Werner Coch is a chemical engineer in his late fifties. Soft spoken and exact, he has dark hair, and dark eyes in a calm face. He is dressed neatly in pale clothes and light-coloured shoes. We sit in the living room of the spacious and comfortable house he built himself and he tells me about the escape route. A small grandfather clock strikes the half-hours of the afternoon.
‘We got the passports and the train tickets,’ he says, ‘and we learned the appropriate story by heart: who we were—name, date of birth, where we were going on our holiday and so on.’ They also had to learn where they had been. Coch’s passport had belonged to someone who once travelled to Togo. ‘Togo!’ he laughs, ‘I can’t say I’m an expert on the history of Togo or anything, but I did bone up on the name of the capital—Lomé—and the language they spoke—French.’
On the appointed day the five of them went to the railway station. They were to stay in the waiting hall until the signal came from a western student, visiting on a day pass, that all was in order to proceed. Then they were to go up to the long-distance platform and board the train. The student would phone Copenhagen to make sure the group before them had arrived safely. Then he would give the signal to go ahead. Coch doesn’t remember the signal exactly. He says it was ‘something with a newspaper. Something about how it was held.’
Frau Paul seems to have forgotten or repressed details like this altogether. She says only, ‘There came a sign from a student that meant that we shouldn’t get on the train. If we did, we would be arrested. We went straight home.’
Coch elaborates. He says when the signal came, ‘It was a shock. But I have to say that at the same time there was a sense of relief. I knew there were things in my luggage that still looked like eastern goods.’
Frau Paul now knows that the group before them were all arrested and jailed. The western student with them was arrested and served a two-year sentence in an eastern prison. The Stasi had become suspicious and overnight instituted a new stamp as part of the transit visa. In the time it took for the visas to be applied for, and the doctored passports to be smuggled back to the east, this stamp had, unknown to the little group, become necessary.
‘We took all the passports home,’ Frau Paul says, ‘and we burnt them. Here in this apartment.’ She says this with exaggerated finality, as though the little fire washed them clean of the crime. ‘Then we just hoped that our son would get better, and that he could come home to us. We thought: we’ve tried it once and it didn’t work. We’ll not try that again.’ Failure had at least brought an end to that particular anxiety, and it felt like a reprieve. She is adamant that she and her husband Hartmut, then and there, gave up trying to get out. ‘That was it for us. But through this whole business, we had got to know the three students who lived here in the east.’ Frau Paul and her husband corresponded with them a bit over the next year. ‘So it is in life that similarly-minded people find each other and we stayed in contact.’
In February 1963, a year after the passport attempt, the three students asked if they might come to stay for a few nights in Berlin. Torsten was still in the west, still in hospital. ‘We said yes,’ Frau Paul says. From then on her conversation becomes muddled, peppered with statements of what she ‘didn’t know at the time’ or ‘couldn’t have suspected’. She trusted the students, and gave them keys to her home. ‘I was working full-time in my job as a dental technician,’ she says, ‘so I could not know what went on in this apartment during the day. I simply wasn’t here.’ She fiddles with her collar. ‘My husband was here,’ she says.
‘Frau Paul and Hartmut were nervous,’ Coch says of his stay in their house, ‘it was a tense atmosphere.’ The students were back to try again. A tunnel had been built from West Berlin under the Wall, to the cellar of an apartment block on Brunnenstrasse in East Berlin. Twenty-nine people had made it through several months earlier. But then the tunnel flooded, leaving others stranded on the eastern side. Now, the groundwater had frozen and a new escape was being planned.
22
The Deal
‘I wanted to go,’ Coch tells me, ‘because I had the feeling it was all perfectly organised. I thought if the danger was too great we’d get a signal, just as we had with the false passports scheme.’
The students waited at Frau Paul’s apartment for word to come from a courier. As before, this attempt was being organised by western students who would tell the easterners where the tunnel was, and when and how they could enter.
The courier came with the information. ‘The instructions were to go to a particular street near the Rosa Luxemburg Theatre,’ Coch says. ‘There, a car would be parked with a small sign on its back dash. From that sign we’d be able to decipher the address of the building where the tunnel could be entered.’ Then they were to go to a telephone booth nearby. If everything was in order to proceed, there would be a sticking plaster under the receiver. ‘If the plaster wasn’t there, it meant that someone had ripped it off as a warning. Then, it was just a matter of proceeding to the address and uttering the code words.’ They were to enter the building at intervals of half an hour, and they would be shown through the tunnel. If all went well, a signal would come from the window of a building on the western side: a white flag for success. If there were problems, they would see a red ball instead.
‘Hartmut Rührdanz and I went to check it out the afternoon beforehand. We took the underground to Rosa Luxemburg station, and had a look around.’ They saw the car, and the telephone booth, and they worked out how long it would take to get there from the Pauls’ apartment that evening. ‘I set out by myself, and Hartmut came after me at a safe interval. He was about a hundred metres behind me or so.’ Coch went to the car and read the sign on the back dash. ‘It was some kind of riddle to do with springs, I can’t remember exactly,’ he says, ‘and the number forty-five.’ Brunnen means spring, or creek. Coch worked out he was to go to 45 Brunnenstrasse. Then he went to the phone booth to find the sticking plaster under the receiver.
Forty-five Brunnenstrasse was a short way from the booth. It’s also right around the corner from my place. I wandered there one morning. The sky was pale blue and high, and the sun shone like a small light in a freezer. Brunnenstrasse hits Bernauer Strasse, which is where the Wall ran, and where the famous pictures of people jumping out of their apartments onto mattresses on the western side were taken on 13 August 1961. Now, there’s just a stretch of overgrown grass here. If you didn’t know that the Wall had been in this place, you’d find it hard to imagine. Eventually, there will be new apartment buildings built over it in the same style as the older ones, and in less than one generation this scar will be invisible. For the moment though, there is something strange about this stretch: it’s not a park, it’s not even an empty lot. It’s just a hole in the city.
I hunched my collar up high as I walked. I was watching the street numbers closely looking for number forty-five when I passed a shop and read its sign. I retraced my steps. I had read it right. The sign said: ‘Digging Equipment for Hire or Sale: Spring Diggers; Electrical Percussion Hammers, Augers, Hand-Borers, Pumps.’ Two young men walked past. They were tough, both of them wearing their jackets open in the cold. One’s T-shirt read, in English, ‘Too Drunk to Fuck’, and the other’s, in German, ‘Out of the Way—an Arsehole Is Coming’. They stared hard at me then at the shop, then back at me again, as if to figure out what I might find so fascinating about a pump-and-drill place.
Forty-five Brunnenstrasse is an ordinary five-storey apartment block. Nothing distinguishes it from any other building in the street. There are no plaques on it, no footpath inlay commemorating the tunnel. And, like so many buildings in the former east, it is being renovated. As I entered, two Turkish workmen were coming out carrying tools and pails of plaster dust. I nodded a greeting as if I knew what I was doing, and walked straight in. The cellar door was on the right. I stood there for a moment. Then I opened the door onto darkness, the smell of dust and damp. I started down the steps when I heard a call.
r /> ‘Excuse me! Excuse me! Can I help you?’ The foreman, also Turkish, stood at the top of the steps. I explained I was looking for a tunnel that had been accessible from the cellar of this building.
‘Wait here,’ he said. He fetched a torch on a long lead. We went down the steps. The cellar had a vaulted roof and wooden partitions for each apartment’s section. I don’t think either of us thought we’d find a tunnel. He swung the light along the dirt-floored passage right to the end. And there, in the wall, was a manhole-sized area where the bricks were newer than all the others. We shone the torch at it and stood there, and I thought of the twenty-nine people who left their country from here, and of Werner Coch and the others.
When he got to the building, Coch says, ‘I went to the door of the cellar in the hall, and I said the code words. They were, “Does Herr Lindemann live here?” There was no answer, so I repeated, “Does Herr Lindemann live here?” It was meant to be for the people—the helpers—behind the door. I was meant to wait for the reaction. I expected someone to appear with a torch, or perhaps to speak to me, and lead me out of there.’ Nothing happened. Nothing at all. ‘I thought: something’s not right here. Please God, just let me get out in one piece. I turned around and walked out of the building.
‘And that’s when they got me—Stasi in civilian clothes. I think there were three of them waiting on the street for me to come out again. I know now they had the building surrounded—there was one on the stairs inside too.’
They asked him what he was doing there, and he told them he was visiting Herr Lindemann. ‘There’s no Herr Lindemann here,’ they said. They took him away, first to the police station, then into custody at the Stasi headquarters in Berlin, and finally to prison at Hohenschönhausen.
‘Hartmut Rührdanz watched the whole thing from the other side of the street,’ Coch says, ‘then he went home, terrified.’ The Rührdanzes would stay in the east. They would wait till their baby was well enough to come home. And they hoped he would survive.
Memory, like so much else, is unreliable. Not only for what it hides and what it alters, but also for what it reveals. Frau Paul must have known why the three students had come to stay, and she probably knew that the tunnel attempt had failed. If she does not admit to having known, it is because for this knowledge she was made a criminal in the GDR, and because, saddest of all, she still feels like one.
Frau Paul showed me a Stasi report on the tunnel. Its outlet had been under our feet at Brunnenstrasse, and not in the wall, as this document shows, in its excruciating bureaucratese:
GOVERNMENT OF THE GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC
Ministry for State Security
ATTESTATION
On the existence of a tunnel from West Berlin into the Capital of the German Democratic Republic.
In the course of a cellar check by members of the National People’s Army on 18.02.1963 at 45 Brunnen Street in Berlin Mitte it was established that there was a hole in the floor of the cellar that gave rise to the supposition that a tunnel was to be found here.
A widening of the hole and subsequent examination gave rise to the confirmation that in this building at 45 Brunnen Street was the end of a tunnel built across from West Berlin territory.
The tunnel began on West Berlin territory, went under Bernauer Street in West Berlin and under several occupied houses in the capital of the German Democratic Republic to the cellar of 45 Brunnen Street.
From the cellar of 45 Brunnen Street to the national border the tunnel measured 130 metres and extended after that under Bernauer Street which is approximately 30 metres wide.
The dimensions of the passage amounted to 75cm width and 70-80cm in height. At the examination of the passage 4 torches of western make, 1 folding spade of American origin, 1 hand spade, 2 hatchets, 1 rock drill as well as several screwdrivers were confiscated.
Further to this a range of light-cables, several light globes and rubber mats were found at the site of the tunnel and confiscated.
By means of comparisons with material already gathered to date it was deduced that the student [name] of the Technical University in West Berlin was definitely involved in the organisation of the building of the tunnel to the cellar of 45 Brunnen Street.
From that time on, Frau Paul and her husband were followed. ‘In the morning when I went to work, there’d be someone close behind me,’ she says. ‘If I went in to Alexanderplatz to do some shopping a man would come with me from my door onto the bus and train and then home again. They changed the personnel, but there was always someone there. They wanted us to feel it.’ Feel what? A simmering, non-specific anxiety? Apart from the fact that they were being followed, there was nothing they could have anticipated. Like most things, until it happens to you, you don’t think it will. This continued for a fortnight.
One morning on her way to the bus stop two men in civilian clothes asked Frau Paul for her ID. ‘This was quite common. You had to carry your ID at all times.’ Before she could reach into her bag to find it a ‘big black limousine’ pulled up to the kerb. The men grabbed her above the elbows, and shoved her in. ‘I was kidnapped right off the street,’ she says.
She didn’t know where she was taken, ‘but I knew I was at the Stasi’. She now has the record of her interrogation and it shows that she was at Magdalenenstrasse, part of Normannenstrasse at Stasi HQ. She was interrogated from 8 am on the morning of 28 February 1963 until the following day at 6 am. ‘That was how long it lasted,’ she says, passing the document across to me. ‘I always said it lasted twenty-two hours and when I got access to my file there it was: twenty-two hours.’ It is as if the things that happened to Frau Paul are so extreme to her way of thinking and to her sense of what life should be like, that she wants to make sure she does not, on any account, exaggerate. It is also as if she just can’t believe it happened to her.
Frau Paul remembers her interrogator clearly. He was young, portly and snide. ‘In the beginning I denied everything, but then I noticed that they already knew a great deal. They wanted to get information about the students who had stayed with us.’ At the end of her interrogation she was taken back to her cell. ‘I could hardly speak any more. I was finished. But they didn’t leave me there long. They came and took me in a paddy wagon to another place. Then they continued the interrogation day and night—they liked to do it when one was sleep-deprived. They didn’t give me any rest.’
It was during one of these sessions that they offered Frau Paul the deal.
She was seated low on a backless stool, in the corner of the room. When the door opened, it concealed her. I think of Frau Paul’s ample body on that small stool, designed for indignity. The lieutenant interrogating her was behind a large desk. ‘I understand your son finds himself in enemy territory,’ he said.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘From our information, it appears he is very ill.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Where was this going? Had something happened to Torsten that she didn’t know about? Surely they wouldn’t do anything to a tiny, sick baby?
‘Would you like to see your son?’
What sort of a question was that? ‘Yes, sir.’
‘That can be arranged.’
I imagine the huge hope in her then, swelling her heart as she sat on that stool. But she says, ‘That’s when I got suspicious. Here I was sitting in the slammer—I mean prison, sorry—and they were offering for me to go into enemy territory—that’s what the west was then. I couldn’t make any sense of it at all.’
‘How is that possible?’ she asked.
‘It is not at all complicated,’ he said. ‘In fact, it’s a simple matter. If you would like to visit your son in enemy territory, we would ask only that, while you are there, you arrange to meet up with your young friend Michael Hinze. The two of you could go for a stroll. For instance, in the grounds of Charlottenburg Castle.’
She was confused. And then he said, ‘You can leave the rest to us.’
‘“You can leave the rest to us!”’ she crie
s. ‘Then he added, “One good turn deserves another.” “One good turn deserves another!”’ Her tone is a mixture of horror and triumph. I am clearly missing something here. I wonder whether in German there is a sticklebrick noun for this strange combined emotion.
‘At that moment,’ she explains, ‘Karl Wilhelm Fricke shot through my head. I had heard him years before on the radio from the west tell of his kidnapping and imprisonment, and I had never forgotten it. In a flash I knew: they were going to use me as bait in a trap to kidnap Michael.’
Karl Wilhelm Fricke is well known in Germany as a broadcaster and journalist, and as a phenomenon: ‘the case of Fricke.’ He has always been an agitator against the German Democratic Republic. On April Fools’ Day 1955, at a meeting in West Berlin, Stasi agents drugged his cognac and then shunted him, unconscious, over the sector border. He was convicted of ‘war and boycott instigation against the GDR’ and sentenced to four years in solitary confinement, which he served until the last day. There was nothing the west could do to get him out. When he was released into West Berlin, he immediately, and at some risk to himself, broadcast over the airwaves the story of his abduction. At the end of an afternoon spent with him he said to me, ‘Frau Paul—then Rührdanz—is a very brave woman.’
Frau Paul knew Michael would trust her to come to a meeting in the park, and when they came to bundle him into a vehicle she would have to turn her back and walk away. She doesn’t know whether the offer would have meant more than one visit to Torsten, or staying out of prison. She knew only that, if she accepted, they would have her then, her soul bought with a visit to her critically ill son. She would be theirs forever: a stool pigeon and a tame little rat.
‘Me—bait in a trap for Michael! And of course that was an absolute no. I couldn’t.’ Her back is straight, and her hands are clenched into fists on her thighs. ‘Karl Wilhelm Fricke,’ she says, ‘was my guardian angel.’ She starts to crumble and break. At this moment, she does not look like a woman who was saved from anything. ‘I had to decide against my son, but I couldn’t let myself be used in this way.’ Her back slumps and she is crying again. She holds one hand in the other, and from time to time swaps them around, as if to give herself some kind of comfort.