[annals] Frau Paul gives a tour of Hohenschönhausen Prison
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 business-like 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 another squat building in the center. 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 cross-board 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 baker's 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 anyplace 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 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 was 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-colored 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 smelled of sweat and damp coats and bad breath. It was a mongrel smell, but it was the smell of pure fear. This "u-boat" smelled 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.
The strangest cell contained a wooden yoke arrangement, something like an apparatus at a county fair. The prisoner would be nearly bent double, head and hands through the slots, and the yoke closed over them. In front of his head hung a metal bucket of water, like a nosebag. The floor and walls were black, and lined with spiky ridges. Frau Paul explained that the prisoner would be barefoot, yoked into position. The ridges would bite into the soles of his feet. Then water dripped from a pipe hanging through the ceiling onto his head. Eventually the prisoner would be in such pain that he would lose consciousness, and his head would slump. It would hit the water in the bucket in front of him, and he would either revive into pain again, or drown.
—Anna Funder, Stasiland (transcribed from audio)