hot in the cellar and they’re soon topless, s
weat flicking off their shoulders as they smash through the top layer, the smaller pieces giving way to larger pieces, the sound of hacking deepening as they reach further under the floor. They hack, hack, hack and hack, until—
The floor breaks open.
Pulling back jagged shards of concrete, they throw them to the side with loud clangs, then use the chisel to extract more concrete until they come to a layer of screed. Now it’s back to the hammers to pulverise the screed, smashing it again and again, until suddenly, the sound changes.
They’ve hit clay. This is good, they’re getting somewhere. But as they start digging into the clay, they realise this is going to be much harder than they anticipated. They’d picked the site for the firmness of its clay, but now they discover the drawback: the mass of dense black earth is almost completely resistant to their attempts to loosen it. Using pickaxes, they chip away pieces so small they wonder how they’ll ever dig a tunnel here, but after a few hours they learn how to work with the clay, now bludgeoning off big sections until, finally, they have something that looks like a hole. Surrounding it, they look down.
This is it. No going back now.
Abandoning their university classes, they dig all the way through that first night, sleep during the day, then dig again through a second night, then a third, and it’s only at the end of that shift that the hole is finally deep enough. It’s just over four metres – the length of a VW Beetle – the ideal depth to avoid digging into the city’s water table or tram lines. They’ve worked it all out in forensic detail using the maps.
Now they’re deep enough, it’s time to start digging horizontally towards East Berlin. They bring a ladder to the cellar and prop it against the wall of the shaft, climbing down into the dark. With a spade, they sketch out a triangle on the clay wall – the safest structure, they think, for the tunnel. Then, taking it in turns to dig at the front, they use spades and an electric drill to bore into the clay. After a few days of drilling, they have it: the beginning of a tunnel.
It’s small, just one metre by one metre, barely big enough to crawl in, and the only way they can dig inside it is to lie flat on their backs, feet pointing towards the East, holding on to a large spade, which they push down with their feet, scooping out the earth then tossing it behind them into a small wooden cart.
To get to the cellar in the East, they will have to dig like this, lying down, for 120 metres – the length of a football pitch. But there are only five of them to do it.
It is painfully obvious: they have underestimated the whole thing. If they are going to make it by August – just three months away – they need more diggers.
26
The Cemetery
JOACHIM PULLS HIMSELF to the top of the gate and looks down: hundreds of gravestones glinting in the moonlight. Cat-like, Joachim drops onto the grass and crouches behind a grave. Ahead of him, in their first tunnel mission, the two new recruits.
First, there’s Hasso Herschel – charismatic, tall, with broad shoulders, thick beard and dark hair. Born in Dresden in East Germany, Hasso had led a quiet life until the day he was arrested, aged sixteen, for taking photographs of people queueing at a shop. He’d become angry, resentful, and in 1953 joined the uprising that Joachim was part of. The day after those protests, at five in the morning, the police came for him, throwing Hasso in a cell with twenty other prisoners, leaving him there for six weeks. After that, his life unravelled: Hasso was expelled from school, and though he was desperate to go to university, nowhere in the East would take him. When he was twenty, Hasso was arrested again, this time charged with illegally selling cameras in West Berlin, and he was sent to a labour camp. Four years. Four years in a communal cell, only one loo. Every day Hasso would look through the bars to the world outside; he loved it when he could see a streak of red in the sky and he’d say to himself: ‘One of these days I’ll be out there, standing at a tree, taking a piss.’
After the Wall was built, Hasso was desperate to escape. In October 1961, with the help of the Girrmann Group, he’d used a blank Swiss passport to cross the border at Checkpoint Charlie. As he’d walked past the VoPos, he was filled with an urge to give them the finger, but he’d controlled himself, made it into West Berlin. Since then, he’d been looking for a way to bring his sister, Anita, to West Berlin with her toddler and husband, and he’d vowed not to shave until they were here. He’d heard about the tunnel from Mimmo and Gigi, and agreed to help as long as Anita and her family could join the list of escapees.
The second recruit is a friend of Hasso’s – Ulrich (Uli) Pfeiffer. Uli was born in Berlin, but his family left when he was seven to avoid the bombs. In horrific timing, they arrived in Dresden a few days before the city was annihilated by firebombs from American and British planes. Uli still remembers his grandmother turning up at their house, covered in ash, having wandered through the night. After the war, as East Germany turned to socialism, so did Uli’s family: his father became a party member, proud owner of a photograph of him with Walter Ulbricht, and Uli became a passionate communist, his friends calling him ‘Communist Pfeiffer’. Communist Pfeiffer spent his days building toy bridges from modelling sets bought for him by his engineer father and dreamt of following in his footsteps.
But Uli lost his communist calling. It was partly the elections, seeing the way the party always won, despite the suspect vote counting. Then there was the time a group of children in his class were failed in their exams, simply because their parents weren’t party faithfuls. Uli drifted, saved up for a motorbike, fell in love with a beautiful nurse called Christine, and they spent their time driving around East Germany, sunbathing on Baltic beaches. They’d swim in the sea and laze on the sand, imagining their lives together, their wedding, their children.
On 12 August 1961, Uli and Christine went to the cinema in West Berlin. At the end of the night, they crossed back over the border to their flat in East Berlin, went to bed and woke up to the barbed wire.
They made the decision to escape that morning. Uli and Christine hated being trapped in the East: they’d had dreams of travelling the world together, but now it was impossible. One day they’d walked to the Brandenburg Gate and stood looking at the border, trying to summon the courage to jump the barbed wire, but they couldn’t, they were too scared. Then a friend of Uli’s told him about a plan to escape through the sewers. There was space for one more person; did he want to join them? ‘All right,’ Uli said, ‘I’ll go ahead, test the route and get Christine out afterwards.’
On 7 September 1961, at 2 a.m., six of them (two girls, four boys, all students) met at Schönhauser Allee in East Berlin. Using a metal hook, they lifted a drain cover and climbed down the metal ladder. They went in silence, except for the moment Uli stepped on the fingers of the girl below and she let out a cry.
The sewer was large, tall enough to stand up in at a stoop, and the six of them fumbled along in the dark, feeling their way along the pipes. They were all wearing their smartest outfits, the only clothes they could bring to the West since there was no space for bags. In their high heels, stockings, dresses and suits, they sludged through the raw sewage, the smell wafting up as they dredged it with their feet.
Arriving at the other end of the sewer, under a street in West Berlin, they discovered a grate blocking the exit. For a moment they considered sloshing back again through the shit, but then they saw a torch flickering from the other side of the grate – it was the students who’d co-ordinated the escape. Spurred on, Uli felt around the grate with his hands and found a gap at the bottom. There was just enough space to wriggle under and slip through to the other side. There, they climbed a ladder, up into West Berlin and into a VW van. They’d made it.
A week later, Uli had wangled Christine onto another sewer-escape operation. But as Christine climbed down the ladder, she heard shouts and saw VoPos running towards her, loud in their heavy black boots. Leaping up from the ladder, Christine ran away, but the VoPos arrested two of her group, interrogated them, and a few day
s later the Stasi came for her.
Uli only discovered Christine had been arrested a few days later; heard she was to be put on trial. He was terrified for her, felt powerless to help. With no phone lines and all letters intercepted, Uli had to wait for coded messages from friends. Eventually, a friend in East Berlin sent a telegram:
ALL THE CELLS IN THE HUMAN BODY RENEW THEMSELVES OVER THE COURSE OF SEVEN YEARS.
Uli knew what it meant: Christine had been sentenced to seven years in jail. In an instant, the life he’d imagined for them – marriage, children – vanished. His beautiful Christine was trapped behind the Wall and he knew he might never see her again. From that moment, Uli was full of hate: hate for East Germany, hate for the Wall, for Walter Ulbricht, the Stasi and a party that could throw a young woman in prison for seven years, just because she wanted to be with her boyfriend. The hate grew, ate at him from the inside, so when Hasso asked if he wanted to help dig the tunnel, Uli said yes. What better way to take revenge against the country that had ruined his life than by tunnelling back into it, being part of the most ambitious escape operation so far? And it felt particularly sweet to be using the engineering training he’d received in East Germany to do it. For Uli was now a qualified engineer working in a construction firm – which made him the perfect recruit.
With Hasso and Uli they had two more diggers, but, without tools, that wasn’t much help. Which is why on this warm May evening they find themselves in the cemetery. It was Hasso’s idea – he had a part-time job there, tending the garden, and he’d seen tools lying around. Creeping around in the dark, Joachim, Hasso and Uli grab whatever they can find: pickaxes, spades, shovels, even wheelbarrows, and they throw them over the gate to Wolf Schroedter, who puts the tools in his van and drives them all to the factory.
Tunnel 29 Page 11
