 about Monika.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I called her the day I got here. She was very surprised. She said she was engaged and was going to be married, so I haven’t seen her.”
As for his relatives, Rudi said that he had not heard from them and did not expect to, but that he had learned in letters from friends that his sisters and their husbands had all been called in and questioned by the S.S.D. Three weeks before he escaped, he said, he had written a letter to each of his sisters in which he expressed a loathing of the capitalist countries and their criminal warmongers and everything else about the West. “This is standard practice,” he explained. “It is to provide some protection for the relatives. With this, they can say, ‘How could I know? This is the last letter I got from him.’ The authorities probably don’t believe the letter. They know why it was written, but at least it keeps them from proving anything. The letter gives the relatives something in black-and-white. The S.S.D. made my sisters and their husbands sign statements swearing they would never communicate with me again. Of course, my uncle denounced me—said I was a traitor and had been recruited by the C.I.A., and all the other usual things—so he has kept his job. I can do without him. Naturally, I hope to see my sisters again. It’s hard to tell when.”
Except for the bloc of defecting Vopos, the East Germans who have escaped since the wall went up are such a varied group that few generalizations about them are valid, though it is safe to say that they are even younger, on the average, than the pre-wall refugees, are much more apt to be artisans than intellectuals, and are, temperamentally, out of the same mold. “Before August 13th, it cost a refugee twenty pfennigs to get to West Berlin. Now it may well cost him his life,” a member of the West Berlin Senate remarked not long ago, and added, “The recent refugees are the kind of people who never stop looking for the chance, and when they see it, they jump.” The necessary post-wall qualifications were exhibited late last January by a twenty-seven-year-old East Berlin chauffeur named Erwin Becker, his two younger brothers, and two friends of the family—an engineer and a mechanic—who collaborated in digging the first successful tunnel under the wall. The shaft started in the basement of Becker’s home, a two-story stucco house situated on the border in the East Berlin suburb of Glienicke; ran for eighty-seven feet; and came out in the West Berlin suburb of Frohnau. For most of its length, the tunnel was barely three feet below a street patrolled around the clock by Vopos. Because of the greater danger of being heard at night, Becker and his colleagues took turns reporting sick for work at their places of employment, so that they could dig by day. As a further precaution, Becker’s sister maintained a constant lookout from a second-floor window; at the approach of a Vopo patrol, she warned the diggers to stop work by flipping a switch, which turned off a string of electric lights that had been installed in the tunnel. The burrowing, through sandy soil and clay, progressed rapidly; the earth taken from the tunnel was packed into the basement, and filled it practically from floor to ceiling. Becker and his fellow-diggers completed the tunnel in nine days. Shortly after one o’clock on the morning of January 24th, they and a number of other relatives and friends—twenty-eight people in all, ranging in age from eight to seventy-one—began crawling through the narrow shaft. Within three hours, all were safe in West Berlin. They had staged what was up to then the largest group escape since the erection of the wall.
The success of the Becker tunnel, which was discovered and sealed by Vopos the next day, started a trend. In May, an eighty-one-year-old neighbor of the Beckers led eleven relatives and friends, all but two of whom were over fifty, to West Berlin through a tunnel that the elderly gentlemen had dug in sixteen days. Over the three-day Whitsun holiday, in June, fourteen more East Berliners escaped by tunnel. (In general,