Stasiland (29 page)
Frau Paul remembers her interrogator clearly. He was young, portly and snide. ‘In the beginning I denied everything, but then I noticed that they already knew a great deal. They wanted to get information about the students who had stayed with us.’ At the end of her interrogation she was taken back to her cell. ‘I could hardly speak any more. I was finished. But they didn’t leave me there long. They came and took me in a paddy wagon to another place. Then they continued the interrogation day and night—they liked to do it when one was sleep-deprived. They didn’t give me any rest.’
It was during one of these sessions that they offered Frau Paul the deal.
She was seated low on a backless stool, in the corner of the room. When the door opened, it concealed her. I think of Frau Paul’s ample body on that small stool, designed for indignity. The lieutenant interrogating her was behind a large desk. ‘I understand your son finds himself in enemy territory,’ he said.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘From our information, it appears he is very ill.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Where was this going? Had something happened to Torsten that she didn’t know about? Surely they wouldn’t do anything to a tiny, sick baby?
‘Would you like to see your son?’
What sort of a question was that? ‘Yes, sir.’
‘That can be arranged.’
I imagine the huge hope in her then, swelling her heart as she sat on that stool. But she says, ‘That’s when I got suspicious. Here I was sitting in the slammer—I mean prison, sorry—and they were offering for me to go into enemy territory—that’s what the west was then. I couldn’t make any sense of it at all.’
‘How is that possible?’ she asked.
‘It is not at all complicated,’ he said. ‘In fact, it’s a simple matter. If you would like to visit your son in enemy territory, we would ask only that, while you are there, you arrange to meet up with your young friend Michael Hinze. The two of you could go for a stroll. For instance, in the grounds of Charlottenburg Castle.’
She was confused. And then he said, ‘You can leave the rest to us.’
‘“You can leave the rest to us!”’ she cries. ‘Then he added, “One good turn deserves another.” “One good turn deserves another!”’ Her tone is a mixture of horror and triumph. I am clearly missing something here. I wonder whether in German there is a sticklebrick noun for this strange combined emotion.
‘At that moment,’ she explains, ‘Karl Wilhelm Fricke shot through my head. I had heard him years before on the radio from the west tell of his kidnapping and imprisonment, and I had never forgotten it. In a flash I knew: they were going to use me as bait in a trap to kidnap Michael.’
Karl Wilhelm Fricke is well known in Germany as a broadcaster and journalist, and as a phenomenon: ‘the case of Fricke.’ He has always been an agitator against the German Democratic Republic. On April Fools’ Day 1955, at a meeting in West Berlin, Stasi agents drugged his cognac and then shunted him, unconscious, over the sector border. He was convicted of ‘war and boycott instigation against the GDR’ and sentenced to four years in solitary confinement, which he served until the last day. There was nothing the west could do to get him out. When he was released into West Berlin, he immediately, and at some risk to himself, broadcast over the airwaves the story of his abduction. At the end of an afternoon spent with him he said to me, ‘Frau Paul—then Rührdanz—is a
very
brave woman.’
Frau Paul knew Michael would trust her to come to a meeting in the park, and when they came to bundle him into a vehicle she would have to turn her back and walk away. She doesn’t know whether the offer would have meant more than one visit to Torsten, or staying out of prison. She knew only that, if she accepted, they would have her then, her soul bought with a visit to her critically ill son. She would be theirs forever: a stool pigeon and a tame little rat.
‘Me—bait in a trap for Michael! And of course that was an absolute no. I couldn’t.’ Her back is straight, and her hands are clenched into fists on her thighs. ‘Karl Wilhelm Fricke,’ she says, ‘was my guardian angel.’ She starts to crumble and break. At this moment, she does not look like a woman who was saved from anything. ‘I had to decide against my son, but I couldn’t let myself be used in this way.’ Her back slumps and she is crying again. She holds one hand in the other, and from time to time swaps them around, as if to give herself some kind of comfort.
‘At that time it was the right decision,’ she says through tears. ‘And even later too, I could always say to myself, “I did not make myself guilty. I can sleep at night with what I have done.”’ She doesn’t try to cover her face. There was no right answer here, no good outcome. ‘It is true that I didn’t burden myself with this on my conscience, but I did,’ she draws in breath in a spasm of pain, ‘decide against my son.’
It is so hard to know what kind of mortgage our acts put on our future. Frau Paul had the courage to do the right thing by her conscience in a situation where most people would decide to see their baby, and tell themselves later they had no choice. Once made though, her decision took a whole new fund of courage to live with. It seems to me that Frau Paul, as one does, may have overestimated her own strength, her resistance to damage, and that she is now, for her principles, a lonely, teary guilt-wracked wreck. ‘The result of this was that I was never interrogated again.’ She learnt that her husband and the three students had also been arrested, as well as some thirty others from all over the GDR who had been planning to leave through the tunnel.
Frau Paul and her husband were held at Hohenschönhausen prison for five months, and then, along with the three students, transported to Rostock on the Baltic Sea coast for trial. Frau Paul thinks this was because the western media knew of the plight of Torsten on one side of the Wall and of his parents on the other, and the authorities wanted to make sure there was no chance of publicity.
The couple never saw the charges against them, nor the judgment. They were offered the services of Dr Vogel, the lawyer with close government connections who became famous for negotiating the trade in people between east and west. But they mistrusted the arrangement and turned it down, insisting on their own family solicitor. He couldn’t do much to help them though, because he was handed the charges against his clients only five minutes before the trial began.
The prosecutor alleged:
Rührdanz, Sigrid, is accused of inducing or, at the least aiding and abetting citizens of the German Democratic Republic to illegally leave the GDR.
The accused maintains connections with members of a West Berlin people smuggling and terrorist organisation which lures people out of the GDR and facilitates their illegal leaving of the GDR either with illegal papers, or through the violation of the national border… [She] had custody of forged passports in her flat, organised meetings and conveyed information about planned people smuggling operations and accommodated persons to be smuggled in her flat. There exists the urgent suspicion that she herself will illegally leave the GDR.
Frau Paul reads this to me, and maintains, at each point, her innocence. ‘We’d long since, as I told you, given up trying to get out,’ she says, and, ‘I did not know what the students were doing at our flat.’ In 1992, twenty-nine years after the trial, Frau Paul saw in her file the judgment for the first time. There was no mention of Torsten. The judges wrote that her ‘attitude of rejection towards our State’ had been ‘exacerbated through the fact that the accused has been a constant listener to NATO smear-radio’.
‘They put that in about the NATO smear-radio because I would not let myself be misused as bait in their trap.’ Frau Paul and her husband were each given four years hard labour. She was put in a paddy wagon and taken from Rostock back to Hohenschönhausen to serve her time. Werner Coch got one year and nine months in ordinary prison, because the penalties for being an accessory to the attempt to flee the country were greater than the crime of trying to flee itself.
Hohenschönhausen prison is not far from the centre of East Berlin, but its existence was unknown even to people in neighbouring suburbs. Every street that leads in or out of the area around it was blocked off by a boom gate and a sentry. Hohenschönhausen was a prison for political prisoners—it was the innermost security installation in a secured area within a walled-off country; it was another blank on the map.
Frau Paul took me there one day. It was an ordinarily cold day, and we were in an ordinarily grey residential street. As we walked along she nodded and said, ‘That’s where the boom gates were.’ All that remained was a hip-height bollard on the pavement. We passed it into what had been the secure Stasi zone. ‘That building there was Department M, Postal Surveillance,’ Frau Paul said, walking slightly ahead of me and pointing with an open hand. ‘That one over there was the Forgery Workshop for the Stasi. That one was a special Stasi hospital.’ These were plain concrete buildings. They looked empty. ‘Those high-rises over there are Stasi housing,’ she continued. I followed her hand and saw a cluster of grey and white multi-storey towers. From one of them emerged a middle-aged man with a dachshund on a retractable lead. The man ignored us, but the dog eyed me warily as it pissed on the kerb.
Further inside the zone we reached a building with high concrete walls topped by barbed wire. The walls seemed to stretch on and on, enclosing an area as big as a city block. At the corners were octagonal guard towers, and underneath them, along the outside, an empty dog-run. Hohenschönhausen has been closed for several years. People are now fighting to preserve it as a museum of the regime. Frau Paul is involved with them, and she has a key.
We approached the towering grey steel entry gates. There was a man-sized door next to them. Her eyes were clear, her clothes made the rustle of nylon. She moved ahead of me in a businesslike way that said, ‘I hate this place, but I’m still here.’ We slipped into the empty prison, into a huge yard surrounded by buildings, with a squat building in the centre. The ground was asphalt and gravel, cracking like the top of a cake. A truck was parked in the yard. It was painted grey, and had a solid steel cage on the back with no windows or apparent ventilation of any kind. ‘This is the same as the paddy wagon I was transported in for five hours from Rostock,’ she said. And then to my surprise she added, ‘Get in.’ I did. Inside, instead of two benches for the prisoners as I had expected, it had a tiny corridor and six internal cells each with a lockable door. These were not big enough to stand upright in, and contained only a crossboard to sit on. She followed me into the truck. ‘Get in,’ she said again, pointing at the furthest tiny cell, ‘it’ll give you a feel for what it was like.’ I climbed into one and she closed the heavy steel door. The key turned in the lock. I sat on the bench and everything was pitch black and horrible. Outside the door she said, loudly, ‘You have to imagine that someone is sitting here with a machine gun.’ I imagined it, then she let me out.
Later, I learned that these trucks were sometimes disguised as linen service vehicles, or refrigerated fish transports, or bakers’ vans, when all the time they were ferrying prisoners and dissidents at gunpoint around the Republic.
We walked across the yard to the building in the middle and entered it via a truck bay with giant doors. ‘This is where I was brought,’ she said. ‘I had no idea where I was. For all I knew, I could have been taken from Rostock to any place in the GDR. I certainly didn’t know I was right in the heart of Berlin.’ The paddy wagon and the truck bay were designed so that the prisoners could be let out one at a time, and never see each other, or daylight, or a street, or the entrance to the building.
We walked up the steps. A huge studded metal door slid sideways to reveal a long linoleum corridor. Frau Paul pointed out a primitive cable-and-hook system that ran along the walls at head height. When a new prisoner was coming, it operated as an alarm system, turning on red lights at intervals. That was the signal for all other prisoners to be locked in their cells, and guards to be out of sight. The prisoner was not to know who else was here, or have any human contact which was not strictly monitored, for psychological purposes, by her captors.
We walked along the corridor. Some of the cells were open, some shut. The only sound was our footfalls on the floor. Grey paint peeled off the walls. It is not the first time Frau Paul has been back, but I don’t imagine this is easy for her. I know there are places that I don’t visit, some even that I prefer not to drive past, where bad things have happened. But here she is in the place that broke her, and she is telling me about it. It is part bravery, like the bravery that made her refuse the Stasi deal, and it is part, perhaps, obsession, caused by what they did to her after that.
She took me to the room where she was interrogated. In this complex 120 rooms were available for simultaneous interrogations. Hers had brown patterned wallpaper reaching halfway up the walls, a dun-coloured linoleum floor, and a large desk and chair. Behind the door was a small, four-legged stool like a milking stool. ‘Twenty-two hours on that,’ Frau Paul said.
Then we went to another building, the ‘U-Boat’. From the ground it looked ordinary enough. We entered down some steps. Frau Paul was telling me it had been purpose-built by the Russians in 1946 as a series of torture chambers. I was sort of listening, but mainly I was adjusting to the strange smell. Some smells are hard to unravel. I remember the university library around exam time. It smelt of sweat and damp coats and bad breath. It was a mongrel smell, but it was the smell of pure fear. This U-Boat smelt of damp and old urine and vomit and earth: the smell of misery.
The tunnel-corridor was long and stark. Single bulbs hung on cords. Frau Paul started opening doors. First, a compartment so small a person could only stand. It was designed to be filled with icy water up to the neck. There were sixty-eight of these, she told me. Then there were concrete cells with nothing in them where prisoners would be kept in the dark amid their own excrement. There was a cell lined entirely with padded black rubber. Frau Paul was held nearby. She remembers hearing the prisoner inside the rubber cell gradually lose his mind. At the end the only words he had left were: ‘Never…Get…Out!’ Once when he was taken away she was ordered in to mop up his vomit and blood.
