Daughters of the KGB (9 page)

On 28 February 1963 I was on the way to work when two men grabbed me and forced me to get into a black car. I was so shocked that I fought back and a bus driver stopped his vehicle and opened the door so that I could get away, but the men were too strong. I was virtually kidnapped and delivered to the Stasi interrogation facility at Berlin-Lichtenberg. After my watch, handbag, belt and shoelaces had been taken away, I was questioned by several men at the same time about the students. I had not been told anything about their arrangements, but they did not believe this. It was very frightening and lasted all day and the whole night. The interrogators were changed every four hours or so, but I had no rest for twenty-two hours.

I was then placed in an unlit cell inside a closed prison van. After a long drive, it stopped and I was let out in a garage, so brightly lit that it hurt my eyes. I was taken into a room, made to strip naked and bend over in a crouch so that a grinning guard could check that I had not hidden anything in any bodily orifice. The humiliation continued when I was given men’s underclothes, coarse socks and felt slippers, and taken into an unheated cell where I was told my name was now 93/2 – 93 for the cell and 2 for the number of my plank bed.

The cell window had been replaced by a double thickness of glass bricks, through which nothing could be seen: no clouds, no birds. Every ten minutes I was spied on through the Judas-hole. The cell light was kept on night and day. I had no idea where I was being held. Even my toilet things were kept outside the cell. With little or no sleep, after two weeks I was so weak, exhausted, lonely and desperate for news of my family that I signed everything that was put in front of me.

From time to time I heard knocking and realised that this was some kind of code. Letter A was one knock; B was two knocks and so on. I took the chance to join in, although this was totally forbidden, and punished by worse conditions. In May of 1964 I had to clean away the blood and excrement in a ‘rubber cell’, where they locked up prisoners who had gone out of their minds. Down there, there was no plank bed nor toilet can.

In July 1963 I was transferred to the Stasi prison in Rostock. Informed that I was at last about to be tried, I asked for a defence lawyer, to be told by my interrogator, ‘You could have three defence lawyers, but it wouldn’t make any difference.’ Before the trial, at which I was sentenced to four years in prison for ‘conspiracy to flee the Republic’, I was not allowed to see the indictment, nor meet a lawyer.

Once sentenced, life was easier. I was allowed a quarterly visit from my mother and a monthly 30-minute meeting with my husband, who was serving time in a male working party at the same prison. Working alone in my cell, I still had a terrible yearning for my son. Day and night, I tried to imagine how he looked now. How big was he? Could he talk yet? What did his voice sound like? Had his teeth grown? What did he know about his parents? Did he even understand what a father and mother were? I could open the ventilation flap in the blocked-up cell window just a little, to let in some fresh air. Sometimes, I heard men’s voices outside and, just now and again, my husband’s unmistakable laugh.
¹⁰

Sigrid was interned from March to August 1963 and from October 1963 to October 1964. Then:

One day I was taken out of my cell very early and escorted into a prison van. I took courage in both hands to ask the guard where I was going, but he did not reply. I was taken to a prison in Berlin-Rummelsburg and put into a filthy, cold cell without plank bed or stool, where I was kept waiting for about twelve hours. In the evening, I was conducted to the gate office, given back my things that had been taken away when I was arrested – and found myself outside on the street.

I don’t know for how long I stood there, trying to think clearly as the sun went down in a wonderful orange sky. Very, very slowly I realised that I was free again. After all the privations and worry about my son, it was indescribably beautiful. Tears ran down my face.
¹¹

By an administrative oversight in the BStU after the end of the GDR, Sigrid eventually learned the name of her main interrogator. Many years later, she tracked him down, but he refused to talk to her.

By the 1980s even
asking
for a legal permit to leave the GDR could result in imprisonment. Waltraud Krüger was forcibly confined in a Stasi psychiatric hospital, on the logic that a communist state was as near heaven as one could get, therefore anyone wanting to leave it was clinically insane. Shown into a cell, she was brought a nightdress and some supper by a nurse, but was not hungry. Then came a psychiatrist in a white coat, who ordered her to eat, threatening her otherwise with forced feeding, which would be very painful. He told the 38-year-old detainee that she was in the medical wing of a Stasi interrogation prison. Since she still refused to eat, he called the nurse and ordered an injection. She asked what it was for, since her medical record indicated allergy to some medicines:

No reply. An orderly came with a syringe. The injection was to be made in my buttocks, so I had to lie face down on the bed. When I refused, the doctor said, ‘Don’t forget, you are a prisoner under interrogation. You have to do everything we tell you to.’ I still refused. Two more orderlies were called. They forced me down onto the bed and one of them did the injection. The nurse undressed me and I did not recover consciousness until next morning. When I was in prison in Magdeburg, I had used the knocking code to communicate with other cells, but when I tried it here, the doctor appeared and said, ‘You’re not in Magdeburg now. No knocking here.’

A medical doctor came and asked me questions about my health. The shrink said they were going to treat me with drugs. When I asked what for, he said that the state prosecutor had ordered it. The treatment started the following day: injections in the morning, at midday and in the evening of the anti-epileptic drug Luminal, which had been used to kill people in the Nazi euthanasia programme. [It also has sedative and hypnotic properties.] A declaration was put in front of me, saying that I wished to remain in the GDR. I refused to sign and went on hunger strike, so they tied me down on the bed and put in a drip.

Soon, I was no longer aware if it was day or night. After I tried to hang myself with a strip of the bed sheet, my nightie was pulled up. One guard wrenched my hands above my head and kneeled on them and the orderly held my legs down, so they could put needles into my thighs for a drip. With the first drops, I felt the most terrible pain – as if my legs were being torn off. Tears ran down my face. I begged the doctor to stop the infusion, but he said he would do so when I ate and drank and signed the declaration he was holding out. I still refused and he continued the drip for three-quarters of an hour. When he pulled out the needles, I screamed. I could hardly recognise my legs. It was agony to move them, and where the needles had gone in was raw and swollen. When I pleaded for some painkiller, the guard called from outside, ‘Get yourself some from the West.’

I was warned that my sentence for refusing to sign the declaration would be not less than five years’ imprisonment. Sometimes I could not understand the interrogations, but the questions were always the same, about my contacts with the West. Since I still refused to eat, my weight declined each day until I was taken into a room with several orderlies. They made me sit on a stool, cuffed my hands behind my back and fastened them to the stool. An orderly pulled back my head and the doctor inserted a tube in my nose so that the nurse could pour fluid in through a funnel. The more I struggled, the harder they pulled my hair, until even the interrogator was fighting me and I lost the last shred of human dignity by soiling myself.

Back in my cell, I begged for some release from my suffering, but God did nothing. The interrogator said my family would pay for it if I did not retract my request [to leave the GDR]. Then came the day I feared, when he told me that my daughter Anita had also been arrested. They showed me a letter in her handwriting, in which one sentence stood out:
Dear Mummy, Please find a solution for us all
. I was so confused, I had to ask the interrogator what it meant. He said she had confessed to having written ‘all the letters’ to the West. I asked to see that in writing, but in vain. To reply to my daughter, I was given paper and a pencil. I was weeping so much, I could hardly write, but managed a few sentences, imploring her to stick to the truth and not be squeezed like a lemon into uttering falsehoods.

My thoughts were all with my daughter. When had she been arrested and why did she have to atone for what I was supposed to have done? Then I was told my husband was also in the prison hospital because he and my daughter were considered accomplices in my ‘crime’. The doctor came and pleaded with me to end the hunger strike, so my husband and daughter could be released and only I would be punished. But I was determined to continue until either I died or was given an exit visa. At my next interrogation, I was offered the same deal by the interrogator, who warned me that in the Bundesrepublik sick people like me received neither medical care or money. ‘In which case,’ I retorted, ‘why don’t all the people in the West come and live in the GDR?’
¹²

By now many people in western Germany had taken an interest in Waltraud’s problems. Every week, she was shown a list of their letters, on which she was supposed to mark the names she knew, which would be proof that she had contacts in the West. She was also told her husband and daughter had signed statements that they did not want to leave the GDR, but when she asked to see the statements, they were not produced. Although it pained her greatly to think of her daughter undergoing Stasi interrogations, what had happened to Anita was even more Machiavellian. A young IM (Stasi informer) called Michael Schilling had been tasked by the Stasi with seducing and marrying her – all to convince Anita to stay in the GDR.

Although Waltraud was now a shadow of the woman who had been arrested, it was the interrogator who eventually cracked and admitted that things were ‘not wonderful, here in the GDR’. After his small admission, Waltraud agreed to end her hunger strike if she was given assurances that nothing would happen to her husband and daughter. A cup of broth was brought from the prison kitchen, but she was able to swallow only a little before being taken back to her cell. Although she now ate, the Luminal injections continued. On 14 July, after five weeks of this treatment, Waltraud was given back her clothes. She dressed and staggered in great pain to the main doors, where she was placed on a stretcher, which was lifted into an ambulance for an unknown destination. Seated beside her was her husband, who had been similarly mistreated in the prison hospital, but they were forbidden to speak to, or touch, each other.
¹³

Suddenly, in January 1981 the family was given permission to leave the GDR legally with Anita, after their liberty was purchased by the Bundesrepublik. Welcomed by friends in the West, their relief and joy can be imagined from a photograph taken at the time. However, after being temporarily accommodated in a reception camp, they were informed that the quota of refugees for Bavaria, where they wanted to live, was already full. Settled in a rented apartment in Lower Saxony, where they knew nobody, they found themselves ostracised by neighbours as ‘troublesome Ossies’.

In September 2000, just before the expiry of the legislation covering all SED and Stasi crimes except murder, the Berlin county court heard the trial of neurologist Horst Böttger for his treatment of the Krügers. Defended by a former Stasi legal officer and calling as defence witness a former KGB psychologist from Moscow, Böttger was found not guilty after pleading that Waltraud’s suicide attempt justified his use of Luminal.

As to how many GDR citizens were arrested for attempting the crime of Republikflucht – flight from the GDR – they totalled 64,000 individual cases between 1958 and 1966. In the last years of the GDR, the figures were nearly 6,000 in 1987 and more than 9,000 in 1988.

Notes

1
.    J. Schönbohm,
Two Armies and one Fatherland
, Oxford, Berghahn Books 1996, p. ix

2
.    The pen name of Eric Blair

3
.    See Knabe,
Gefangen in Hohenschönhausen

4
.    Ibid

5
.    F. Sperling in Knabe,
Gefangen in Hohenschönhausen
, pp. 147−53

6
.    Knabe,
Gefangen in Hohenschönhausen
, pp. 166−73

7
.    H. Fichter in Knabe,
Gefangen in Hohenschönhausen
, pp. 152−63 (abridged)

8
.    An example is displayed in the Normannenstrasse museum. The modus operandi was shown in the film
Das Leben der Anderen/The Lives of Others
, dir. von Donnersmarck

9
.    W. Janka in Knabe,
Gefangen in Hohenschönhausen
, pp. 174−91 (author’s italics)

10
.  S. Paul in Knabe,
Gefangen in Hohenschönhausen
, pp. 236−47