Tunnel 29

by Helena Merriman

  Still, the water came.

  Joachim climbs out of the tunnel up into the cellar, where the diggers are arguing about what to do next, pacing the room in their underwear – wet jeans and T-shirts drying over electric cables in the corner. One digger says it’s time to give up, abandon the tunnel: look at it, it’s half-wrecked already. The others nod, but then Uli jumps in; that knot of revenge in his stomach that has got him this far is now pulsing and he can’t bear the thought of giving up now: ‘No! Let’s keep pumping, or… or there are other things we could try, like… why don’t we go to the water authorities, ask for their help?’

  There’s a burst of laughter; the idea of wandering into a West Berlin local authority office and asking for help is so ridiculous that some of the diggers start gathering their clothes to leave. Others are terrified at the thought of doing something so reckless and they shout back at Uli: ‘Are you crazy? Do you want to be kidnapped? Taken back to the East, thrown in prison?’

  As they all know, Stasi informants aren’t just operating in East Germany; West Germany is crawling with spies too. In the late 1950s, Markus Wolf (then deputy minister of the Stasi, supposedly the inspiration for John le Carré’s fictional spymaster Karla), recruited hundreds of informants from East German universities, trained them in espionage, and sent them to West Germany. Like caterpillars, they wriggled into the fabric of West German society, into government, media, business, even its intelligence services, and now, ten years later, having reached the top, the brightest of these Stasi butterflies had been activated. The Perspektivagenten – ‘sleeper agents’ – are run from Markus Wolf’s foreign wing of the Stasi, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA). As well as these spies, there are the former Nazis working in West German politics, blackmailed by the Stasi, who threatened to reveal their past if they don’t spy for them. Then there are the low-level informants, the Siegfrieds of this world, who’ve been recruited to work for the Stasi in West Germany.

  Joachim thinks of the stories he’s heard, the Stasi agents who infiltrate student groups and escape networks in West Berlin, the cars that sidle up on the street – footsteps and a hood pulled over your head.

  It was a well-known practice: Stasi agents would often kidnap (or, in their words, ‘retract’) people off the streets of West Berlin, smuggling them over the border to Stasi prisons. It’s what happened to Karl Wilhelm Fricke, a well-known journalist, who on April Fools’ Day in 1955 had his cognac spiked by Stasi agents, who then bundled him into a car, drove him to East Berlin and put him on trial. He was sentenced to four years of solitary confinement. Fricke was one of the lucky ones: many ‘retracted’ people were never seen again.

  They all agree it’s too dangerous to get the water authorities involved; they should just keep pumping the water out instead. But later that evening, as more of the tunnel collapses and they realise they only have a few days before they lose it completely, they decide that though the West Berlin water department is the riskiest solution, it’s the only one they have.

  Sitting in the water utility department, looking at the man in charge of water supply for Bernauer Strasse, Mimmo and Gigi come straight to the point: ‘We’ve seen water, on the pavement on Bernauer Strasse, and we think it must be a burst pipe.’

  The man looks back at them, says he’s surprised. How would they know it’s a burst pipe? It’s very observant of them.

  For a moment there’s an awkward silence. Mimmo’s mind races; he looks at the man, trying to work out from his face whether he could be a Stasi informant. But just as Mimmo is about to try out a story on him, the man asks them, straight out, whether they’re digging a tunnel and Mimmo finds himself admitting it.

  ‘Okay,’ the man says, ‘I’ll help you. But you need permission.’

  Mimmo looks blank. ‘Permission? From whom?’

  ‘The intelligence services.’

  That night, there’s a phone call for Mimmo at his university dorm. Running to the corridor phone, he picks it up and a man on the line introduces himself as Egon Bahr and says he wants to help.

  Mimmo knows exactly who Egon Bahr is. He is one of the most trusted advisors to Willy Brandt, the mayor of West Berlin. Egon Bahr hates the Wall as much as Willy Brandt does (though while Willy Brandt calls it die Schandmauer – ‘the Wall of Shame’ – Egon Bahr calls it the Scheissmauer – ‘the Wall of Shit’). Egon Bahr is known for supporting any plans to attack the Wall – it was Egon who had given the Girrmann Group the go-ahead when they bombed the Wall, and right now he is very excited about this tunnel, the most ambitious escape attempt since the Wall was built. He says he wants to help, but first they need to meet someone in West German intelligence.

  The following day, Mimmo and Gigi meet a man called Mertens. They know it’s not his real name; they barely know anything about him except that he keeps an eye on all escape operations hatched from West Berlin, not just for West German intelligence, but also for the CIA. The Western intelligence agencies liked to know about escape operations for two reasons: first, so they could mine new arrivals in West Berlin for information from the East (as they’d done with Joachim after he escaped). More importantly, they didn’t want any nasty surprises at the border if an escape went wrong – they all knew that a shoot-out could escalate into nuclear war.

  Most of the time, the West German and American intelligence agencies didn’t get involved in escape operations – they were in favour of them (they supported anything that undermined East Germany), but they’d watch things play out from the background. Occasionally though, like West Berlin police, who sometimes gave covering fire to help escapees over the border, they would find ways to work a little magic.

  Mimmo and Gigi tell Mertens all about the tunnel, the people they want to rescue and about the leak. Mertens listens. He is inscrutable, they are uncomfortable talking to him, they have no idea whether they are right to trust him, but at the end of the meeting, he too sends them onto someone else: the Americans. And he gives them an address: 9 Podbielski Allee.

  Mimmo and Gigi find it on a map. It’s in south-west Berlin, which makes sense – that’s where the Americans base most of their operations, including the offices of RIAS, the American radio station that Joachim listened to in East Berlin. Arriving at a large, nondescript house, Mimmo and Gigi walk into ‘P9’, and there they explain the situation. For a fourth time.

  The Americans are interested. Very interested. They want names and addresses of everyone involved in the escape. Mimmo and Gigi write the names, hand them over to the Americans, then leave, the Americans thanking them – adding that help might come soon. Mimmo and Gigi have no idea if they’ll hear from them again.

  A few days later, a group of men in flat caps arrive at Bernauer Strasse, just outside the cocktail-straw factory. Joachim and Uli are on digging shift that day, and they pull aside a drape that covers the window to watch the men as they hack into the pavement. Also watching, from their guard-towers over the Wall, are VoPos. Straining their eyes through binoculars, the VoPos watch as the plumbers break into the concrete and remove pieces of pipe. The VoPos know that people are digging escape tunnels in the streets near the Wall, they’re always hunting for evidence of one, and now Joachim and Uli are terrified that the VoPos will guess from the repair work that there is something that shouldn’t be there underground.

  It doesn’t take the plumbers in flat caps long to fix the leak, but when they finish, Uli and Joachim watch as the men walk up to the next block and start hacking into the other parts of the pavement. They’re confused – at first they think the leak must go further than they thought. It’s only later they discover that this was a charade, performed entirely for the benefit of the VoPos. Just general repair works – that’s the impression the plumbers are trying to give. Nothing to see here.

  That night, down in the tunnel, Joachim checks the water level. It’s stabilised, the water is no longer streaming in, but though the leak is fixed, the tunnel is still full of water. He calculates that it will take
months to pump it out and for the earth to dry.

  A week later, at the end of June, Mimmo and Gigi cross the border to East Berlin to see Evi and Peter, and they tell them about the leak, explain that the tunnel won’t be ready by 13 August.

  Evi and Peter are devastated; they know the army could come for Peter at any moment. Every time there’s a knock at the door they think his time is up. But there is nothing they can do except wait.

  40

  The Second Tunnel

  IT’S JULY 1962 and the Wall has been up for almost a year.

  In East Berlin, the streets next to the Wall are quiet. The houses are empty, except for rats, and barbed wire hangs from chimney to chimney like Christmas decorations. Streets that once thrummed with cars are empty and the shops and bakeries that once stood here have closed. The Wall has changed the shape of East Berlin; bus routes have been re-drawn, walks to school diverted.

  But every now and then, there are bursts of life. There are the children who play in the streets next to the Wall, taking advantage of these roads-to-nowhere, playing football or hide-and-seek. There are the protests, when people in West Berlin come to the Wall with banners and shout into the East. There are the songs, which separated lovers play to each other over the Wall. And then there are the vans that drive up to the Wall playing propaganda and music through loudspeakers: Soviet songs on one side, American on the other. A kind of musical warfare.

  When the Wall was built, many in the East thought it wouldn’t last. A year on, they realise it’s here to stay – as are they. The idea of trying to escape now is terrifying, because the Wall has changed: there are now trip-wires, guard-towers, landmines, triangular tank traps, electric fences, metal spikes, spotlights, a second inner wall – and should someone somehow make it through all that, the VoPos are armed with pistols, machine-guns, mortars, anti-tank rifles and flame-throwers. Along Bernauer Strasse, there are makeshift memorials all along the street for those who’ve died here trying to escape, their names carved into wood: Olga Segler. Ida Siekmann. Rolf Urban. Bernd Lunser.

  For Walter Ulbricht and his Socialist Unity Party, the Wall has been a great success. It’s blocked the haemorrhage of people that would have destroyed the country and the party now has a second chance. And there are some who still believe that life in the East will improve, that things will get better if they wait long enough. But for many East Berliners, the Wall is a constant reminder of the life on the other side that they can’t live. People who live closest to the Wall describe feeling constant anxiety and fear, and East German psychiatrists will soon invent a new word to describe this: Mauerkrankheit, which translates as ‘Wall-sickness’. And statisticians who measure the country’s death rate note that the suicide rate has shot up. All of which makes the next addition to the Wall feel even more insidious: the party instructs VoPos to attach a wooden screen to the top to make it taller. Not to stop people escaping, but to stop them waving to people in West Berlin. In a strange way, you can see their logic: if you’re in prison, waving to a friend or your mother over a wall, you’re still dreaming of a life on the other side, and the party doesn’t want that. That’s why they’ve blotted out West Berlin on all new maps. East Germany should be enough.

  But it’s not enough. And every month, some of those who dream of life beyond the Wall escape – eighty-six in June, stuffed into the boots of cars or smuggled over the border with fake passports. By now, the diggers hoped the tunnel would be almost ready, but it is sitting there, waterlogged, and every day they wait, there’s a greater the risk the Stasi will find it. They’re desperate to keep going, but how?

  That’s when they’d heard about it: the other tunnel. A tunnel that had been dug into East Berlin, but then abandoned: one of the diggers had got ill, the others had left Berlin. Bodo Köhler from the Girrmann Group put Joachim and the others onto it. There was a list of people waiting to crawl through this new tunnel; why not add Evi and Peter and get everyone out at the same time?

  It made sense. In theory. But it was risky; it would mean working with a new network of students in a new tunnel they knew nothing about. Some of the diggers say no straight away – they’re out. But Joachim wants to take a look – after all, here they were, a group of diggers without a tunnel, and now a tunnel had appeared, in need of diggers.

  On a sticky day in late July, Wolf drives Joachim and Uli to Kiefholzstrasse in the south-east of Berlin. Climbing out of the car, Joachim walks towards a small clump of trees and bushes, and there it is: a hole in the ground leading to the tunnel.

  Holding a small torch, Joachim crawls in. It’s tiny, not even big enough for him to crawl on his hands and knees. He slides in on his belly, broken tree roots scratching his skin. The tunnel runs under Kiefholzstrasse, a busy road, and every time a truck drives over the tunnel, sand pours into his eyes, but Joachim keeps going, now wriggling along in pitch-black as there are no lights, his breath rasping as the air runs out.

  He’d never expected another tunnel to be as high-tech as his, with lights, telephones, motorised pulley systems and air pipes, but he can’t quite believe there are tunnels as basic as this: with nowhere to hide the earth, no water supply, no electricity. And all this with the VoPos just a few hundred metres away over the Wall. But as Joachim inches out of the tunnel, reversing feet first on his tummy, he finds himself thinking up ways to improve it.

  A few hours later, Joachim and Uli return with spades and pickaxes. Squeezing into the tunnel, they hack away at the sides hour after hour until it is wide enough to crawl through.

  Two days later, they are happy with the size. Now they need to check the tunnel is pointing in the right direction. All Joachim knows is that the tunnel is meant to come up under a house in a street over the Wall called Puderstrasse, but down in the tunnel it’s hard to tell whether it’s actually heading that way. So they come up with a plan: one of the diggers crawls to the front of the tunnel, sticks a rod through the ceiling, right up into the air, while another crouches above ground, looking through binoculars to see where the stick comes out, to check if the tunnel is pointing the right way.

  It isn’t.

  Back into the tunnel they go for another day’s digging, correcting the route, then they excavate the final few metres until the front of the tunnel is under the house.

  Lying there, underneath that house, Joachim realises he knows almost nothing about what’s meant to happen next. All he’s been told by the Girrmann Group is that the house is owned by a couple who’d said a few months back that their home could be used to help with an escape. Since then, the couple had gone quiet and no one had heard from them for months. As for the rest of the plan, all Joachim knows is that there is a list of forty people who are meant to be escaping through the tunnel; forty people – plus Peter, Evi and their baby Annet, who’ve been added to the list.

  Now the tunnel is ready, there is one final job. They need a messenger, someone to tell everyone on that list in East Berlin the date and time of the escape. With no phone lines between East and West Berlin, the only way to do this is for someone to cross the border from West to East Berlin and tell everyone in person. That person needs a West German passport, since only West Germans can go in and out of East Berlin. It is dangerous: if anything goes wrong on escape day, the Stasi will send soldiers to the checkpoints to find that messenger before they go back into West Berlin. And they know that the Stasi punishes escape-helpers more severely than the people they’re rescuing. Unsurprisingly, no one wants to do it.

  But just as they are giving up hope, they find someone – someone who will do it for the most primal reason of all.

  41

  The Lovers

  WOLFDIETER LIES ON her bed, looking at her, his Renate, drinking in every minute before he has to leave. He thinks about what he’s agreed to do, hopes he’s made the right decision. It is the biggest gamble of his life.

  He thinks back to the first letter he wrote to Renate, aged eighteen. A family friend had put them in touch: ‘You coul
d be pen-pals,’ she’d said. And so, from his home in the Black Forest in West Germany, Wolfdieter had told Renate all about his childhood after the war: the French soldiers who liberated his city, the constant hunger, his father who died as a soldier in an unknown field in Russia. And from East Germany, Renate had replied, describing in long letters how her family had escaped from Polish soldiers towards the end of the war, arriving in Dresden just before the city was bombed, the fear that ran through her bones – even now – every time she heard a siren. Soon they wrote about other things, the music they listened to (this new band called The Beatles), and they shared their love of Russian literature – Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy. Renate once wrote a letter all about The White Rose, a book about a group of German students who’d led an underground resistance against Hitler. They were caught, put on trial and hanged. Something in it had sparked something in her.

  After two years of letters, Wolfdieter and Renate met in Berlin. They only spent a few hours together, but enough to know they liked each other as much in person as on the page. They’d made plans to move to Berlin, but then 13 August happened and now there was a Wall between them.

  And so it had come to this: weekend love. During the week, Renate worked in the audiology department of a hospital in East Berlin and Wolfdieter studied at the Free University in West Berlin. As a West German citizen, Wolfdieter was allowed into East Berlin, so on Saturday mornings he’d board the train to Friedrichstrasse, wait in line to cross the border, then take another train to Renate’s apartment. He hated those train journeys. No one talked, everyone looked down, shoulders hunched. Three hours after leaving his flat in West Berlin, when he arrived at Renate’s apartment, they would fold into each other’s arms and wonder how they could ever build a future together. For Wolfdieter, it was like falling in love with a prisoner.