Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [94]
In an alley near the station Michael handed over the passports and supplies. The East Germans, with a case no bigger than for a holiday, prepared to leave for their new lives. By Christmas 1961, Michael Hinze’s father and stepmother were safely in West Berlin.
Over the winter of 1961 Frau Paul had permission to visit Torsten four times. Once, an envelope was waiting for her at the hospital. It was a brief note from Dr Hinze, with his telephone number and some small change. When she phoned, Dr Hinze told Frau Paul his son would help get them out. The next time she was over at the Westend Hospital she brought passport-sized photos of herself and her husband. Michael had them inserted into West German passports.
‘So in February 1962,’ Frau Paul says, ‘we planned to get out using the transit route from Berlin Ostbahnhof through Denmark in order to reach West Berlin. It was a very roundabout route.’ Frau Paul is a woman utterly without irony. She seems to have, in fact, very little distance from what happened to her. Things remain close, and hard.
Three eastern students were going to escape with them: a young man called Werner Coch and another couple. Frau Paul and her husband gave their car away to a friend and sold, discreetly, some of their belongings. They left their home intact, full of furniture. ‘It was a terrible, uncertain time,’ she says.
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