“Always believe that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Believe that you may be that light for someone else.”                                                     Kobe Yamada

October 1961 – West Berlin, Germany: Joachim Rudolph, a 22-year-old West Berlin University student, answered the knock at his dorm room door. Two Italian students, his new friends, wanted to get several buddies out of East Berlin and they wanted Joachim, an engineering student, to lead the effort to dig a tunnel under the Berlin Wall.

“A tunnel? Are you crazy?” Joachim told them. “We will be shot. We have no tools. How can we build a tunnel?” Joachim didn’t sleep much that night. When he was 10 years old Russian soldiers shot and killed his father and gang-raped his mother. He had vivid memories of that day and the hatred he still felt toward the Soviet Union communist regime boiled up.

The wall separating East and West Germany had been constructed two months earlier on the night of August 13, when tens of thousands of East German soldiers strung barbed wire and erected concrete barriers. The wall had been built to stop the steady stream of people leaving the communist dictatorship for a better life in the West.

A few weeks after the wall went up, Joachim and a couple of his East German buddies risked their lives and scaled the wall to freedom. Joachim was happy to be making a new life for himself as a college student, and now friends wanted him to help tunnel back into the East. After careful consideration, he decided he would help.

Joachim reviewed maps of the area. He chose the basement of an abandoned factory in the West, 100 feet from the wall to begin the dig. He wanted to tunnel up into the basement of an apartment building a few hundred feet beyond the wall. He hoped the East German secret police would not suspect a tunnel being constructed under one of the busiest streets in Berlin.

Joachim recruited three engineering students to help, bringing their total to six. They stole spades, shovels, and wheelbarrows from a cemetery. The digging under the factory began at midnight on May 9, 1962. They dug down about 12 feet in the first week and then started the horizontal excavation. The work proved harder than expected. They lay flat on their backs and used a shovel to chip away at the hard clay. Their hands were blistered, their shoulders and backs ached, and the dirt was caked in their eyes, noses, and mouths.

They needed more people and money. Joachim and his friends recruited 14 more volunteers, primarily college students, and went to two four-hour shifts a night. Meanwhile, in America, NBC News closely followed the Berlin Wall stories. Piers Anderton, the Berlin correspondent, learned of the tunnel project and agreed to give the team $7,500 for the rights to film the rescue, should it happen.

They dug in silence beneath the street. By the end of June, they had dug for 38 nights and gone 150 feet. The tunnel was about three feet wide and four feet high. A small cart and rope were used to move dirt into the corners of the basement. Joachim rigged a string of lights and used a stove pipe to create a crude ventilation system to help with the oppressive summer heat. Then, he utilized an old World War II phone for communication when the cart was full.

In late July, Joachim heard a drip and discovered water leaking into the 250-foot tunnel. Two nights later, the water was six inches deep. He faced a decision: dig another tunnel or contact the West Berlin Water Works who might question how he knew about an underground leak. He took the risk, the leak was repaired, and the digging resumed.

Joachim and his team of 20 young men completed the 400-foot tunnel on September 10, just after the leak returned. The escape date was set for Friday, September 14, at 6 p.m. As NBC filmed, Joachim stood at the entrance of the tunnel until the last of 29 people who ranged in age from 2 to 80 crawled through six inches of water to freedom in West Berlin. Tunnel 29, named for the 29 people who escaped Soviet oppression, collapsed the following day.

Joachim Rudolph had no family members in the escape, but several years later, he married Evi Schmidt, the first woman to crawl through the tunnel. Joachim’s tunnel was a chance at a new life for the 29 escapees and shows the extent to which people will go for a chance to be free.