ding finally filled the tunnel and made it impassable. By then, twenty-nine refugees had reached West Berlin—the largest group escape since the wall was erected, and, as far as is known, the students’ most successful single operation.
Up to now, it is estimated, the university students of West Berlin have made possible the escape of at least a thousand East Germans. Part of the known cost of this achievement has been the arrest by the East Germans of more than a hundred students, including at least three and possibly four Americans. Most of those arrested have been sentenced to prison terms ranging up to three years. (Two of the Americans were released after serving four months; the third, arrested last January, was sentenced in July to a twenty-one-month prison term; the fourth disappeared in East Berlin shortly after August 13, 1961, and is apparently still being detained there.) In July, Heinrich Albertz, a member of West Berlin’s Senate, delivered the principal address in a ceremony paying tribute to the victims of the abortive anti-Hitler plot of July 20, 1944, and took occasion to compare “the resistance fighters against the Nazi regime to those courageous young people who, since the erection of the wall, have sacrificed their lives to save others from oppression and dictatorship, which does not differ from Hitler’s.” “Since August 13th,” he added, “things have happened in Berlin of which we will be able to speak frankly only many years from now.”
From what we do know of events since August 13th, it is evident that while Ulbricht has succeeded in turning East Germany into what West Berliners call a concentration camp (Konzentrationslager, their abbreviation of which—KZ—they have painted on the wall in letters two feet high), he can never make it escape-proof. As soon as one escape route is discovered and closed, another is found. When the Vopos were keeping an increasingly vigilant lookout for tunnels, fourteen East Germans commandeered a five-hundred-ton excursion boat, after having got the captain and engineer drunk, and raced it across the Spree. When more careful watch was placed on excursion boats, twenty-six East Germans who had managed to embark on a government cruise ship that provided Mediterranean vacations for so-called “deserving workers” and “reliable” intellectuals disembarked at Casablanca, wandered off into the city, and never returned. When, soon afterward, the East German authorities directed that such holiday ships confine their cruises to the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, and Cuba, many East Germans began escaping across the Baltic to Denmark and Sweden in sailboats, folding boats, and row-boats with outboard motors. When, in June, East Germany sealed its hundred-and-ninety-mile Baltic coastline with an immense “control strip,” forty-one young East Germans got themselves appointed to their country’s delegation to the World Youth Festival, held in Finland, and from there departed for the West.
On my last day in Berlin, I paid a visit to the Marienfelde reception center, accompanied by a friend named Max, who is the Berlin correspondent of a West German newspaper. Max had offered to drive me to this now historic way station because I was curious to see it; neither of us expected to run into much activity there. Marienfelde, I found, is a complex of three-story apartment houses, in the southern part of Berlin, which before August 13th sometimes accommodated as many as thirty-three hundred refugees. Now it has hardly any, and more than half of its capacity has been converted into permanent residential quarters. It was mid-afternoon when Max and I arrived, and Marienfelde looked deserted. The only person I saw on the grounds was an elderly man working on the lawn. Inside the Administration Building, we were met by a staff member, who wore shiny black leather gloves over artificial hands (in government offices in Berlin one so frequently encounters employees with artificial limbs that in time one tends not to notice), and he directed us to the room where refugees are—to use the disagreeable but proper te