Thank you, President Reagan.
Via DW:
The Berlin Wall sliced up its city, dividing East from West, for 28 years, two months and 27 days. Monday marks a turning point: for the first time, the wall has been gone for as long as it stood.
Its construction in 1961, designed to stem the flow of East Germans fleeing over the Berlin border, forced would-be escapees to come up with more creative methods to make it to the West. Some enlisted the help of sympathetic West Berliners to try to cross over where nobody would see them: underground.
It is estimated that about 75 tunnels were dug underneath the Berlin Wall. An archaeologist recently found the entrance of one such tunnel near the city’s Mauerpark. Its rediscovery has unearthed the story of a man whose committed opposition to the wall began with this underground passage to the East.
Painstaking progress
“You couldn’t just shovel away at this kind of soil — you had to really scrape your way through,” says Carl-Wolfgang Holzapfel. “That’s what made it so difficult and frustrating. Sometimes you had the feeling you weren’t getting anywhere at all.”
In 1963, the then 19-year-old West Berliner, along with a group of friends, started burrowing underneath a disused warehouse in the Wedding district of the city. Their aim was to reach a basement 80 meters (262 feet) away, on the eastern side of the wall, so that Gerhard Weinstein, an acquaintance of Holzapfel’s, could be reunited with his young daughter.
After four months of painstaking work, news of the group’s endeavor reached the Stasi (the East German state security service). In total 21 people on the eastern side, who had been planning to escape via the tunnel, were detained. Holzapfel did not hear from them again.
It was a bitter disappointment, but 73-year-old Holzapfel insists his group’s efforts were not entirely in vain.
“It was a reminder that there will always be people who will fight against injustice, and who will find ways to erode that injustice,” he told DW.