My real fear was the border guards and Stasi, who were listening for movement beneath the ground and digging their own tunnels to intercept ours. I n , I was 21 and studying civil engineering in East Germany. I was desperate to escape to the west; the Berlin Wall , which started going up in August , was becoming more impregnable every week.
By winter, scores of people had been killed there or while trying to swim across the River Spree. It felt as if we were penned in, with no future at all.
I was lucky. I managed to cross into West Berlin using a smuggled Swiss passport. I had to leave my girlfriend, Christa, and family behind, thinking I would never see them again.
I got some state support as a refugee, and enrolled at another university, but I missed Christa and my family. By now, border procedures had tightened up, and some school friends and I decided we would tunnel under the wall to help others get out. A friend put us in touch with other tunnel-digging students in need of manpower. We were part of a few successful projects; I had the skills to survey the tunnels, but other diggers were medical or philosophy students. We would make a deep pit in the soil and, as a team, dig 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in hour shifts over several months.
Lying on our backs, we pushed the spade in 10cm each time, and used a wagon attached to a rope to remove the dirt. The tunnels were metres long, 80cm high and 80cm wide β small enough to dig quickly but big enough to turn around in. While it was claustrophobic, my real fear was the border guards and Stasi, who were listening for movement beneath the ground and digging their own tunnels to intercept ours.
