Tunnel 29

by Helena Merriman

The Last Visit

  9 September

  ‘IT’S TIME,’ THEY say. Mimmo and Gigi have crossed the border and are now sitting in Evi and Peter’s house. ‘We have a date for the escape; get ready to leave in five days.’ Not that there’s much for Evi and Peter to plan. They can’t tell anyone, not even Evi’s grandparents, in case someone talks. And they can’t bring much – just nappies, money and ID cards. Sitting there, Evi decides she’ll wear her deep-green skirt suit again, the one she had made for the first escape that went wrong.

  Mimmo and Gigi don’t stay long, just a few hours. After they leave, ‘Wilhelm’, the Stasi informant who lives a few doors away, picks up a pen and makes a note of the visit.

  Something to tell his handler when he next sees him.

  53

  The Messenger

  10 September

  ELLEN SCHAU SASHAYS down the terminal hall at Berlin-Tempelhof airport, enjoying the movement of heads swivelling her way, the eyes that admire her chestnut-red hair, her delicate figure and her elegant Düsseldorf dress. Scanning the crowds, she looks for him, her fiancé, her Mimmo. Ellen hasn’t seen him for a year – they barely talk on the phone and she’s convinced something is wrong – but then she sees Mimmo, his dark eyes, his caterpillar eyebrows, his arms outstretched, and the hurt is forgotten as she burrows into his chest. All this year, Ellen has felt lost without him, stuck at home with her strict father and sick mother – she has TB and doesn’t have long left. But now, here with Mimmo, the man Ellen describes as her first close friend, she feels safe.

  That night, they eat at a restaurant. It’s small, intimate. Their knees touch under the table. Ellen is expecting a long, romantic meal, but instead Mimmo looks serious and says he has something to tell her. And so it begins. Mimmo tells Ellen about the tunnel. The escape that went wrong. The arrests. Then he tells her that they’re going to try again in four days. Ellen laughs at the coincidence: 14 September is her birthday.

  Then Mimmo picks up Ellen’s hand, so tiny in his. He tells her how none of it will work unless they can find someone to be their messenger, only no one wants to do it. Everyone has heard about Wolfdieter’s arrest and imprisonment. A girlfriend of one of the diggers said she’d do it, but she’d pulled out – said she felt ill, but everyone knew it was just an excuse. Ellen stops eating because she knows what’s coming before Mimmo asks.

  Lying in bed, in a friend’s apartment a few hours later, Ellen thinks about Mimmo’s proposition. She hasn’t given him an answer yet; she’s still shaking off the version of her trip to Berlin she’d been dreaming about, replacing it with this new uncertain one. She thinks back to her conversation with Mimmo; how he’d called her the perfect messenger: with her West German passport she can go in and out of the East and, being a woman, he says, she’d arouse less suspicion.

  ‘But what if it goes wrong,’ she’d asked, ‘like that other tunnel?’

  Mimmo says she’d have to get a train to Warsaw, then to Yugoslavia and ask the embassy for help.

  Ellen can’t begin to imagine doing all that and so she lies there, playing out different versions of the escape in her head. In each scenario, she gets caught. At some point in the middle of the night, Ellen falls asleep, and when she wakes, she finds a single thought running through her head: If I don’t do it, no one will, and I don’t want to be the person who lets them down.

  54

  Investigations

  EVERY DAY, THEY’RE learning more about it, this mystery tunnel in North Berlin.

  Siegfried has been lurking around at the House of the Future, asking questions, and sometimes he gets answers. He hears about weapons requested. Plans to rip up floorboards. He passes every detail on to his handler, and the Stasi cross-reference these titbits with their other intelligence, the information they’re getting from their prisoners in Hohenschönhausen Prison, and gradually, they are piecing together the details. Like the blind men and the elephant, they hope that with enough numbers and measurements they’ll find the tunnel. From their interrogations they know the tunnel is 150 metres long. Seven metres deep. Then, their best intelligence yet: it begins in a cellar on Bernauer Strasse.

  55

  Maps

  12 September

  TUCKED INTO A quiet corner of Café Bristol, just off the Ku’damm, Ellen and Mimmo hunch over a table, half-empty cups pushed aside, pencils and notebooks in their hands, the comforting smell of bread rolls and coffee washing over them. One by one, Mimmo recites the street names that she must walk to in East Berlin: Schönholzer Strasse, Bernauer Strasse, Wolgaster Strasse, Brunnenstrasse, Ruppiner Strasse…

  Ellen listens and scribbles the names in her notebook, the notebook she will take into the East. She has to be clever about how she puts it all down: the numbers she disguises as birthdays, the street names she weaves into diary entries. Studying the map Mimmo has given her, Ellen tries to burn the layout into her mind. She’s never been to East Berlin before, has no frame of reference, so she must remember it all. Over the Wall it will be too dangerous to ask for directions.

  Yesterday, Ellen had met the other diggers – Joachim, Hasso, Uli and a few others in their university dorm. They couldn’t believe she’d agreed to be their messenger, showering her with so much attention that she’d flushed pink with embarrassment. Gabbling at her through cigarette smoke, they’d all wanted to help Mimmo’s glamorous girlfriend with directions. Ellen had got confused, bamboozled, which is why she and Mimmo were here alone. Somewhere calm to work it all out.

  On the map, Mimmo identifies three pubs. In each, he tells her, there will be a handful of escapees, waiting. Mostly families with young children. When Ellen walks in, she must give a coded signal that the tunnel is ready, a different one in each pub. Once she’s delivered all three, she must get out of the East. As fast as she can.

  56

  Reuven

  13 September

  HE COULDN’T RESIST asking. For months, Reuven Frank knew almost nothing about this mysterious cellar in West Berlin from which twenty men had been digging for four months, but now, the day before the escape, it is time.

  Two days ago, back in New York, Reuven Frank had received a coded message from Piers Anderton: he needed to come to West Berlin now. Reuven had flown to Tegel airport in West Berlin, along with one of his top film editors, only the fifth person in NBC to find out about the tunnel. At the airport they were met by Piers Anderton and Gary Stindt.

  ‘How long do we have to wait?’ Reuven had asked, guessing it would be at least a week.

  ‘They go through tomorrow night,’ said Piers; ‘the tunnel’s finished.’

  Reuven Frank grinned. ‘Can I see it?’

  Now, sitting in Gary’s car, weaving through West Berlin, the long, grey cement-curtain looming over them, Reuven is shocked by how much the Wall has grown since he was here a year ago. Gary parks the car outside the factory, tells Reuven that the tunnel is just underneath.

  It’s too risky for Reuven to go inside, so he sits in the car, looking at the factory, imagining the tunnel below, this tunnel that NBC money has helped fund, a tunnel 4 metres deep, 120 metres long, pointing into the heart of East Berlin. Four months of digging and it doesn’t feel right that everything now depends on the next twenty-four hours.

  Looking at the factory and the buildings around it, Reuven gets a strange feeling – this part of West Berlin feels familiar. This was the place, it dawns on him, where he’d set up the NBC camera a year ago when the Wall appeared and NBC was the first to tell the world. Now, a year later, he’s back at that same spot to tell another story – the story of what people will do to escape.

  That afternoon at the bureau, Reuven watches the footage that Peter and Klaus gathered over the past four months, developed in secret by a film processor in West Berlin. There’s twenty hours of it. Some is footage from the early days, when they were filming the aftermath of other escapes. It’s boring; little to see – just open manhole covers and sewers.

  Then Gary shows h
im the scenes from the tunnel. Holding his breath, Reuven leans forward as he watches every frame, as he watches the tunnellers digging, cart-hauling, dirt-emptying, sweating, shaking, exhausted, and he knows this is unlike anything he’s ever seen.

  He watches it for hours, into the early hours of Friday morning – the escape day – and as he sits there in the darkness, taking it all in, just a few streets away, Ellen lies in bed, eyes fixed on the wall, lips moving as she whispers the names of those streets she must remember, ‘Schönholzer Strasse, Bernauer Strasse, Wolgaster Strasse, Brunnenstrasse, Ruppiner Strasse’, the sound of those street names disappearing into the night.

  57

  14 September

  Ellen

  SHE WAKES WITH her ears ringing, pain throbbing. An ear infection from the flight, she guesses. Sun pours in from the window onto her bed and Ellen lies there, trying to work out what to wear, suddenly realising that the only clothes she’s brought with her are glamorous dresses that would draw too much attention in East Berlin.

  She looks through her friend’s wardrobe for something plainer, finding a skirt and sleeveless tunic. They’re too big for her, baggy on her delicate frame, but they’ll do. Then she covers her flaming red hair in a cream headscarf. At the kitchen table she tries to eat breakfast, but can’t get much down, just a few sips of tea. She barely slept last night, her stomach is churning, but she stills herself, goes over Mimmo’s instructions once more.

  On her bed, Ellen lays everything out. Passport. Notebook with street names and numbers. Tissues. Make-up. Sunglasses. Cigarettes. Lighter. Then money: both Deutsche Mark (West German currency) and Ostmark (East German). The Ostmark is her Plan B; she’ll need it if the escape goes wrong, so she can buy a train ticket to Warsaw.

  Mid-morning she leaves her apartment and walks to Bahnhof Zoo train station, where she meets Peter and Klaus Dehmel. They’re here to film Ellen’s trip into East Berlin; they want to capture as much of the day as they can. In the footage you see Ellen standing below the train station in her headscarf and sunglasses, handbag draped off her arm. The streets around the station are busy: smartly dressed men and women rush past; groups of children play on the ground. Among them, Ellen stands out – despite her efforts to dress down, she still looks like a glamorous sixties movie star. You see her check her watch: it’s midday. Then she turns and strides into the station, heads turning as she clicks past in her white high heels. Peter and Klaus follow with the camera.

  The next shot is Ellen, sitting in an empty carriage, looking out of the window as the train zooms along the elevated railway to East Berlin, slicing between trees and buildings high above the city. At the last stop before the border, Peter and Klaus leave the train and take a final shot as it crosses the canal and disappears into the East.

  Evi, Peter and Annet

  Evi comes running into her grandfather’s house, not far from her own home, Annet, her toddler, perched on her hip. Peter is working there; he’s been doing odd-jobs for Evi’s grandfather through the summer to make some money.

  ‘You need to come home right now!’ Evi commands. ‘People from the newspaper are here.’

  Peter turns around, confused, then catches her eye and understands. ‘Won’t be back today,’ he tells Evi’s grandfather as they leave the house. ‘See you tomorrow.’

  As they race home, Evi explains, telling Peter all about a person who came to their house that morning to tell them that the escape would happen today. They should leave now and go to a pub near Schönholzer Strasse and wait for Ellen’s signal.

  Evi’s hands are shaking; she’d been nervous all week, ever since Mimmo and Gigi visited and said the escape would happen soon. Evi knew what had happened to the people arrested at the other tunnel, the one the Stasi busted. She’d heard how they were all now in Stasi prisons, babies snatched from mothers and dumped in children’s homes. Evi still remembers the moment when she noticed the men on the streets in the long coats and hats; how they’d only just got away in time. If it all goes wrong, she knows she could lose her toddler, Annet. The thought of it makes her feel sick.

  Yesterday, when she was out shopping, one of her neighbours had seen Evi, noticed how strange and on edge she’d looked. Her neighbour had gone home and told her husband, completely unaware he was a Stasi spy, codenamed ‘Walter’. Walter had noted this nugget of information, added it to a list of things to pass on to his Stasi handler.

  Back at the house they get ready: Peter puts on thick underpants to keep him warm in prison if he’s arrested, Evi bundles Annet into her best outfit, then dresses herself in her green dress-suit and burgundy heels. It’s the only outfit she’ll have with her if she makes it into West Berlin; she might as well make it a nice one. Then Evi stuffs nappies and money into her white handbag. Finally, she walks through the house, making sure the shutters and windows are open. She doesn’t want anyone noticing anything unusual: they’re a family out for the afternoon, nothing more.

  Then, for the second time in a month, Peter and Evi leave the house with Annet, hoping never to see it again. As they walk away, Peter throws the key into a ditch and Evi turns back for a final glance: she sees two nappies hanging on the washing line, the mattress they would lie on together when the sun was out, and Annet’s baby clothes soaking in a bowl. A snapshot of their old life frozen in time.

  NBC

  On the balcony of a building overlooking the Wall, an NBC cameraman, Harry Thoess, is setting up. Five stories high, on Wolgaster Strasse, he has a perfect vantage point. From the window, Harry can see over the Wall straight into Schönholzer Strasse. It’s such a good position that the diggers ask if they can use it to give the final signal to Ellen: a white sheet draped out of the window. That’ll mean they’ve broken through into the cellar, that they’re ready for the escapees. Reuven Frank agrees, but reluctantly, for he is breaking his own rule: that NBC film but never help. Yes, he’s funded the tunnel, but until now, no one from NBC has directly assisted the diggers. But somehow, he can’t bring himself to say no.

  Harry looks through the camera, zooms in over the death strip, over the triangular tank traps, over the Wall, towards the building with the tunnel underneath. It’s tall, once grand, but the front is now covered in holes and cracks, shrapnel damage from the war. There’s an arched doorway under which sits a small white ceramic plate decorated with a blue pattern and the number seven. A man on a bike cycles by, two women and a child walk slowly down the street, a gang of school-aged kids push babies in prams. Then you see the VoPos: one stands on a guard-tower smoking a cigarette, two are chatting to a group of boys, and a couple of VoPos stroll down Schönholzer Strasse, glancing into the doorway of number seven before moving on.

  Evi, Peter and Annet

  Walking out of the S-Bahn, Evi, Peter and Annet (and Peter’s mother, who wants to escape with them) head to the pub. When they get there, panic: the place is rammed with workers, out spending their end-of-week pay, and here they are, a smartly dressed family, completely out of place. Weaving their way through the drinkers and the smoke, they make for a table in the corner, where they sit, shrinking back into the wall, hoping no one notices them.

  The cellar in West Berlin

  It’s the biggest argument they’ve had. Everyone’s shouting, they’re angry and scared. Uli and some of the diggers had arrived for what they thought was just an ordinary digging shift, only to be told the escape would happen that evening. Then they’d seen Peter and Klaus standing there with their camera and lights. What on earth was happening? That’s when Mimmo and Gigi finally told them about the American TV crew. Reeling, confused, some of the diggers threaten to leave. If an American TV network knows about the tunnel, who else does? We’re out, they say, we’ve been lied to. Mimmo and Gigi try to reassure them – it’s safe, you can trust them – but the argument goes on for almost an hour until Mimmo finally persuades the diggers to set their fears aside and do the job. They’ll discuss it all after.

  Peter and Klaus film the final prep
arations. Joachim crawls through the tunnel, checks the earth is holding firm, the electric lights all working. The tunnel is dark, muddy, but also, somehow, a thing of beauty; its lights gently illuminate the shaft, all the wires are neatly held back, the border sign still swings halfway down to mark the point where West becomes East. It’s not just the longest tunnel dug under the Wall so far, but the most high-tech and lovingly constructed.

  Now they have to decide who will crawl down the tunnel and break into the cellar. Hasso steps forward. ‘I’ll do it,’ he says, and he looks at Joachim and Uli. But Uli says no, his mother has told him not to risk his life again – he can help, just not go into the East.

  Everyone looks at Joachim. There’s a pause. Unlike most of the diggers, Joachim has no one he’s trying to rescue, no one he’s risking his life for. He could walk away now, he’s done so much already, and leave someone else to do it, someone who’s rescuing their wife or brother, someone with skin in the game. No one would ask questions or berate him. But in that moment, none of that occurs to Joachim. Somehow, everything in his life has led to this moment – that first escape on the horse and cart where his father was taken, his smuggling trips to East Berlin, the hours experimenting with coils and wire and circuit boards, that newspaper article naming and shaming students in Dresden, his escape to West Berlin, all the months digging the tunnel, the escape that went wrong – and he finds himself nodding, saying, ‘Yes, I’ll do it.’ And of course he will; he’ll do it because he’s done it once before, he’ll do it because the sequence of decisions he’s made has brought him to this point and this is simply the next step; he’ll do it because he’s learnt that life is a series of problems – you just have to find the solution.