Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [97]
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