Tunnel 29

by Helena Merriman

  The tunnel.

  Looking at each other, the two men draw reassurance. They’re brothers, Peter and Klaus Dehmel, and they work for NBC – Peter on camera, Klaus lighting. They don’t mind the blindfolds; they know the diggers don’t want to take risks. Peter takes a camera out of a small fibreboard case and climbs down the ladder. At the bottom of the shaft, he crouches and sizes up the tunnel. It is unthinkably small. Mimmo is inside, digging, and somehow Peter needs to get in behind him.

  Folding his body into the tunnel, Peter turns onto his back, and scoots down the tunnel, cradling his camera. Once his feet are almost touching Mimmo, he stops, props his camera on his chest, points it down his body towards Mimmo and begins filming. Behind, his brother Klaus lies on his stomach, holding a battery-powered light, illuminating the scene.

  Peter films for exactly 150 seconds before he stops. The tunnel is so small there’s only space for the smallest and lightest of cameras, a 16mm Arriflex that holds just two and a half minutes of film. Peter peels off a plastic wrapping, the only thing protecting the camera from mud, reloads the film and begins shooting again. After a while, the brothers reverse through the tunnel, climb into the cellar and film the rest of the operation.

  The first piece of footage from that day is a hand on a bright white rope. You see the hand pull down and a cart rises slowly from below. Full of earth, it sways with the weight, around ten kilograms. Then you see Mimmo. Bare-chested, the sweat on his back glistens in Klaus’s hand-held light as Mimmo empties the earth from the cart in the corner.

  Peter and Klaus film for a few hours that day, returning the next day and the day after that. As the diggers sweat, haul and heave the earth, winding the cart up on a pulley again and again, carting it off to a corner of the cellar in a wheelbarrow, the footage gives you nothing of the grunts and groans, the sound of metal against wood. There’s no room for a sound recorder in the tunnel, so the footage shows everything in an eerie silence. There is one moment though, when the brothers take down a microphone. In the footage, you hear a click, then suddenly you feel as though you’re down there with them. You hear the low rattle of a tram running along the ground just above their heads. Then a bus. Then footsteps – you can tell they’re a woman’s from the clip-clip-clip of her high heels. These are the sounds of Bernauer Strasse, the street above their head with all the tourists walking along it, looking at the Wall. Joachim finds the noises comforting. A reminder of the world of light and fresh air outside the tunnel.

  The day after filming begins, American Secretary of State Dean Rusk arrives in West Berlin and tours the Wall. At Bernauer Strasse he makes a speech for the cameras, commanding that ‘the Wall must go!’ As Rusk stands there, under his feet, deep below the flashpoint of the world, the diggers burrow closer to that Wall under the lights of the NBC cameras, all of them now characters in a TV drama, the script unwritten.

  35

  Umbrellas

  25 June 1962

  SIEGFRIED CLOSES THE door to the House of the Future, a grey umbrella in his hand. Heart thumping, he begins walking. This is it. Three months after joining West Berlin’s largest escape network, finally, he’s been asked to join an operation. The American, Joan Glenn, had told him about it a few weeks back. They were shaking things up, she said, changing the way they got people out of the East. Now, in a new VIP-service, groups of escapees would be assigned separate escape-helpers in the West. Was Siegfried up for taking a group on?

  Of course he was.

  Siegfried was assigned four people: two teachers and two students, all hoping to escape immediately. Then Joan had told him about the codes. Because so many escape operations had been busted by the Stasi, they would now communicate in a secret code, written on pieces of paper, hidden in umbrellas and smuggled over the border. She wanted Siegfried to deliver one of these umbrellas to the teachers tonight. And so Siegfried had come to the House of the Future and picked up that grey umbrella, a typewritten secret nestled within its spokes.

  Now, after checking he’s not being followed, Siegfried takes the umbrella to a Stasi safe house called Orient to meet his new handler, Puschmann. Siegfried arrives at eight. He’s always on time, to the minute. He gives Puschmann the umbrella – a proud cat delivering a mouse to its owner.

  Puschmann places the umbrella on a table, takes a photograph, then opens it, finding the container and the piece of paper inside. Written on the paper, a series of letters. Puschmann takes another photograph, refolds the paper and inserts it back into the secret compartment.

  They talk. Siegfried is excited. He wants to take the umbrella to the teachers now, finish the job tonight. But he is nervous. He asks Puschmann to follow him, ‘in case of an incident’. Puschmann agrees and off they go.

  Siegfried makes for Malmöer Strasse, the address given to him by Joan. He walks down it until he finds the right number, walks up to the door and presses the buzzer.

  Nothing.

  He waits, then buzzes again. Nothing. He tries one last time. Nothing. All that tension, all that build-up, only to find no one in. It’s the second time he’s failed. First, not finding out about the bomb, and now this.

  The next day Siegfried gets a phone call from Bodo Köhler and things get even worse: Bodo tells Siegfried not to come to the House of the Future again. Siegfried is worried. Are they on to him? Did they spot Puschmann behind him last night? In a panic, he calls Joan. ‘What’s going on?’

  She’s friendly as usual; nothing in her voice suggests a problem.

  ‘So why weren’t the teachers there when I went to see them? Did you give me the wrong address?’

  Joan says the address was right, they just weren’t at home. But he shouldn’t worry, as the teachers have found someone else who can help. They don’t need Siegfried’s help any more with this escape.

  None of this reassures him. Siegfried is suspicious, feels as though he’s being edged out. ‘So why can’t I come to the House of the Future and see you all?’

  ‘Haven’t you read the paper?’ Joan asks.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Neues Deutschland,’ she says (the party’s official newspaper in the East). ‘Read it tomorrow,’ Joan tells him. ‘Then you’ll understand.’

  A few hours later, Siegfried meets Puschmann and tells him what’s happened. Puschmann writes up the meeting in report 13337/64. He’s worried, thinks Siegfried could be burnt. Puschmann writes: ‘the Secret Collaborator should be extremely careful in his questioning so that he does not attract attention’.

  The next day, Siegfried reads the newspaper and everything becomes clear. An escape tunnel was infiltrated by the Stasi just two days ago, a tunneller shot and killed. The Girrmann Group were rattled. Yet another death.

  The party newspaper had left out the details: how the tunnel was dug by men in West Berlin who’d been separated from their wives in East Berlin, how one of them – a twenty-two-year-old who hadn’t seen his baby since the Wall went up – had crawled through into the East only to find Stasi agents waiting. They shot him, interrogating him as he lay dying. Their wives were all arrested.

  The Stasi informant who betrayed them was the brother of one of those women. His reward – a small bundle of cash.

  36

  Death Strip

  JOACHIM SITS BACK and inspects them: hundreds of stove pipes, bought by him over the past few weeks. It’s the end of June, they’ve been digging for forty days and they’re almost under the Wall. The tunnel is so long now, around thirty metres, that when they’re digging at the front, the air runs out. Panting, heads pounding, they get dizzy, short of breath. They need fresh air, but how to get it down to the front of a thirty-metre-long tunnel?

  That’s when he’d had the idea of the pipes. Standing, he grips one pipe and sticks it to another using strips of white tape. Then he tapes that pipe to another, then another, until he’s connected 160 pipes all the way from the tunnel to the factory door. There, he hooks the final pipe into a ventilator, and fresh air rushes in. />
  Lighting his way along the tunnel is a string of electric bulbs, installed a few weeks ago. Another Joachim invention. Then there’s the cart that zooms along the rails after he’d attached a motor and electric winch. This tunnel is now the most high-tech escape tunnel under the Wall and you can tell Peter and Klaus are impressed as they lovingly film all of Joachim’s electrical wizardry. The only problem Joachim hasn’t yet solved is a small leak – water is coming into the tunnel but it’s manageable for now.

  NBC are now getting their side of the deal: footage. And the diggers are getting theirs: money, lots of it, brought to them by Piers Anderton, who’d stashed $7,500 down his trousers on his flight to Paris, driving it through East Germany all the way to West Berlin with his wife Birgitta on their honeymoon.

  The diggers buy steel to make a rail for the cart. They buy pulleys. Ropes. Spades. Wheelbarrows. Pickaxes. And that means they can recruit more diggers. It’s not easy, finding people willing to spend hours underground, but eventually they have twenty-one diggers, people they think they can trust. Most are students at the Technical University, refugees from East Berlin. Some have people they want to get out. Others want revenge.

  When they recruit them, there’s one thing that Mimmo, Gigi and Wolf don’t tell them about: the NBC film deal. They’re worried it will put people off, that they’ll think it’s too risky having an American TV network involved. They create a careful schedule, only allowing Peter and Klaus to come to the cellar when the core group are there: Mimmo, Gigi, Wolf, Joachim and Hasso. The others will find out in time, just not yet.

  A few days later, the tunnel reaches the border between East and West Berlin. To mark the moment, they make a sign, a replica of the one you’d see above ground when you crossed the border:

  YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR OF BERLIN!

  Every time they crawl under it they laugh. They were good at that kind of thing. Tunnel humour. And they need that humour, for now they are under the death strip.

  It’s a section of land next to the Wall patrolled by armed border guards and Alsatians. Watching. Listening. The strip is festooned with trip-wires, studded with spikes, and raked sand reveals the illicit footprints of intruders. At the end of the tunnel, as Joachim digs, it’s now silent. The sounds from the street – the bicycles, horns, trams, buses – have disappeared and all he can hear is the sound of his own breathing, dank, fast and shallow. The scuffle of spade on clay. The metallic whirr of the cart as it zooms towards the cellar. In the tunnel, just one metre by one metre, those sounds disappear as fast as they arrive, absorbed by the clay. And in the silence, Joachim learns what it’s like to feel entombed, the weight of the earth tightly packed in all around him. He looks up at the tunnel ceiling, a handspan above his head. If it were to collapse, as other tunnels have, he’d drown in the clay. Thinking about that sends a drowsy terror through his veins.

  Then he thinks about what’s above him: the VoPos. He knows they’re on the lookout for tunnels and he knows about the listening devices that they place on the ground. If they detect movement they’ll dig a hole and shoot into it or throw in dynamite. At any moment the earth above him could break open, a bright flash of sky before it all ends.

  Some nights he hears them talking. And he knows that if he can hear them, they can hear him. So there’s no talking in the tunnel. He switches off the ventilator. It’s too loud.

  Now he struggles to breathe. He gets headaches. His ears ring.

  And then there are the times when he stops digging, just for a moment, and lies there, lost in time, the black hole against his feet seeming to lead down into forever. He can hear the wind, he can hear things falling on the ground above, he can hear vibrations that seem as though they’re coming from inside the tunnel, then one of the lightbulbs flickers and winks out and panic flows through him like a drug.

  Is there something in here? Is it the Stasi? Are they coming for me?

  37

  Wilhelm, Again

  BStU

  20 June 1962

  Main division II/5

  - Operative Group -

  Report on the Schmidt family

  Following a detailed discussion about his opportunities and his contact with Peter and Evi Schmidt, it was unanimously concluded that ‘Wilhelm’ will have good opportunities to further monitor these persons if things are done right.

  Furthermore, ‘Wilhelm’ will spend his whole holiday at his weekend property in July and August this year, and thus he will be there every day, and he declared himself willing to do his utmost in this respect. In order to have more contact with Peter and Evi Schmidt it was agreed that he will carry out some work in their house and garden. After carrying out the work, Peter should be very hospitable and engage Wilhelm in conversations with Schnapps and beer.

  Next meeting: 2 July, 1962 at 9.30 a.m.

  Signed, _____

  Second Lieutenant

  [Enclosed: Floor plan of Peter and Eveline Schmidt’s house]

  38

  Ground Rules

  IT’S THE MIDDLE of the night and Piers Anderton is lying in bed, his wife Birgitta beside him. She’s deep in sleep. His eyes are wide open. Slipping out of bed, Piers pulls on a sturdy pair of boots and drives to the factory, arriving just as Joachim, Wolf and Hasso are beginning their shifts. Inside, the Dehmel brothers are filming.

  Piers likes to see the tunnel growing, getting a few centimetres longer each day. When the diggers take breaks up in the cellar, he talks to them, his notebook out, writing by the light of a candle, inhaling deeply on his cigar. On one shift, over apples, beer and cigarettes, Mimmo tells him about his childhood. How his father died when he was six months old fighting Franco. His mother died soon after. He doesn’t trust any government, he says, communist or capitalist; people have to do things for themselves. Then Mimmo describes seeing the Wall go up, women in East Berlin weeping because their husbands were in the West and they’d never see them again. ‘The East Germans are swines,’ he tells Piers, ‘not because they are communists but because they keep people living lives full of fear. People should live happy lives with good food and love, not by an idiotic theory of a future one hundred years from now. We must do something to help friends whose freedom has been stolen. The East German government should know that there are simple people who want to do something against inhumanity.’

  Piers never stays long, just an hour or two, then drives back to his flat, where Birgitta is stirring. She looks at him, his clothes spattered with mud, the earth caked on his boots. She knows not to ask questions, teasing him about his ‘crazy American news business’.

  Later that day Piers will phone Reuven to give him an update. He calls Reuven every couple of weeks, never saying much as he knows the phones are probably bugged – after all, West Berlin is 100 miles inside the communist zone and, as Reuven put it, ‘only a fool would assume nobody is listening’.

  Reuven and Piers had agreed the ground rules right from the start. First, they would only tell Reuven’s boss at NBC about the tunnel, no one else – definitely no NBC lawyers. Reuven even hired a separate accountant outside of the usual NBC channels, against which he charged cameras, lights and any other tunnel costs. Second, they agreed that Reuven Frank would never come to West Berlin while they were filming – a hotshot TV executive from New York spending time there would raise questions. Third, the Dehmel brothers would never take the same route when they went to the tunnel and they would never meet any diggers in public. Finally, Piers agreed he would never tell anyone where the cellar was, not even Reuven.

  The fewer people who knew, the better.

  39

  The Leak

  JOACHIM IS SOAKED.

  Water runs down his face, his shoulders, into his ears and down his back. Crouched at the entrance to the tunnel, now around thirty metres long, he looks at the water that’s filling it, the earth that’s as soft as soap. The wooden boards that once held the earth back are floating on top of the water, almost touching the cei
ling and every hour, chunks of the tunnel wall fall in.

  Joachim looks down at his knees, wedged into the soft clay, pools of stagnant water swilling round them, the air filled with the musty smell of wet clothes. It’s dark and airless in the tunnel now; one by one his lights have sparked out, and some of the pipes that funnelled fresh air have fallen in. Now he reaches forward to pull the Second World War telephone off the wall before it, too, is lost to the water. All of his beloved inventions are now redundant. Two months of digging; two months of blisters, exhaustion, and a life that Joachim had given over entirely to this tunnel, forgetting the above-ground life he was supposed to be living at university; and it had come to this: sludge.

  Joachim trails his hand in the water that’s still rising. The leak had begun three weeks ago. First, just a bit of moisture on the ceiling that they all thought was nothing to worry about. Then plump drips. Then a trickle of water that streamed in steadily hour after hour, day after day. Joachim thought it was just the rain – Berlin was in the middle of its wettest summer in years, the Wall-tourists above sploshing through giant puddles in the streets. But soon the water was gushing in and he knew there was more to it, probably a burst pipe somewhere nearby. It was then Joachim realised that, despite their calculations on the route and length of the tunnel, they had made one mistake: they’d dug the tunnel down at an angle, which meant the water was collecting at the front, almost impossible to remove. Standing in a line, their clothes sodden, the diggers had scooped out thousands of buckets of water. Still the water came. Using a hose borrowed from a local fire station they pumped out 8,000 gallons of water in one week by hand, dumping it into an overflow pipe that ran through the cellar.