Experience: I tunnelled under the Berlin Wall
My real fear was the border guards and Stasi, who were listening for movement beneath the ground and digging their own tunnels to intercept ours
In 1961, I was 21 and studying civil engineering in East Germany. I was desperate to escape to the west; the Berlin Wall, which started going up in August 1961, was becoming more impregnable every week. By winter, scores of people had been killed there or while trying to swim across the River Spree. It felt as if we were penned in, with no future at all.
I was lucky. I managed to cross into West Berlin using a smuggled
