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The Tunnel Television Paid For — 10-Minute Edition

audio_story · the-tunnel-television-paid-for-10-minute-edition

{
  "kind": "truestory",
  "slug": "the-tunnel-television-paid-for-10-minute-edition",
  "title": "The Tunnel Television Paid For — 10-Minute Edition",
  "voice": "25dfa8ed-dcd0-446e-8490-5b87da2ee760",
  "script": "Two in the morning, early July 1962, and the telephone is ringing in a student dormitory on Hardenbergstraße in West Berlin.\nThe message is water. Fifteen metres past the boundary line, standing ten centimetres deep in places. Apparently a pipe has burst.\nThe water is four to six metres under the city, in a hand-dug passage about ninety centimetres wide, shored with timber and wired for electric light.\nThe student who takes the call is Domenico Sesta, Mimmo to his friends, an Italian studying civil engineering.\nThe timber holding that roof up is being paid for by an American television network.\nThat takes some explaining. Start with a Sunday morning in August.\n13 August 1961. Barbed wire goes up overnight, then concrete blocks, then a wall.\nOn Bernauer Straße the houses stood in the East and the pavement in front of them in the West, so people came and stood on that pavement and looked at it, and there was nothing else to do.\nSesta and his friend Luigi Spina, Gigi, had one thing the Germans around them didn't. Italian passports. Foreigners could still cross.\nIn February 1962 they crossed to see Peter Schmidt, a friend of Sesta's, stuck in the East with his wife Eveline and their small daughter Annett.\nSchmidt asked them to get him out.\nThey said yes. They had no plan, no money, and no idea how.\nThey bought a cadastral map, the kind that shows property lines, and measured across it from Bernauer Straße to Rheinsberger Straße. The first rough figure was 165 to 170 metres.\nAt the end of March the promise turned into a hole in a floor: the cellar of a disused factory at Bernauer Straße 78, a place that used to make cocktail swizzle sticks.\nBetween that cellar and the one they were aiming at: Berlin. To be cut out of the ground and carried away.\nMeasured rather than looked at, the Wall came out as a labour problem. Clay, worked with spades, shovels and hand saws.\nThe spoil came back on a cart running on steel rails laid along the tunnel floor, dragged to the shaft on a hand-cranked winch, hoisted up on a second winch and tipped into wheelbarrows — and a cellar only holds so much dirt.\nThey worked in shifts of four or five. One man at the face, one hauling the cart, two lifting it.\nEventually forty-one people were doing it.\nClay at that depth wants to move, though, and timber, cable, lighting and pumps were the difference between a tunnel and a grave.\nBy the end of May the money was gone, about 4,500 D-Marks of it spent on tools and a VW bus, and the digging stopped.\nSo Sesta and Spina sold the story. In May and June they signed exclusive film rights over to NBC for about 50,000 D-Marks, roughly 12,500 dollars, part of it payable only if the escape actually worked.\nTwo American cameramen came down the shaft with their gear and filmed men digging.\nFive men appear in that footage, and only five: Sesta, Spina, Hasso Herschel, Uli Pfeifer, Wolfhardt Schroedter.\nThe cameras came down only when no other diggers were present, because Sesta and Spina were keeping the deal from the rest of the group.\nAbout half the money went straight into the ground as timber and pumps and cable, and the tunnel started moving east again.\nWhich brings the story back to that telephone, at two in the morning, and the water fifteen metres past the line.\nThey borrowed hoses through a contact in the fire brigade and pumped it into a cast-iron sewer beside the entrance, first by hand, then with an electric pump. It wasn't enough.\nSo three of them, Sesta, Spina and Pfeifer, walked into the building-inspection office in Wedding, reported a broken water main on the eastern side of the line, and asked whether the main could be shut off.\nThe officials agreed. The supply running east was shut off, and a repair was staged beside the Wall. The water stopped, and the Senate, once it knew, covered the whole thing over.\nBy then the secret belonged to forty-one diggers, each with friends, girlfriends, brothers, mothers.\nIt belonged to an American television network.\nAnd to a city government, while West Berlin security officials met Schroedter at Ernst-Reuter-Platz and offered secrecy, support, and checks on the men.\nOn the other side of the line, the Stasi was building its files by pressure.\nOne informer, in Ellen Sesta's account a forwarding merchant called Rolf, was blackmailed into it after a week in a Stasi prison and threats against his girlfriend in Pankow. He had already given up one tunnel.\nThe checks were real, and some names went through them.\nThen, one evening, the diggers found a stranger on the factory grounds at Bernauer Straße 78, standing directly above everything they had built.\nThey took him for a Stasi informant, overpowered him, tied him, and put him down in the tunnel.\nA few hours later he was driven across the city to the police in Tempelhof, to the department that handled state security, and questioned there all night.\nNothing in his account contradicted itself. In the morning they let him go.\nHe walked straight back to the factory.\nHe told the diggers he would do anything they asked, take any shift they gave him, if his family could be brought out through the tunnel.\nHis name was Claus Störmer, a toolmaker from Berlin-Friedrichshain who had got himself over to the West soon after the Wall went up.\nHis wife had been caught trying to follow with their child. She was pregnant, and she got ten months, and she was let out early, in late January. The child spent that time in a children's home in Friedrichshain.\nThey let him dig, on terms. He went onto the shifts and was told less than the men fetching their own relatives, and when the escape came he would wait in the cellar and send no word to his family until everyone else was over.\nBy mid-September, water was coming in again near the eastern end, there was nowhere left to put the spoil, and the group was afraid of betrayal.\nSo they changed the plan. The cellar on Rheinsberger Straße was too far to reach in the time they had, and Pfeifer's measurements said they were already underneath Schönholzer Straße 7.\nThey came up there instead, about 120 metres from the factory, and the breakthrough was accurate to fifty centimetres. The date moved forward to 14 September.\nThat morning, Ellen Sesta crossed on a West German passport to move people through East Berlin in small groups.\nAt the first meeting place she sat with a copy of the BZ folded so only the masthead letters showed, and bought matches.\nAt the second, around two in the afternoon, near Kastanienallee, she ordered mineral water and drank it.\nAt the third she tried to order coffee, which that small pub didn't have, so she said the word Kaffee until everyone who needed to hear it had heard it, then ordered a cognac and drank it in one go.\nIn the stairwell at Schönholzer Straße 7 the escapers identified themselves by talking about Eisenstein and Battleship Potemkin, a Soviet film used as a password against the Soviet sector.\nDown in the cellar they greeted the filthy men at the tunnel mouth with the phrase they had been given: \"Ihr fleißigen Handwerker.\" You industrious craftsmen.\nTwo men held the cellar stairs, another stood lower down them, another by the tunnel entrance, all with loaded pistols. Nobody came down.\nFirst through: Eveline Schmidt, with Annett.\nAccounts differ on when exactly the word went east that day, and on how the last arrivals divide between the fourteenth and the fifteenth. The people who were there never did agree.\nWhat is clear is the order of things in the cellar under the factory at Bernauer Straße 78, where Claus Störmer spent that day.\nThe lights were on, the American camera was set up, and people kept coming up out of the square hole in the floor, clay to the elbows, one group and then another.\nStörmer had dug that hole with them for weeks. His wife was a few streets from the eastern end, waiting for a signal nobody had sent yet.\nThen the last group came up through the floor, and it still wasn't his turn.\nEllen Sesta was still on the eastern side. They waited until enough time had passed that she had to be over.\nOnly then did they tell Störmer he could send for his family.\nA courier went east and laid a photograph on the table in front of his wife. Their daughter Kerstin, with his handwriting across it. \"Halt die Ohren steif.\" Keep your chin up.\nThat was the signal to run.\nThen a tram derailed.\nHis wife and a woman who had shared her prison cell walked fifteen stops pushing a pram and reached Schönholzer Straße at half past eight in the evening instead of five, by which time there was forty centimetres of water standing in the tunnel.\nThey crawled it anyway.\nWhen they came up in the West, Claus Störmer jumped down into the tunnel exit and took his newborn son out of the helpers' hands.\nHe held the boy and said the same two words over and over, crying, in front of everyone. \"Mein Junge, mein Junge.\"\nNBC's camera was running.\nStörmer remembered what the other men did then. They rushed him, the way they had rushed him in the factory yard, and this time it was out of joy.\nHis wife and children were among the twenty-nine.\nThen the water came back and took the tunnel.\nOn 15 September, Joachim Neumann and a friend pulled on diving suits and went down the flooded shaft for the people still expected on the eastern side. Only two of them could be guided through.\nAfterwards the group had word put out on the radio, so that nobody else would make their way to Schönholzer Straße 7 and try to reach a tunnel that was already gone.\nA child's doll stayed behind in the mud.\n",
  "synopsis": "In February 1962, an Italian engineering student named Domenico Sesta crossed into East Berlin on the passport that let him move where his German friends could not, sat down with Peter Schmidt, and promised to get him out — along with his wife Eveline and their small daughter. He had no plan, no money and no idea how. By the end of March the promise had become a hole in the cellar floor of a disused factory at Bernauer Straße 78, a place that had made cocktail swizzle sticks: the start of roughly 120 metres of clay, four to six metres beneath a city that had been cut in two overnight the previous August, to be moved with pickaxes, hand saws and buckets by crews of four and five working in shifts.\n\nEvery problem they solved cost them a little more secrecy. The timber and the pumps were paid for, improbably, by an American television network buying exclusive film rights. When a pickaxe opened a water main fifteen metres past the boundary line, the fix involved three of them walking into a building-inspection office in Wedding to report a suspected broken pipe on the other side and ask, politely, for the main to be shut off. By midsummer forty-one people knew about the tunnel, each with friends and relations of their own, at a time when the Stasi was blackmailing men into escape-helper circles with prison sentences and threats against their girlfriends. The water could be fixed. Forty-one people could not be checked. And then, one evening, the diggers found an unknown man standing on the factory grounds, directly above everything they had built — and the decision that mattered most came only after they had tied him up, handed him to the police, and watched him walk free.",
  "audioArtifactId": "bc09b121-ff7a-497e-b71f-c62a755245c0",
  "durationSeconds": 586
}