Tunnel 29 - Ep 1. The Escape

Intrigue

BBC

True Crime, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.6 • 4.6K Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2019

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

“I didn’t want to be a part of this new world.” Joachim is on holiday in East Germany when he hears Berlin is to be divided. The wall is built and the escapes begin. Joachim has to decide whether he'll be among them.

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Helena Merriman tells the extraordinary true story of a man who dug a tunnel into the East, right under the feet of border guards, to help friends, family and strangers escape. It’s also the story of the Stasi spy who betrays the tunnel, the American TV network which funds it and the love that develops between refugees who find freedom together.

The series is based on original interviews with the survivors as well as thousands of documents from the Stasi archives and recordings from the tunnel.

Producer & Presenter: Helena Merriman Sound Design: Eloise Whitmore Translation and additional research: Sabine Schereck Editor: Richard Knight Joachim Rudolph's original interviews voiced by Mark Edel Hunt

#tunnel29

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless
0:06.8	searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the
0:11.8	telly we share what we've been watching
0:14.0	Fladiated.
0:16.0	Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.
0:19.0	Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.
0:21.0	And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less
0:25.0	searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:35.0	There's a street in Berlin.
0:37.0	To look at now, it's pretty ordinary.
0:40.0	There's a bakery, a couple of cafes, but back in 1961, the year this story began,
0:46.9	it was one of the strangest streets in the world. Right down the middle of it, there was
0:52.3	a wall.
0:53.0	And if you tried to climb over it, you could be shot.
0:56.0	Now, it hadn't always been there.
0:58.0	Children used to be able to run across the street and play in each other's houses.
1:02.0	But now, they could only stare at each other over the top of it.
1:08.1	But the story I'm about to tell you isn't about what was happening on the street.
1:13.4	It's about what was happening on the street. It's about what was happening underneath it.
1:18.0	Under the tarmac, under the concrete, down through the mud.
1:23.6	There's something that shouldn't be there.
1:28.1	Not there.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.