We got married in 1960, and my son was born in 1961, just before they built the wall. I worked as a painter, and considering the way most people lived back then, we lived pretty well. We even owned a small car. It’s strange to think that before they built the wall we could have escaped to the West at any time by just buying a subway ticket for 20 pfennigs.
Afterward no one could get out. We were lucky. My twin brother was sentenced to one and a half years in an East German prison and then was sent to West Berlin. [West Germans routinely ransomed political prisoners from the communists.] He was able to get in touch with the right people.
When [a group of West Berliners who dug a tunnel under the wall] figured out where they had broken through, they sent couriers to East Berlin who raced around the city, trying to get hold of everyone who had planned to escape. Some people weren’t home and missed their chance. We got the message the first night, though, and were able to make it to the tunnel by 10:45 p.m. A stranger in the building took us to the door of the courtyard, where he asked my wife to take off her shoes. The courtyard was paved, and her high heels would have made too much noise. Moments later, he came back and said: “Now it’s your turn, you and your son.”
The tunnel was about 150 meters long. We were told to crawl forward; I was terrified that they would shoot me in the back. Finally we reached part of the tunnel that must have been 10 or 12 meters below the surface. The bottom of the tunnel was filled with water, and my son began to cry loudly. Even though he wasn’t a big 3-year-old, he still wasn’t able to stand upright in the tunnel. At the deep end, there was a board attached to a pulley that they used to pull us up with one by one. Suddenly we were in an abandoned bakery in West Berlin.
Later someone asked me if I wanted something to drink. I thought he meant beer or Coke, but he asked me if I wanted a whisky. In American Westerns, whisky flows like water; it was my first ever, and I didn’t really like it. But at that moment I first realized how happy I was to be free.
