Authors: Paul Dowswell
A young man lying on the top bunk sat up, then jumped down.
‘You must be Alex,’ he said, as he shook his hand.
Alex couldn’t believe his luck.
‘I’m Eugen Hartmann.’
The guard slammed the door and locked it.
‘That’s it until supper,’ said Eugen. ‘It gets very boring. I’ll give you a tour of the facilities. Here we have the bookshelf . . .’
He pointed to three dusty, moth-eaten old books. Alex scanned the titles:
Creating Young Comrades
; Nikolai Ostrovsky’s
How the Steel Was Tempered
; and
Scientific
Socialism, Victor of History
. There were also several ragged copies of the
Sputnik
youth magazine.
‘Not an inspired choice, but they’re the best I could find,’ said Eugen. ‘You’ll read anything after you’ve been stuck here for a week.’
‘How long have you been here?’ asked Alex.
‘Just over a week,’ said Eugen.
Alex wondered if he should ask why Eugen was in here.
‘They put me here for selling black market records,’ said Eugen.
‘Cool,’ said Alex. He liked him already.
‘I don’t know how long I’m going to stay here. They’ve forbidden me to mix with the others. Say I’m a bad influence. They must think you’re corrupt enough already for it not to matter!’
Alex was so relieved to meet someone who seemed OK. He reached into his pocket and offered him a sweet.
Eugen smiled and popped it in his mouth.
‘I don’t really know why they put me in here. Being awkward, I think,’ swaggered Alex. ‘And listening to the wrong music.’
‘They must have thought we’d have a lot to talk about,’ said Eugen with a laugh.
They did too – long into the afternoon. Most of it was about their favourite rock groups and who played the best guitar. Eugen was a Hendrix fan and looked down his nose at Led Zeppelin. ‘They stole all their best tunes from the old blues guys,’ he said. ‘ “The Lemon Song” – that’s “Killing Floor” by Howlin’ Wolf. “Whole Lotta Love” – that’s “You Need Love” by Willie Dixon.’
Alex didn’t know enough about it to argue, but he had heard one or two of ‘the old blues guys’ and Led Zeppelin sounded nothing like them.
Eugen was good company – Alex had been lucky. The only thing he hated about being in that cell with Eugen was that there was a single portable toilet in the corner. He felt embarrassed when he needed to take a crap.
‘It’s just like kindergarten,’ said Eugen, ‘but with just one potty.’
Alex laughed as he remembered his kindergarten days. They used to make them all sit on their potties at the same time. It was something about encouraging them to be good citizens. No one was allowed off until all of them had finished.
‘Still – at least we have a proper portable toilet,’ said Eugen. ‘Some cells just have a bucket.’
‘Do you ever think about getting out of here?’ said Eugen quietly.
‘What, you mean digging a tunnel or throwing a grappling hook over the wall?’ Alex laughed. ‘Maybe we could smuggle ourselves out in the laundry basket!’
Eugen smiled. ‘No, I meant getting out of the DDR. Don’t you get sick of it?’
All at once Alex realised Eugen might not be quite who he thought he was. People who had only just met didn’t talk to each other like this. So he considered his reply very carefully. ‘I don’t know. When I think of all the things I’d like to do . . . then yes I do. But when I think about the other stuff – my family and friends, how badly they treat you at work in the West, how they don’t look after their old people, how expensive everything is, all that selfishness and backstabbing, I think it’s better to be here.’
Eugen smiled. ‘That’s just what they want you to think. I’d go tomorrow if they let me.’
‘All these rules and restrictions,’ said Alex. ‘That’s what drives me mad. And this.’ He gestured around the cell indignantly. ‘I can’t believe I’m an enemy of the State.’
He was talking louder the more exasperated he got. Eugen shushed him.
Alex wondered how long they were going to keep him in prison. He was called out for his evening meal and when he returned Eugen was no longer there. He had left a small note under Alex’s pillow. ‘Being transferred. Keep rockin’, E.’
Alex kept expecting another cellmate to arrive but no one did and he spent the night on his own. He wondered who else had been in this cell and how close to despair and suicide they might have been. He remembered the little lecture he had received when he arrived. ‘You will be deprived of your belt and shoelaces. But should you attempt to take your own life in any other way while you are in custody, this will be regarded as an attempt to avoid punishment and you will be treated accordingly.’
He was also weighed down with anxiety. Who would be joining him in here next? What would Geli and his mum and dad be thinking? And what were they doing to Sophie?
The report was sitting on Erich Kohl’s desk when he arrived at work early the next morning.
Alex Ostermann 254
Observation statement
Hohenschönhausen
Subject shows incorrect and delusional aspirations and embryonic delinquency with pronounced negative-decadent tendencies, but is not a potential class enemy or likely imperialist espionage operative. Feelings towards DDR and Federal Republic are fluid and malleable.
Recommend further preventative harassment and continued day to day monitoring as may still be vulnerable to hostile and negative influences and oppositional thinking but further contained supervision is unnecessary. With correct course of action subject can still be regarded as potential comrade. May also be possible in near future to inveigle subject into own monitoring collaboration as he is well placed to report on other asocials within his circle. More information needed on likely reliabilty/unreliabilty as potential unofficial collaborator.
Kohl added his own additional information to the file:
Sophie Kirsch
Accomplice to Ostermann in potential adversarial asocial activity. Previous exemplary record as model socialist youth suggests subject might be suitable assistant to preventative action. Suggest coercive or persuasive approach, depending on degree of false-consciousness exhibited.
Report on reliability of Ostermann parents and other family members
Parents have unimpeachable record as supporters of DDR and SED. Both m and f have been Party members since 1965. No question of negative influence and necessity of subject’s removal to politically reliable foster family.
Only possible negative influence is sister Angela, aka Geli. Past record of association with negative-decadents (now terminated), but work in photography course shows potential harmful tendencies and reluctance to stay within boundaries of socialist realism.
Kohl scribbled a note for the department secretary to telex back to Hohenschönhausen and shouted out for her to come into his office and fetch it. He watched her leave the room with her haughty nose in the air. She had responded with complete indifference to his earlier flirtations. So now Kohl amused himself with little acts of humiliation.
He regarded the report with some scepticism. Comrade Minister Mielke had told them they had a duty to the State to ‘creep under the skin’ of such potential class traitors and imperialist collaborators and ‘look into their hearts so that we can reliably know who they are and where they stand’. Kohl knew exactly where Alex Ostermann stood. He was a straightforward negative-decadent – his fantasies revolved around playing a guitar in front of an adoring audience, not bringing down the enemies of the DDR. For a moment his impatience got the better of him.
Then he started to think more logically. He had a duty to the State to reclaim the socialist soul of Alex Ostermann. Maybe he was worrying too much about that cock-up with the Red Army Faction, but he couldn’t afford to give them any reason to doubt his own commitment.
Alex had the strangest dream. He followed Eugen down a road close to Treptower Park. Eugen did not know Alex was right behind him and had stopped at every bicycle he found and let down the tyres. Alex started to tell people in the street what he was doing but they all ignored him.
When he woke at dawn, Alex immediately went through everything he could remember about his conversations with Eugen. Had he said too much? Had he said anything they didn’t know about him already? Eugen had asked several leading questions. Even then, Alex had started to feel a little uneasy about his cellmate. Now, looking back, everything was too convenient: Eugen saying he was not allowed to mix with the prison population, his ‘transfer’ after an afternoon in the cell.
Alex decided he had been wise to hold his tongue – especially about his desire to get out of the country. He tried to read
Scientific
Socialism, Victor of History
, to keep his mind from spinning round and round.
He had only just got back to sleep, it seemed, when the wake-up bell sounded. Alex dressed and washed rapidly, to be ready for the summons for breakfast, and wondered anxiously what the day held in store. But before the breakfast bell rang there was a commotion at the door and three guards came in.
‘Prisoner 254,’ said one with sergeant stripes on his arm. ‘You are to come with us.’
They handcuffed him tight behind his back and then two of the guards marched him down the corridor. They took him up two flights of stairs and then down two more and out through a courtyard into a section of the prison he had not seen before.
‘What’s happening?’ he asked.
‘No talking,’ said the guards.
They arrived at a small building at the perimeter of the prison and stopped in front of the entrance. ‘Hold still,’ commanded one of the guards, and then knelt down in front of Alex and tied his ankles together with a small rope.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked anxiously.
‘In we go,’ said the guard and opened the door. Two others picked him up by his arms.
Inside the building was a single room with whitewashed walls and a plain stone floor. The building smelled of wood oil and disinfectant. In one corner there was a great black curtain. One of the guards drew back the curtain with a dramatic flourish. A guillotine stood before them.
Alex took one look at the nightmare machine and the blood drained from his face. ‘You can’t do this to me!’ he screamed and began to struggle. They held him tight.
‘You can’t . . .’
He looked at the ghastly device, with its great iron frame that reached up to the ceiling, and levers and wires, and the board where they laid the victim and the hole that secured the head, the empty black coffin next to the board, the tin receptacle for the head, and the sharp slanting blade that perched at the top of the frame.
His senses swirling, Alex fell into muffled darkness. He came to with a stinging sensation on his face. One of the men was slapping him repeatedly.
‘Take a look, 254,’ he said. ‘This is where your disloyalty will lead you.’
Alex was conscious enough to understand that this was a threat and they were not actually going to execute him.
They turned round and dragged him out of the building. As soon as they were outside the two guards holding on to him let go. Alex’s legs gave way and he collapsed on the floor and began to retch. He had yet to eat his breakfast but somewhere from the depths of his stomach he managed to throw up. The bile at the back of his throat tasted horribly bitter.
‘
Schweine
,’ he croaked, between great gasping sobs. ‘How could you be so cruel?’
‘Prisoner 254,’ said the sergeant, ‘you have used disrespectful language towards your guardians. If you utter another word, you will be returned to solitary confinement.’
They untied him and took him back to his cell. By 10.00 that morning he had been given back his own clothes and issued with a one-way tram ticket to Treptower Park. As he left, an officer assured him he was looking at several years in a
Jugendwerkhof
– the special prisons for youth offenders – if he came to their attention again.
Every one has secrets but Erich Kohl’s were darker than most. Kohl had been a Nazi who started his police career with the Gestapo. Low-level work, flushing out Jews from attics and basements in Berlin and on the northern escape route to Sweden. It was easy work, although his colleague Verner Schluter had got himself into a fine old mess one day in August 1943. Kohl never took chances after that. Why bring them in alive, he told himself, if they were going to kill them anyway?
Kohl knew at least one other Gestapo man like him – Karl Loewe. He had reached a high level in the Stasi. But they never spoke to each other – never even acknowledged each other in the corridor. It was too dangerous, even the slightest connection might put them at risk. Loewe had disappeared a couple of years ago. A casual enquiry as to his whereabouts was met with a brusque ‘Comrade Major Loewe is no longer with us.’ It was a euphemism they often used when talking about associates who had been executed.