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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