Tunnel 29

by Helena Merriman

  The crowd is quiet. Expectant.

  Kennedy looks straight ahead. ‘There are many people in the world who really don’t understand… what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world,’ he continues. ‘Let them come to Berlin.’

  A cheer.

  ‘There are some who say that Communism is the way of the future. Let them come to Berlin.’

  A bigger cheer.

  Then Kennedy talks about the spirit of West Berlin, how he knows of no town or city that has been besieged for eighteen years that still lives with the force, hope and determination of West Berlin. He describes the Wall as the ‘most obvious and vivid demonstration of the failures of the Communist system’ and as an ‘offence against history, separating families, dividing husbands and wives and brothers and sisters and dividing a people who wish to be joined together’. He says that one day, ‘this city will be joined as one’ and then, in a line he’d been practising, knowing it all depends on getting the pronunciation right, he says:

  ‘All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words Ich bin ein Berliner [“I am a Berliner”].’

  The people in front of him and on balconies surrounding the square go wild, screaming, crying, ‘Ken-ne-dy! Ken-ne-dy! Ken-ne-dy!’ Two years ago, Kennedy didn’t care much about Berlin, just wanted the problem to go away, and Berliners felt abandoned. Now, emboldened after his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy had shown he’d stand by them. Later that evening, as Kennedy sits on Air Force One, he tells an advisor: ‘We’ll never have another day like this as long as we live’.

  Back in West Berlin, the streets are speckled with confetti, cleared away over the following week by street cleaners. On the other side of the Wall, two days after Kennedy’s visit, Nikita Khrushchev arrives from Moscow. Not wanting to be outdone by Kennedy, he tours East Berlin in an open car with a handful of party functionaries lining the route. At East Berlin’s City Hall, Khrushchev gives a speech that he hopes will rival Kennedy’s: just as Kennedy delivered a line in German, Khrushchev decides he will too, and at the end of his speech, in German, he shouts ‘Ich liebe die Mauer’ – ‘I love the Wall!’ This time there are no cheers and screams, just a few polite claps. Then Khrushchev flies home to Moscow, leaving the divided city.

  Across the Wall, in West Berlin that same month, on the Ku’damm, women in flimsy dresses and men in T-shirts sit outside at street cafes, cigarettes glowing in the night, bright neon signs advertising Coke and burgers and films, radios playing American rock and roll. The air is thick with the promise of summer. Through half-open windows in the flats around them, there’s the flicker and murmur of televisions, turned on for a special film.

  A few streets away, Joachim, Wolf and some of the other diggers are sitting in one of their university dorm rooms. Cross-legged on the floor, beers in their hands, they wait. They never thought they’d get a chance to see it, this film they were part of – some unwittingly. But now, for the first time, it is to be broadcast in West Berlin, and, inevitably, through antennae turned to the West, East Berliners will watch it too.

  As the film plays across Berlin, Piers Anderton’s deep, serious voice spills through open windows into the streets that line the Wall. On Bernauer Strasse, the collection of makeshift wooden memorials has grown; at the top of each, the name of the latest person killed escaping: Otfried Reck. Hans Rawel. Horst Kutscher. Peter Kreitlow. Some of the memorials are festooned with spring flowers, placed there by grieving relatives in West Berlin. Occasionally, the Wall-tourists stop to take photos as they walk the length of the Wall in their summer shorts and sunglasses.

  As they walk, under their feet, through the concrete, under the screed and clay, down in the dark and silence, there are new hollow chutes running between East and West Berlin. Inside, men and women are pushing spades with their feet and hands and pulling out clumps of earth. In escape circles, everyone has heard of the magic clay that holds firm under this street and soon there will be dozens of tunnels, most never reaching their destination, but occasionally, part inspired by the film they watch tonight, one succeeds and, like the twenty-nine people who crawled through the tunnel in September 1962, others, too, will escape.

  But tonight, it’s a film for Joachim, Hasso, Uli, Wolf, Mimmo, Gigi, Ellen, Evi, Peter, all the tunnellers, messengers, escapees who can lose themselves in their own story. When it ends, they switch off their TVs, and drink and talk into the night. At one of the parties, a Stasi informant lurks in the corner, listening.

  New stories are beginning. New plans. New betrayals.

  71

  The Letter

  June 1963

  WOLFDIETER SITS ON a wooden stool in his prison cell writing a letter to Renate. It’s cramped, there are three other prisoners in there with him, but they give him space as he sits at a small table.

  He’d spent the morning in the prison-factory building furniture, an eight-hour shift beginning at six. Eighteen months into his sentence and he’s figuring out how to survive prison, working longer shifts for extra money that he spends in the prison tuckshop on biscuits and jam. The guards barely give prisoners enough food to live off, so these extra titbits keep him going. Most of his dreams are about food, nearly always the same dish: spaghetti, tomato sauce and schnitzel – his favourite meal as a child.

  Sitting at the table, Wolfdieter tries to work out what to write. It’s not easy: there are strict rules about letters, only twenty sentences allowed, nothing political or it will be blacked out by the guards. But all he can think about as he sits there, pencil hovering, are the things he can’t write.

  He wants to tell Renate about the prison choir he’d joined, fifty men in a small room, belting out Russian songs, practising for a concert they would give soldiers in the nearby Soviet barracks. (Like the Nazis, the Stasi liked to give their prisons an air of civility.) A few weeks into rehearsals, when the men had come to trust Wolfdieter, he’d discovered what was really going on during choir rehearsals: this was the Brandenburg Prison resistance. He wants to tell Renate how his time in prison had changed since then, how the group did remarkable things like ensuring prisoners returning from solitary got extra food and blankets, and smuggling messages from prisoners to family and friends. Wolfdieter never thought that in the horrors of Brandenburg Prison, where men lost limbs in factory accidents, went mad in solitary, or even killed themselves, that he would find this kind of hope. This solidarity.

  He wants to tell Renate about the Catholic priest in the next-door cell who’s been in solitary for nine months, how they talk through the sewage pipe that connects their cells, the priest whispering mass for Wolfdieter with lit candles.

  And he wants to tell Renate how good it feels when he’s allowed outside in the yard now and then, how he looks up at planes on their flight path west, dreaming about one day sitting in one, flying home to his mother and father.

  As he writes the first sentences, an anaemic few platitudes about life in prison, he thinks about Renate, wonders whether she’s coping, whether she has found a resistance group that has lifted her soul as his has been lifted. He hates not knowing what she’s feeling and he wants, somehow, to give her what these men have given him: to lift her, send her strength and hope. And then it comes to him, a line in Hamlet, that he wants to share. But he knows he cannot write it in full – it will be crossed out in thick black ink – and so instead, he simply writes that he’s been thinking of Hamlet, particularly Act One, Scene Three, and he hopes, somehow, Renate can find out what he means.

  Later that day, when the guard comes to his cell, Wolfdieter hands him the letter hoping he has found the right words.

  72

  Hamlet

  RENATE IS WALKING in the prison yard. It’s small, concrete walls stretching high into the sky. Around her, women pace the perimeter in a circle, one behind the other, shoulders hunched, eyes down. Caged animals repeating the same steps they took the day before and the d
ay before that. But today, something – someone – is different: Renate. She is walking taller, her chest lifted; even the women behind her notice and they know something must have happened.

  That morning, Renate had received a letter from Wolfdieter. It was short, but she didn’t mind. It was his handwriting, his words, none blacked out. Already, she knew it off by heart, the brief note about how he was doing okay in prison, then at the end, this strange line about Hamlet. It made her laugh. The stuff Wolfdieter read was always so weighty, intense: Dostoyevsky. Shakespeare. Wolfdieter mentioned a particular scene in Hamlet, but it didn’t mean anything to Renate; she decided she would ask the prison warden for a copy of the play later. There was a library in prison, all part of their re-education, and there was a chance they might have the play.

  Until now, Renate hadn’t read much in prison; reading a book felt like an act of hope and she didn’t have much of that. Five months in solitary had almost destroyed her; she had found nothing to cling to. Then there was the day she had sat on her loo in her cell, picked up the newspaper that masqueraded as loo-roll, and discovered the news story about Wolfdieter’s trial. She saw his sentence: seven years. She’d be out long before him and they’d be separated again. Sitting in her cell, all alone, day after day, week after week, she had wept. And wept. There were so many tears that at one point a prison guard had opened the door, told her to stop crying as she would need some tears for life after prison. Something in that advice had touched her and she’d stopped crying and started singing instead, mostly ‘Die Gedanken Sind Frei’, a resistance song sung by prisoners who’d stood up to the Nazis: ‘Our thoughts are free… no one can guess them…’ Renate sang the song loudly in her cell, again and again until the guards banged on her door.

  After five months, Renate was eventually allowed out of solitary and put to work in a prison-factory making dresses, which felt like bliss as she was among people again. She made friends with her cell-mates, most of them prostitutes, taught them maths, helped them write letters home. But there was no women’s choir. No resistance group. This letter was the first thing to give her hope.

  That day, Renate asks a guard if she can request a copy of Hamlet. She knows it will take a while; she has to be patient. She waits weeks, months, almost a year. Then one day, a guard brings the play to her cell. Hands shaking, Renate flicks the pages until she finds the right scene, runs her eyes across the words until she sees the lines that she knows Wolfdieter meant for her.

  This above all – to thine own self be true,

  And it must follow, as the night the day,

  Thou canst not then be false to any man.

  Farewell. My blessing season this in thee!

  She knows immediately what he means: trust no one, remain true to yourself. The words lift her, and so the lovers, the pen-pals who were once separated by the Wall, became pen-pals once again, from prison cell to prison cell, counting down the days till they can see each other again.

  73

  The Gold Mercedes

  August 1964

  WOLFDIETER KNOWS SOMETHING is up when the guard, the one they call ‘Leg-of-a-Stool’ (because that’s what he beats people with), walks into his cell and tells him not to go to his shift. Wolfdieter panics: Am I going to solitary? Another interrogation? Another prison?

  Ten minutes later, another guard enters and takes Wolfdieter to a different cell. Inside – his old clothes, the ones he came to prison in that night, almost exactly two years ago. The guard motions for Wolfdieter to get changed, and Wolfdieter puts the clothes back on; they flap around his stick-limbs. Then yet another guard arrives, takes him to yet another cell.

  Wolfdieter knows what this room is: it’s a holding cell for people who are about to leave prison. But he’s only two years into his seven-year sentence, his time isn’t up, so he is now terrified that they’ve found something else on him, an extra charge. Perhaps he’s off to court right now. Through the window, Wolfdieter sees two friends on laundry shift. He waves to them; he wants them to know where he is in case something terrible is about to happen.

  A few minutes later, Wolfdieter is brought downstairs, the door opened and he finds himself standing outside the prison, a Stasi officer in front of him holding a pistol. Wolfdieter’s mouth goes dry as he follows the Stasi officer to a car and sits inside. As he is driven out of the prison complex, Wolfdieter finds himself thinking of Renate. She is now out of prison, waiting for him. His nails dig into his hands: Please don’t let my prison sentence be extended.

  Two hours later, the car parks outside a vast concrete building in East Berlin, hundreds of windows reaching high into the sky. Climbing out of the car, he sees the street sign, Magdalenenstrasse, and his legs go weak. Everyone knows the address; it’s one of the most notorious Stasi prisons, this one, right in the heart of the Stasi’s headquarters, in the same building as Erich Mielke himself. Wolfdieter is taken to a cell and he sits on the bed, the light darkening around him.

  That night he doesn’t sleep. He’s scared of what might come through the door, and animal-like, he wants to be prepared to meet it. Every fifteen minutes a bell tolls from a nearby church, and he listens to each chime as night eventually turns to dawn. When the sun rises, he’s exhausted and hungry, eyeing the door until, finally, it opens. A guard walks in with a tray, and when Wolfdieter sees what’s on it, his mouth fills with saliva. It’s a piece of bread with butter. Next to it, a sausage. He’s not eaten anything like this for two years and he gulps the food down, now completely confused.

  Next, Wolfdieter is taken into a room where a senior Stasi officer sits behind a large desk, his shoulders decorated with badges. ‘Wolfdieter Sternheimer, you are being released early on the generosity of Walter Ulbricht following paragraph 346 of criminal law which states that a prisoner can leave early for good behaviour.’

  Wolfdieter looks at him blankly. He doesn’t dare believe it. Good behaviour? Maybe they’d found out about the prison resistance group and this was all a trick.

  Following the man outside the cell, Wolfdieter sees two other prisoners: a skinny man with grey skin and a small, pale girl. Behind them, a good-looking man in a sharp suit and tie. The man in the suit motions for the three prisoners to follow and walks them out of the building towards a gold Mercedes. The three prisoners climb inside, sitting in silence as the man drives them to his office, where he introduces himself: ‘I’m Dr Wolfgang Vogel,’ he says, ‘a lawyer.’

  Later, they’ll discover that Dr Vogel works for the East German government, arranging prisoner releases like this. One day his name will be famous for the extraordinary number of swaps and releases he organises, but right now, Wolfdieter isn’t interested in him, he just wants to get over the border, as until he’s in West Berlin, none of this will feel real.

  Soon, another lawyer arrives – from West Berlin – and he walks the prisoners to his car – another Mercedes. Wolfdieter sits inside, looking out of the window as the car weaves through East Berlin, and it’s then that he realises, his legs beginning to shake, that the car is heading to the same checkpoint where he was caught two years ago, trying to return to West Berlin the night the escape went wrong. Now, he is sitting in a Mercedes, the barrier effortlessly pinging up, the car driving Wolfdieter over the border and into West Berlin, where it parks at the lawyer’s office, and that’s when Wolfdieter sees her, his mother, and he runs to her, wrapping his bony body into hers, crying and shouting, ‘Those damned pigs! Those damned pigs!’ as all the anger and terror and loneliness of the past two years rises and spills out.

  A few hours later, Wolfdieter is on a plane. He is with his mother, flying home to southern Germany. The lawyer told Wolfdieter he couldn’t stay in West Berlin, he didn’t want anyone finding out about the prisoner release; this was the first they’d organised and if journalists got hold of the story, it might scupper the next one. For this is a controversial business. Wolfdieter’s release had come at a price: 40,000DM (£3,500), paid for by the West German government. Eig
ht hundred and sixty other prisoners were also on the list, a similar price paid for each. Wolfdieter was shocked, shocked that the West German government would pay for people like this, giving money to its enemy, East Germany.

  ‘And why was I chosen?’ Wolfdieter had asked.

  And that’s when the lawyer told him all about a secret list, smuggled out of Brandenburg Prison by a Catholic priest, concealed within a candle, covered in wax. The hairs on Wolfdieter’s neck had risen as he realised this was his cell-neighbour, the priest who’d whispered mass with him. It was all part of a secret plan, dreamt up by the Brandenburg Prison resistance, to draw up a list of prisoners who should be released in case a swap was ever agreed. They knew lawyers from West Germany would negotiate with lawyers from East Germany, but they didn’t want the Stasi to choose which prisoners would be released. There were 12,000 political prisoners in East German prisons and they wanted the right people to get out: people who’d been stuck in solitary for years, who might go mad if they weren’t let out early; people who hadn’t become prison informants. And one of the names on the list was Wolfdieter. After the Catholic priest smuggled the list out of prison, he had taken it to the lawyer in West Berlin. What he’d risked, thinks Wolfdieter. If the prison guards had found it, they would have sent the priest back to prison, perhaps another five years. Perhaps all of them in solitary.

  Now, as the plane arcs south-west over Germany, Wolfdieter looks out of the window and his stomach plunges as he sees it below him.

  The prison. His prison. Brandenburg.

  And it’s only now, looking down at the prison, that he realises in his bones that he is free, and as he pictures his cell-mates in the yard, knowing that they will be looking up at the plane, he wishes he could somehow tell them to hold on; that one day, sooner than they think, they, too, might be free.