Tunnel 29

by Helena Merriman

  Bodo listens, pauses, then moves on.

  At the end of the meeting, Bodo leaves the room and the others talk for a while and gossip. One of them has heard a rumour that the Girrmann Group is about to oust Bodo, blaming him for the mistakes in the last few operations. Siegfried listens, keeps quiet, drinks it all in. Then someone else mentions another escape tunnel; one that’s being dug right now in West Berlin.

  Leaving the meeting, Siegfried can’t believe his luck. Not only does no one suspect him, but now, Bodo Köhler, the only person who’d been suspicious of him, was about to be kicked out. Then, best of all, this new intelligence about another escape tunnel. Siegfried knows he won’t be asked to take part in this one, after all he’s burnt, but maybe if he hangs around the House of the Future, he’ll hear more about this new tunnel, find out where it is. Where it is going.

  A few days later, Siegfried meets Puschmann, his handler, and tells him what he’s discovered. Puschmann is impressed. ‘The secret collaborator is of the opinion that he has undoubtedly gained and solidified the trust of these persons,’ he writes, adding: ‘work is already underway on a tunnel supposedly located in North Berlin. The Secret Collaborator assumes that he will receive precise knowledge of the exact location of this tunnel. He will inform us immediately.’

  A few days later, a letter arrives on the desk of the head of the Stasi, Erich Mielke.

  AIM 13337/64 part I/1

  BStU

  [Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic]

  000139

  Ministry for State Security

  Administration Greater Berlin

  - Director -

  Berlin, 15.08.1962

  Proposal

  Subject: Award and distinction of Secret Collaborator (GM) ‘Hardy’.

  It is proposed to award Secret Collaborator ‘Hardy’ the Silver Medal of Merit of the National People’s Army and 1000 DM West (one thousand).

  Reason:

  Thanks to information from the Secret Collaborator, it was possible to prevent a large-scale, violent border breach organised by a West Berlin terrorist organisation and arrest the persons involved. Armed bandits planned to enter the state territory of the GDR by means of a tunnel from West Berlin to democratic Berlin and secure the border breach with armed force.

  The Secret Collaborator showed great dedication, reliability, initiative and personal courage in performing his duties for the Ministry for State Security (MfS). As a result of the Secret Collaborator’s cautious behaviour, it was possible to arrest a total of 43 persons, including 4 West German members of the West Berlin terrorist organisation who played major roles in the organisation and implementation of border provocations in democratic Berlin.

  Signed,

  Colonel Wichert

  Erich Mielke agrees to the award immediately. Siegfried Uhse will be one of the first recipients of this new medal, a fitting prize for the spy who prevented an embarrassing mass escape. But Mielke doesn’t plan on keeping this escape plot a secret. For the master of theatrics has a grand plan for a great spectacle, Wolfdieter in the starring role.

  46

  Silence

  13 August 1962

  JOACHIM LOOKS AT his watch: five minutes to twelve. Not much time. Looking around the train, he sees it, a piece of string running along the top of the carriage.

  NOTFALL! EMERGENCY!

  Reaching up, he places his fingers around the cord, ready to yank.

  It’s 13 August, six days after the escape that went wrong and the first anniversary of the building of the Wall. In East Germany, the VoPos are out in their thousands, expecting trouble. In the West, Mayor Willy Brandt has announced a minute’s silence at noon. Neither the governments of East or West Germany, nor the Americans, want any protests or violence.

  When the Girrmann Group heard about the West German government’s anaemic plan for the anniversary, they were outraged – just one minute’s silence to mark a concrete Wall that had separated children from parents, sisters from brothers, a Wall at which twenty people had died trying to cross. The Girrmann Group wanted outrage, defiance, noise, anger; they wanted to remind the world that their city had been cut in half, their lives cut in half, and that this was not normal. If the government wouldn’t organise something more spectacular, they would.

  At twelve noon, the minute’s silence begins.

  In West Berlin, all down the Ku’damm, along Bernauer Strasse, across the whole city, people stop walking, stop talking and they are still. Traffic stops. VW Beetles and lorries sit awkwardly in the middle of the road. As people stand there, statues dotted around the city, the sudden departure from normal life kick-starts their emotions: grown men cry, elderly couples cling to each other, children curl into their parent’s arms. But as the seconds tick on, despair turns into something else. Anger. Anger that their collective response to one year of the Wall is simply this.

  Silence.

  At 12.01, someone somewhere beeps their horn. A long, loud, angry beep. Another joins in, then another, until all over West Berlin cars are blaring, and it’s at this very moment, during this gesture of defiance, that on the S-Bahn, Joachim and dozens of other Girrmann Group volunteers pull the emergency cords, train wheels suddenly fix in their tracks, sending up sparks and the smell of burnt metal as the carriages screech to a halt in the no man’s land between stations. It is a perfectly aimed piece of civil disobedience, for in a strange quirk of municipal politics, the whole of the city’s train network is owned by East Berlin. Stopping these trains is a finger-up to Walter Ulbricht and his party and everything he stands for. Now, Joachim watches as a couple of angry East Berlin policemen (who are allowed to patrol the trains even in West Berlin) stride through the carriage towards him.

  ‘Dokumente,’ they order.

  ‘Nein,’ Joachim replies, with the sweet satisfaction of knowing that here in West Berlin, they are on his turf. They can’t make him do anything. Instead, they hand Joachim to the West Berlin police, who give him a fine. A small price to pay.

  Those broken-down trains, the blaring horns, seem to spark something, because later that day thousands of people walk to Bernauer Strasse, the street with the tunnel underneath, the street cut in half by the Wall, and when they arrive, in a rush of madness, they try to smash through the Wall, hurling stones and bricks at the concrete before being pushed back by West Berlin police with sticks.

  Eventually, just after midnight, the protesters realise they’ll never smash through the Wall and people peel off, beginning the walk home. A few metres under their feet, still intact, lies the tunnel, the first that Joachim and the others dug, the one that became so waterlogged it was unusable. Now, after the hot August weather, it’s finally dry, just waiting to be rediscovered.

  47

  The Show Trial

  IT IS THE night before his trial and Wolfdieter lies in bed, counting down the minutes before the guard returns. That night the guard had been in every ten minutes, turning the light on, padding over to Wolfdieter’s bed, waking him. Wolfdieter was breaking the rules, he said, not sleeping flat on his back. But Wolfdieter soon realised it was just a ruse. Even when in the state-sanctioned sleeping position, the guard still came in. Just another Stasi game.

  Wolfdieter thought back to that morning, the moment he’d been pulled out of his cell and he’d let himself hope that something had happened, someone had intervened – that he was being released early for some unfathomable reason. Pushed into a fruit-and-vegetable prison van, Wolfdieter was driven to another building and taken into a room where a man sat, neatly dressed.

  ‘I’m your lawyer,’ he’d said; ‘your trial begins tomorrow.’

  Sinking into himself, Wolfdieter tried to get a grip, a list of questions forming in his head, things to go over with his lawyer. But he needn’t have bothered.

  ‘We have thirty minutes to discuss your crimes,’ his lawyer continued, ‘terrible crimes that deserve proper punish
ment…’

  As he went on, Wolfdieter wondered what kind of lawyer spoke to his client like this, but this was East Germany and everything went differently here. Wolfdieter knew what crimes he was being accused of; his interrogator had told him the day before: paragraphs 17 and 21 of East German Criminal Law. He was being charged with ‘threatening acts of violence’ and ‘misleading people into leaving East Germany’. It was that first charge of violence that had stuck in Wolfdieter’s throat.

  ‘What violence?’ he’d asked.

  ‘If your escape plan had worked,’ his interrogator answered, ‘it would have spread fear and horror through our country. There’s your violence.’

  Instead of explaining these charges or his likely sentence, the lawyer asked Wolfdieter a few questions about his childhood, his time at university, then left.

  Now, lying here in the darkness, thinking about his trial, Wolfdieter realises he has no idea about any of it: who will be in the court-room, how long it will go on for, what his sentence will be or where he’ll be taken. The questions rattle around his brain, each spawning new ones, his stomach gnarling with adrenaline. And it no longer matters that the guard appears every ten minutes, for Wolfdieter knows that sleep will not come tonight.

  Dawn. A guard brings Wolfdieter his old clothes, the clothes he’d been wearing when he arrived in prison. They are baggy – two weeks in prison have taken the fat off him – but their musty smell feels like home.

  He washes, combs his hair, then follows the guard outside, climbing into the van. At the court building, he’s taken into a side room with four other prisoners: two accused of spying, and two other escape-helpers, one of whom is the vet – the other messenger from the escape, the man whose baby was taken by the Stasi. A Stasi officer is in the room with them. He turns to each prisoner in turn, giving instructions.

  To the vet: ‘You must say you hate this country.’

  To Wolfdieter: ‘You must talk about six men coming into the tunnel with machine-guns. If you don’t,’ he says, ‘we’ll take you back for another interrogation, we’ll find those secrets you never revealed and things will be much worse for you.’

  It is only when Wolfdieter enters the court-room that he understands why he’s been given this script. He’d imagined a small court-room, just a handful of people, but sitting on all sides of the court, eyes boring into him, are hundreds of people, all smartly dressed. He realises then that he is no ordinary prisoner.

  Stasi jails were stuffed full of East Germans, but Wolfdieter was a West German student, involved in the most ambitious escape operation from East Germany so far. It was a huge political opportunity for the Stasi, and only a few days after they’d arrested Wolfdieter, they’d begun to organise one of the first great show trials. The Department of Agitation and Propaganda had written a letter to the head of the Stasi, Erich Mielke, asking for his approval, which he gave, and then, as if throwing a party, the department had sent hundreds of invitations to the great and good: police officers, soldiers, journalists, businessmen and party members. Two hundred and fifty people had accepted, now sitting there, sweating in the heat and the glare of the lights and cameras – for the trial was to be filmed and broadcast on TV.

  The trial begins with a statement from the General Prosecutor, a man in his fifties in a smart suit and cravat. Streitt is his name. It means fight. He starts by talking about the escape, then, puffing out his chest, he broadens the narrative into a bigger story: a parable about the dangers of trying to escape East Berlin; the corrupting influence of West Berlin; the West German terrorists sponsored by the Americans who are trying to destroy East Germany. To add to the drama, he brings a witness on stage, a politics professor from Humboldt University who talks at length about the corrupting influence of the Americans and demands that they leave West Germany or they will spark a third world war.

  Late in the afternoon, the first day over, as Wolfdieter leaves the courthouse, he realises that he is merely a puppet in a political drama, staged in this court-room theatre. He knows now that neither his testimony, nor his lawyer, will make a difference. As in most Stasi trials, the script has already been written. Yes, there are lawyers representing clients, judges to hand down sentences, it all looks and feels like a proper trial, but the real work happens off-stage, with judges given instructions by the party.

  On day two, Wolfdieter’s lawyer stands up to speak.

  ‘The accused has carried out terrible crimes and must be punished,’ he says, adding cursorily: ‘but please take into consideration that Wolfdieter Sternheimer grew up in West Germany and was influenced and brainwashed by a capitalist system and a capitalist press.’ And that is it. His lawyer sits down. Now for the sentence.

  Wolfdieter has no idea what to expect. When you look at the kinds of sentences allotted to different political crimes, it’s hard to predict what anyone would get in a Stasi court. There are cases of teenagers being given eighteen months for watching Western TV, people given two years for sticking political posters on their apartment windows – someone was even given two years for failing to report a friend who was planning an escape to the West. People caught escaping could get anything from six years to life imprisonment, or in some cases, the death penalty, which was carried out initially by guillotine, then by a single shot to the neck.

  Wolfdieter looks at the judge, a nondescript man in his fifties who is enjoying his starring role. The judge reads out the sentences for the five prisoners: life imprisonment for the two accused of spying, twelve years for the vet, six for the other escape-helper. Seven years for Wolfdieter.

  Wolfdieter looks down at his hands. Steadies them. Seven years is manageable. He’ll be twenty-nine when he’s out. Still time to build some kind of life. Then he catches himself: what about Renate?

  From the court-room, Wolfdieter is taken to Brandenburg Prison, called ‘the crystal coffin’ because of its enormous glass roof. He spends his first week in solitary confinement, then he’s taken to a cell, nine other men inside: murderers, thieves, rapists. In East German prisons, political prisoners are mixed with criminals; it’s part of the punishment, being roughed up by thugs and murderers, and the criminals often work as informants.

  At Brandenburg Prison, every day is the same. At four in the morning, Wolfdieter is woken with a piece of bread and coffee. He washes, makes his bed, then at six his shift begins. Like most prisoners, Wolfdieter is expected to work in prison. It boosts the East German economy, for the party sells products made in its prisons to West Germany.

  Wolfdieter is in House Five, shift B: kitchen furniture production. Every morning he’s taken down to a room in the basement, thick with dust and heat, where he uses outdated machines to build wooden carcasses for East German kitchens. He works in a 40-degree heat for eight hours straight, and there are times when he faints, when he sees men lose fingers and other horrific accidents that he puts to the back of his mind. At two in the afternoon, there’s lunch, then it’s back to his cell where he sits and looks at the wall, or reads the party newspaper that’s delivered to prisoners as part of their re-education programme. Occasionally, there are lectures too. ‘Red light radiation’, the prisoners call it.

  After four weeks, Wolfdieter thinks nothing can be worse than this, but then one day, without warning, he’s taken to Pankow Prison, one of the oldest Stasi prisons in the centre of Berlin. And there, he’s put in a cell on his own. Solitary again.

  The first week is okay; he’s done this before. Wolfdieter moves around, tries to keep his mind active. But it’s hard to keep a routine – the guards bring food at different times and he struggles to frame each day. He craves his murderer cell-mates, the kitchen work, even the conversations with his cell-informant back in Hohenschönhausen. He replays lessons from school and university, and for a week his brain is blissfully busy, but soon his mind is exhausted and empty. He loses sense of time, of day and night. It is then that his memory hunts begin: scrolling back through his life, Wolfdieter searches for memories, stretchi
ng them as far as he can, hungry for every detail. First he goes for the recent stuff: the escape. Renate. University. Easy pickings. Soon he’s craving the deeper stuff. Like an oyster diver, he swims down, finding fragments from school, his childhood, those memories that barely make sense, images and smells as incomprehensible as dreams. Then one night, around six weeks into solitary, he dives down and discovers that most precious of pearls: a memory he thinks he’s never had before. He sees himself in his parent’s bedroom, standing in front of their bed. It’s empty. His mother sits on the floor, crying. It’s the day his father left to fight the Russians. In the corner of the room he sees a chess set – the set he inherited once it became clear his father wasn’t coming back.

  Wolfdieter is intoxicated by the fresh memory, spends days with it, rolling it around in his head, until he no longer knows what’s memory and what’s a dream. He forgets the cell, forgets he’s a prisoner, but then at some point, days later, he finds himself surfacing, coming back to the room, to the prison, to the other end of his life, back to his interrogation, and without warning, it hits him.

  My interrogator asked me about everyone involved in the escape. Asked about them ten times – what they did that day. Their address. Their family. But there’s one person they never asked about. Not one question. Siegfried Uhse.

  Why? Why? Why?

  As Wolfdieter sits there, going back over those nights in Hohenschönhausen, he can’t believe he didn’t see it before: Siegfried Uhse. He must be the spy, the man who betrayed them to the Stasi, the reason so many are now sitting in prison, separated from everyone they love. And now, his despair turns into an overwhelming sense of helplessness for he knows Siegfried Uhse is the spy and he knows Siegfried is still in the network of escape-helpers, but Wolfdieter is stuck here, unable to warn anyone.