Tunnel 29

by Helena Merriman

  Two weeks later, a guard comes to Wolfdieter’s cell, takes him out of the building and into a car, and drives him to a building he doesn’t recognise. There, a guard takes Wolfdieter up the stairs into a room. A court-room. He’s confused: he’s had his trial; why would he need another?

  Then he sees her: Renate.

  The last time he’d seen her was on the S-Bahn, the day of the escape. They’d said goodbye at the train station, Wolfdieter leaving to cross the border back into West Berlin. He’d had no idea Renate had been caught by border guards on the street corner, or that she’d made up that story about her friend’s birthday and got away.

  The night of the escape Renate went home, relief flowing through her as she went to bed, assuming that Wolfdieter had made it back over the border. Then, at three in the morning, the doorbell rang, long and urgent, and opening the door, bleary-eyed, Renate found two men standing there.

  ‘Get dressed,’ they’d said, and they’d driven her away in a black car, one man either side of her in the back. Later she’d discover that her name and address had been given to the Stasi by someone in Hohenschönhausen Prison. Renate never found out who, but she didn’t blame them. In the end, most people talked.

  The men took Renate to Keibelstrasse, the police headquarters, and interrogated her all through the first night and the next. Since then, she’d been kept on her own – in solitary confinement. Now, back in the clothes she’d thrown on that night, she stands in the court-room, and sees Wolfdieter at the back.

  Their eyes lock and her hands begin to shake, as do her legs, so much so that the judge – a woman – motions for someone to bring Renate a chair. Renate has never forgotten that: that small gesture of kindness. But she doesn’t let herself hope that the judge might be lenient. She knows by now how it all works.

  The judge looks at Renate. ‘You are charged with committing a violent act, which endangered the state and created fear and terror.’ She is being charged with the same crime as Wolfdieter.

  Renate is given a chance to speak and, somehow, she finds some words. ‘I didn’t want to create fear,’ she says. ‘I just wanted to go to my Wolfdieter.’ After the trial, many years later, she’ll hear that the other prisoners in the court-room were moved by her words. Few dared say anything.

  Meanwhile, standing at the back of the court-room, watching all of this, Wolfdieter realises that, in an act of chilling vindictiveness, the Stasi have brought him here simply to watch Renate be sentenced. The judge calls the court to order, then hands down her sentence.

  Three years.

  As the guards take Renate out of the court-room, she passes Wolfdieter and she puts out her still-shaking hand, he puts out his, and for a few seconds their fingers curl together, gripping tightly before their hands are ripped apart and Renate disappears out of the court-room, the door closing behind her with a bang.

  48

  The Butcher

  COVERED IN SWEAT and mud, Joachim lies back in the tunnel. It’s quiet. He looks at his stove pipes, the electric lights, the Second World War telephone, all his inventions that make this tunnel feel like home. Yes, it’s hot and damp and dark and claustrophobic, but it feels good to be back.

  The NBC camera-crew are here again too, Peter and Klaus lying in the tunnel with their tiny camera and light, filming the digging. And Piers Anderton had been dropping in now and then to see how they were all doing. Over the months Piers had become a father-figure to the diggers, though he would always remember what Reuven Frank had told him when he started filming: don’t get involved – that would cross the red line of universal journalist principles. Piers was simply there to film and report the digging. Not be part of it. If the diggers ever asked his advice about the escape operation, Piers would redirect the conversation and they would talk politics, fantasise about a future where one day the world wouldn’t be carved in two.

  It is now late August, a few weeks after that failed escape attempt, and Joachim and the others are back in the tunnel. They’d gone to the cellar to check on it, the tunnel that had been waterlogged by the leak, and discovered it was dry, the clay no longer mush, but holding firm. That day, they’d started digging again. Peter and Evi were desperate to escape East Berlin as soon as possible, and now there were over twenty others on the list, including Hasso’s sister Anita, all desperate to get out. And so the diggers had returned to the rhythm of their shifts in the tunnel: the eight-hour digging stints, the backaches, the blisters and the fear of being discovered.

  Up in the cellar, Joachim’s gaze falls on a newspaper photo of a teenager in a white shirt, with neat features and combed hair. Whenever he felt exhausted, like giving up, Joachim would look at the photo and he’d dig from somewhere deep within, anger fuelling each thrust.

  The boy’s name was Peter Fechter and he was famous all over the world for something horrific that happened on 17 August. It began when Peter and his friend Helmut crept into an abandoned factory in East Berlin near the wall at Zimmerstrasse, not far from the American border post at Checkpoint Charlie. Peter and Helmut were eighteen years old, bricklayers working on a building site nearby, and they’d wandered to the factory during their lunch-break. They’d been talking about how they both wanted to escape, and in a heady moment of teenage-spontaneity, they decided to see how close they could get to the Wall without being seen.

  Inside the factory, Peter and Helmut took off their shoes, padding up to a storeroom where they found the only window in the building that wasn’t bricked up. It looked directly out onto the Wall.

  Then suddenly: voices. Without thinking, they jumped out of the window and ran towards the Wall, scrambling over the first barbed-wire barrier. From behind, they heard the crack of automatic Kalashnikovs as VoPos caught sight of them, spraying bullets at the boys as they sprinted across the death strip in their socks. No one knows how they’ll react to the sound of gunfire until they hear it: for Helmut, it made him run faster and he vaulted to the top of the eight-foot Wall. Looking down, he saw Peter, who’d had a different reaction.

  He’d frozen.

  With the Wall right in front of him, Peter no longer had the momentum to scale it, but he tried anyway, throwing his body at the Wall while the VoPos let off their weapons, thirty-five bullets streaming towards him, one hitting Peter in the hip.

  Peter fell.

  Slumped at the bottom of the Wall, Peter curled his body into a foetal position, cradling himself as the ground around him turned red.

  ‘Help me! Help me!’ he screamed.

  The VoPos watched. Police in West Berlin watched. American soldiers from the nearby garrison watched. And they kept watching minute after minute as Peter cried for help, gasping for breath, his voice getting weaker. Later, the VoPos would say they didn’t run in to the death strip to retrieve Peter because they were scared they could be shot by Western police. West Berlin and American police said they held back as they were following orders not to help escapees unless they’d already made it into the West. One American officer at the scene was said to have looked away, saying: ‘It’s not my problem.’ They all knew that if shots broke out, it could spark World War Three. This was the Cold War in action. Or rather, inaction.

  At Checkpoint Charlie, the American lieutenant on duty called the commander of West Berlin’s American garrison, who managed to get a message to President Kennedy: ‘Mr President, an escapee is bleeding to death at the Berlin Wall.’ They wanted instructions.

  None came.

  Soon, word spread through West Berlin that something awful was happening at the Wall: reporters climbed ladders, taking photographs of Peter as he lay there, his life bleeding out of him. Hundreds of people climbed on cars, screaming at the VoPos, the West German policemen, the American soldiers: ‘Do something! You cowards! You murderers! DO SOMETHING, DO SOMETHING, DO SOMETHING!’

  Eventually, a couple of West Berlin police climbed onto the Wall and threw down some bandages, but by then, Peter had stopped crying and his face was pale. An hour after
Peter had been shot, his body crumpled and went limp. Only then did the VoPos move in to collect his body, exploding smoke bombs around them to give cover. As the VoPos took his body away, to the chant of ‘Murderers! Murderers!’, the smoke cleared and a reporter took a photograph that would be printed in newspapers all over the world. It would become one of the most iconic images of the Cold War: Peter Fechter’s body being carried away by three VoPos, his head flopping back, one bare foot.

  Three hours later, a handwritten sign appeared in an East Berlin apartment window:

  ‘He is dead.’

  The American garrison sent a message to the White House: ‘The matter has taken care of itself’.

  The next day, and for three days after that, West Berlin exploded with rage. Tens of thousands of people filled the streets, setting cars on fire, barricading streets, swarming to the Wall, where they threw rocks and bricks, West Berlin police pushing them back with water cannons and tear gas. But the protesters kept going, because something about watching Peter’s slow and lonely death had made West Berliners feel powerless and ashamed as never before. Right now, they wanted to feel as though they could do something to change the monstrous thing that had happened in their city that made soldiers and policemen stand by and do nothing as a human being died in front of them. Thousands marched to Checkpoint Charlie to demonstrate against the American soldiers for abandoning Peter, holding banners reading:

  PROTECTING POWER = ACCOMPLICE TO MURDER

  As they raged, the reactions came in: the US commander in West Berlin called the event ‘an act of barbaric inhumanity’. President Kennedy discussed Peter’s death with his advisors, trying to work out a plan should this kind of thing happen again. Time magazine ran the story as their headline, describing the Wall as a ‘Wall of Shame’, a phrase that would stick.

  But somehow, words didn’t feel enough, and a few days later, the mayor of West Berlin, Willy Brandt, invited the Yale Russian Chorus to sing a German translation of Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus at the Wall. The men gathered at the Wall, the understated opening notes giving way to a soaring melody, the music lifting high above the concrete, high above East Berliners, who felt forgotten. From now on, they knew that whatever horrors happened at the Wall, the US wouldn’t step in: the risk of nuclear war wasn’t worth the life of a bricklayer, however long and painful his death.

  While West Berliners could express their anger, East Berliners had to suppress theirs: Peter’s horrific death was yet another indignity to rage about in private. They’d learnt from that uprising in 1953 what the costs of marching on the streets were. Peter’s parents only found out what had happened when police burst into their home, searched it, interrogated them, then told them their eighteen-year-old son was dead. At the funeral a few days later, 300 people turned up, and as usual, the Stasi took the opportunity to monitor everyone who attended, arresting an American photojournalist and sentencing him to two years in prison for espionage. That evening, on his nightly TV show, East Germany’s chief propagandist, Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, got to work, turning Peter’s death into a moral lesson for anyone in the East thinking of escaping:

  ‘The life of each one of our brave young men in uniform is more important to us than the life of a lawbreaker. By staying away from our state border – blood, tears and screams can be avoided.’

  East German newspapers buried the story, filling its front pages instead with stories about the latest Soviet space missions and the heroism of the volunteers who’d helped with that year’s harvest. In the back pages, where they mentioned Peter’s death, they blamed the West for inciting him to suicidal actions. By the end of August, after the rioters in West Berlin had exhausted themselves, all that remained to mark Peter’s death was a white wooden cross near the spot where he’d died.

  Looking back down from that photo on the wall to the tunnel, Joachim thinks about the weeks ahead. This final stretch of digging will be more dangerous than all the digging they’ve done so far, for now they are firmly under the East, VoPos patrolling above their heads all the time with their listening devices. And yes, the digging is hard, but after what happened at the other tunnel, all the people arrested, what Joachim finds harder is the fear, never knowing who to trust. Ever since the escape that went wrong, the mood among the diggers had changed; they still don’t know who betrayed them to the Stasi, so they watch each other. All the time.

  Towards the end of his shift, around six in the evening, as he lies in the tunnel, Joachim hears a strange noise.

  Hmm. Hmm.

  It’s a humming, electrical sound. It starts, then stops. Starts and stops again. Putting down his spade, Joachim lies in the dark, listening to the sound of his breathing. Is it a VoPo patrolling the death strip above? Have they heard me? He begins to wriggle through the tunnel on his back, barely breathing.

  Hmm. Hmm.

  The hairs on his neck prickle as he hears the noise again, now louder, his eyes boring into the ceiling as he scoots back towards the cellar, imagining the tunnel ripped open, a VoPo smiling triumphantly as he throws in dynamite.

  Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.

  At the end of the tunnel, Joachim pulls himself out, scrambles up the ladder into the cellar and catches his breath.

  Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.

  The noise is louder here and he scans the room, looking for anything that explains it, and sees the fuse box – perhaps that’s it. Walking towards it, Joachim freezes, for the cellar door is slowly opening, and an arm is sliding through the gap. Joachim is rooted to the spot; all he can do is watch as the door opens to reveal a man standing there. He is hefty, plump, with brown hair, an open face and – to confuse things – a big smile.

  ‘I’m Claus,’ he says.

  49

  Claus’s Story

  HE’S A BUTCHER, Claus says. Married, but he hasn’t seen his wife, Inge, since the night they tried to escape in November last year. They’d taken their toddler, Kirsten, to the border with nappies and milk, and were about to dash across when a VoPo appeared, pointed his gun at them and told them to go home.

  The border guard was short, much shorter than Claus, and it had been too tempting not to take advantage of his height, so Claus punched him and ran, thinking Inge and their daughter were following as he squeezed through the barbed wire. Then he’d heard them, five shots, and he dropped to the ground. As Claus stood up, astonished he wasn’t dead, he realised Inge and Kirsten weren’t following, but were stuck behind the barbed wire, trapped in the arms of the VoPo. In an instant, Claus had lost his wife, his daughter and his unborn child – for Inge was pregnant.

  Since then, Claus had been living in West Berlin, feeling powerless as he heard snippets of news from back home: he’d heard all about Inge’s show trial, how she’d been sent to prison, their daughter placed in a children’s home. He’d imagined Inge giving birth in a Stasi jail, but she was released early and gave birth in hospital to their son, Uwe. A few weeks later, through smuggled messages, Claus and Inge had agreed a date and time to stand either side of the Wall in the hope they could catch a glimpse of each other. On the appointed day, Claus went to the border and held up a pair of binoculars through which he could just make out the shape of his daughter (now reunited with her mother), and Inge, holding Uwe high above the Wall, wrapped in a blanket. Since then, Claus had spent every day trying to find a way to get Inge and their two children into West Berlin. He’d helped dig two other tunnels, but both collapsed. Then, walking down Bernauer Strasse today, he’d seen clumps of clay in the courtyard, which is why he was standing here right now. Could he help dig the tunnel and use it to rescue Inge and his two children?

  It’s quite a story. Almost too much, and Joachim doesn’t know whether to believe it. He wonders how a husband and father could escape like that, abandoning his family, not checking they were with him. It just doesn’t sound right. Then this tale about finding clay in the courtyard.

  Joachim thinks about the people arrested a few weeks ago, sitting in Stasi prisons all becaus
e of a spy, and now, here’s someone they’ve never met with a strange story who just happens to have found their tunnel. If they let Claus join the group, and it turns out he’s working for the Stasi… it’s unthinkable.

  The easiest solution would be to throw Claus out of the cellar, but now he knows where the tunnel is. And then, what if Claus is telling the truth? What if his wife and children really are stuck on the other side? If Joachim doesn’t let Claus join them, the children will grow up without their father, just like he did. He must think carefully. Find a solution.

  ‘Okay,’ says Joachim, ‘I need to discuss this with the others. Come back at ten tonight.’

  At ten exactly, Claus returns and sees five of them standing there: Joachim, the two Italians, Wolf and Hasso. Joachim had told them all what was happening, said he needed their help.

  ‘So,’ says Joachim, ‘tell them what you told me.’

  ‘Well, I’m a butcher…’

  Claus repeats his story and the diggers form a circle around him, listening to every word, scrutinising his body language, looking for any sign that he’s lying. Then slowly, they close in on him, Claus inching back towards the tunnel until his heels are teetering over the edge of the shaft. As he stands there, Joachim catches Mimmo’s eye and Mimmo gestures to the hole, and for a moment the thought hovers in the air between them, horrifying and unspoken. Joachim pictures it: if Claus were to fall in, they could bury him in the tunnel and no one would ever know. It would be a neat solution. But as suddenly as the thought appears, he pushes it away. He knows neither of them could do it. Even if Claus is a spy, they’re not murderers.

  Claus finishes his story. There’s a short pause, then the diggers start firing questions: ‘Who are you really? How did you find the tunnel? Where do you live? Who are you working for?’