After sharing a cell overnight with a Romanian prisoner who was too scared to talk to him, Mario and eight other young people who had attempted to escape were flown handcuffed back to Berlin. Upon arrival, Mario was bundled into a windowless vehicle disguised as a van from the East Berlin department store ‘Centrum Warenhaus’, alongside a handful of others. It was 30 degrees centigrade outside, but inside the van it was probably 10 degrees hotter. Like the other prisoners, Mario was locked into a box smaller than a wardrobe, forcing him to be hunched up with very little breathing space. In the pitch-black, the prisoners silently made their journey into the unknown, with armed Stasi officers guarding them menacingly with large guns. Mario could tell that they were on the motorway to start with because the road was smooth, and then he sensed that they were in a town, because the roads were bumpier. At one point, he says, the van stopped at crossroads and he could hear pedestrians talking outside. He thought about screaming, he explains, but he was afraid of being shot by the guard. The fear of the unknown is what Mario remembers. All the guards said was ‘We’re from the Staatssicherheit [Stasi] and you’re being taken to our special prison’, but, as Mario explains, ‘You couldn’t help fearing for the worst, that they’d take us into a wood and shoot us.’ About four hours later, sleep-deprived, hungry, and scared, the prisoners arrived at what later turned out to be Hohenschönhausen Stasi prison in East Berlin. At the time, they had little idea of where they were, but given the length of the journey, Mario assumed that they were in some remote part of the German countryside. If the van had driven directly from the airport to the prison, this would have taken forty minutes. The long drive was all part of a deliberate tactic of disorientation.
Wherever Mario thought he was, the scene upon arrival was not a pleasant one. Looking back, he felt like he had walked onto the set of a Nazi horror film: uniformed men with large rubber batons glowered menacingly as he disembarked from the van which was already parked inside a garage so as not to disclose the location. Blindingly strong, bright lights fell on the prisoners, disorientating them further in the otherwise dark garage. Mario had never been treated anything like this before. He was totally taken aback and shocked to his core. He was then strip-searched by a Stasi officer, who stood there in uniform with rubber gloves on, shouting, ‘Take your clothes off!’ Mario took his clothes off down to his underwear whereupon the guard shouted, ‘Everything!’ Why is this necessary? Mario wondered. ‘I had to spread my arms and legs wide and the guard explored every orifice of my body with his hands in rubber gloves,’ Mario recalls. ‘It was very painful.’ At this point the officer gave Mario a piece of paper to read which stated his rights. In his shocked and disorientated state, the only thing Mario was able to take in was that he had the right to wear his own clothes. He raised this with the officer who said, ‘You should have thought of that before. Now you’re just prisoner 328, the number of your cell on the third floor.’ Mario was then given the prison uniform: a dark blue tracksuit and brown shoes, as well as red underpants. On the shelves Mario noticed that most of the underpants were blue, so he did wonder why he had red ones. Perhaps, he thinks, it was because he was a gay man. Mario remembers that he was given trousers that were far too big, so he had to hold them up, causing the guards to laugh at him. Walking to his cell for the first time, Mario recalls that the corridor seemed incredibly long. In retrospect he thinks that this was deliberate, so that prisoners felt the overwhelming power of the system. The building as a whole, he believes, was designed to make you feel like a really small person.
figure 12 Photograph of Mario on his arrival at the Stasi prison in Hohenschönhausen, Berlin on 3 July 1987. This picture was in Mario’s Stasi file which he gained access to at the Stasi Archives (BStU) after the Wall fell.
Courtesy of Mario Röllig.
Eventually he arrived at cell 328, where he would spend the next three months alone, alongside a bed and a latrine. There were certain ‘House Rules’ in the prison, all designed to make the experience unpleasant and uncomfortable. During the day, prisoners were not allowed to sit or lie on their beds. There was no fresh air and the cell windows were frosted to prevent the prisoners from seeing outside. At night, however, they were not allowed to sleep on their sides and were required to have their arms out of the covers and to each side of the body when sleeping. If prisoners turned onto their sides during sleep guards would bang on the cell door violently until they moved onto their backs. A 100-watt light bulb would come on at random through the night, jolting prisoners from their sleep. All this contributed to many broken nights and sleep deprivation.11
When the cell door was opened, prisoners were expected to stand in a certain position and identify themselves by number.12 The guards interacted with the prisoners like robots, Mario says. They issued short, set commands that they had learned: ‘Stand up!’, ‘Turn around!’, ‘Come!’, ‘Go!’ Mario would always try to talk to them, asking things like ‘Have you got children?’ Mostly these questions were met with silence or Mario was told to be quiet. Mario later heard the story of a guard who opened the door and asked ‘Can I help you?’ when he heard that the inmate was crying. This guard was immediately switched to work in another place. In the corridor there were video cameras, and the cells were bugged. It seems, then, that if guards were ever friendly, they were replaced.
A traffic light system operated in the prison. It was designed to ensure that prisoners never saw one another. When a guard saw a red light it meant that the corridor was occupied: another guard was moving a prisoner. A green light meant the corridor was free and the next prisoner could be moved. One time, Mario remembers vividly, the traffic light system did not work and the guard told him to stand facing the wall with his hands behind his back. Nonetheless Mario and the other prisoner caught each other’s eye and grinned triumphantly, because they knew the system had not worked and they had seen each other.
By all accounts there was enough to eat as a prisoner, but the food was always the same and extremely fatty in content. Each day was punctuated by three meals at 8 a.m., 12 noon, and 6 p.m. This is how Mario knew what time of day it was. For breakfast there was white bread, with margarine and jam, as well as bitter coffee. For lunch there was a portion of fatty meat in gravy, alongside potatoes which, in Mario’s memory, were either half raw or totally overcooked. In the evenings prisoners received white bread, margarine, salami and blood sausage, and tea to drink. The only opportunity prisoners had to eat something else was in the interrogation room: sometimes prisoners would be given their favourite food if they gave their interrogators useful information about others.
Since it was forbidden to exercise in the cell, Mario recalls putting on weight. He tried to counteract this by running laps, doing sit-ups and lunges during the two sessions a week he was allowed to spend outside in open-air cages. These sessions varied in duration from ten to thirty minutes. Some prisoners disliked going into the outdoor boxes because they felt like caged wild animals as armed guards watched them from above.13 Mario liked to get the fresh air and exercise, however. When you were in the outdoor box, Mario explains, you were not allowed to look at the sky, but sometimes he did. The armed guards shouted ‘Kopf runter! ’ (‘Head down!’) The best thing, Mario recalls, was when he took a sneaky look up at the sky and saw a plane. He remembers seeing Pan Am planes with the blue-cross symbol on the aircraft body, and thinking ‘One day I’ll sit in one of those planes’. Mostly, however, Mario did look down because he was worried that the guards would shoot him. Fear and uncertainty were always there as a prisoner. When the guards patrolled the other outdoor cells, Mario explains, then he could look up at the sky. And when he had seen the sky he felt great and the day was saved.
The prison rules dictated that it was strictly forbidden for prisoners to sing. Mario recalls two occasions when he defied this rule. Once, in July 1987 he sang the Udo Jürgens song ‘Ich war niemals in New York’ (‘I’ve never been to New York’), symbolic, of course, because of the travel restrictio
ns on East Germans. After a minute a guard opened the cell door and hit him twice with a rubber baton. Shortly afterwards, a prisoner in another cell started singing the same song very loudly. ‘The guards seemed totally shocked that we were disobeying orders in spite of the threat of being beaten’, Mario recalls. After that, Mario was not allowed outside for the next few weeks. On 13 August 1987, the anniversary of the building of the Wall, Mario was allowed outside again. On this occasion, he chose to sing the West German national anthem, including the lyrics ‘Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit für das deutsche Vaterland’ (‘Unity and justice and freedom for the German Fatherland’), which was highly provocative in the context of divided Germany. The guards above quickly came down from their observation posts, by which time Mario had almost finished the song. He was taken back to his cell in handcuffs and forbidden from going outside for the next four weeks. ‘When I sang,’ he recalls, ‘the guards shouted “Quiet!” ’ On this occasion too, a prisoner in the cell next door started to sing loudly as well. These were extraordinary, unusual moments.
For all that there were a few occasions where Mario showed youthful defiance of the prison rules, there were other times where his total vulnerability to the whims of his guards was made particularly clear. One such example was when he was taken for his weekly shower. Normally, he would undress in an antechamber and then go into the shower, which would then be locked behind him. The guard outside would control the water. One time, Mario got undressed as normal, leaving his clothes and towel in the antechamber. He was locked into the shower and washed as normal. The water then stopped, but no one unlocked the door. Mario called out, ‘I would like to come out now’, but there was no one there. He did not shout out, because this was against prison rules and prisoners who screamed were threatened with being taken to the arrest cell in the basement. Instead, he stood there, cold and dripping, and wondering why no one was coming. Twenty minutes went by, then forty minutes … after one and a half hours a guard came and said ‘Oh, you’re still here. We forgot all about you.’ It was really humiliating, Mario says. He firmly believes that there was nothing that went on at the prison that was not deliberate. Such an experience, he thinks, was designed to make him feel powerless against the regime.14
With hour upon hour to kill, Mario played mind games with himself. He did mental arithmetic, recited poems to himself, and tried to think of nice things. There were no distractions—no newspapers, no books, no radio, no television. At one point, seven weeks into his imprisonment, he was so severely depressed that the guards acceded to his request for some books to read. They gave him crime novels, about GDR border police arresting people trying to flee, and books about travelling—a deliberate and cruel move psychologically for someone who has no freedom. Mario likened this to giving a starving person a cookbook. He soon stopped reading the books as they only exacerbated his longing to be free again. Echoing what Mario recalls of his time in Hohenschönhausen, another political prisoner in the GDR gave voice to some of his feelings in a letter to his wife on 15 November 1984: ‘It’s hard to keep track of time. I’ve become like a machine … The world is a hive of activity outside … and I know nothing about it … I long for company, for work and for a battle in which I have a fair chance.’15
So long were the stretches of time that prisoners spent alone, that many were finally glad to talk to someone when they were hauled out to be interrogated.16 This was a deliberate tactic employed by the interrogators to get prisoners to confess. Mario recalls that in these interrogations, there was usually a good cop and a bad cop.17 The bad cop might shout and be really threatening while the good cop maintained a low profile. The bad cop would leave the room and the good cop would say, ‘Now then, I think we can deal with this in a more calm and civilized manner.’ But Mario said the good cop was almost worse than the bad cop, because despite his superficial friendliness, you knew he was working for the other side. When he first arrived at the prison, Mario said, ‘I want to call my lawyer!’, to which the prison guard replied, ‘You’ve been watching too much West German television. You can’t have a lawyer, you can’t afford a lawyer, and even if you could afford one, the lawyer would be working on the side of the state.’ The fact was that there was no independent judiciary in the GDR, and the Stasi sometimes even suggested sentences to the judges in court.
First and foremost, the interrogators were trying to extract a confession from Mario—a confession that he was trying to escape from the GDR. He held out through many sessions, resisting answering by instead counting the leaves on the wallpaper behind the interrogator—there were 582 leaves, it turns out—a fact he was able to establish on several occasions. A comfy chair was left vacant at the table. Only if you answered certain questions or if it was your birthday did you get to sit on this chair. Sometimes the interrogator turned off the tape recorder and said, ‘We can’t use anything that you say now. Who organized your escape?’ Later, Mario found out, there was another tape recorder running in the cupboard. The interrogators tried to tempt Mario into confessing, saying that things would be easier for him if he confided in them. ‘Don’t worry, we have plenty of time’, said the interrogator repeatedly, the last thing a sleep-deprived Mario wanted to hear after days on end sitting in his cell with nothing to read and no one to talk to. The interrogator always sat by the window, which in Mario’s eyes represented freedom and the outside world. The curtains were almost always closed, so prisoners could not see out, but sometimes, Mario says, a crack was open and wind from the open window blew the curtains. ‘When I saw out of the window,’ Mario recalls, ‘I thought of being on holiday. You had to come up with strategies to kill time. The interrogator would sit there reading the paper and would repeat the same question for hours. It was really draining.’ The interrogators only ever saw the prisoners in the interrogation room. They had nothing to do with what happened to the prisoners the rest of the time. They did not see the conditions in which the prisoners spent most of their time—a deliberate strategy so that they felt no empathy for them. Eventually Mario conceded that he had attempted to leave the GDR, whereupon his interrogators showed him clause 213 of the GDR statute book, which stated: ‘Anyone who leaves the GDR illegally … will be punished … by imprisonment or a fine.’ They said, ‘Well, you will be imprisoned for at least two to eight years now.’18
Having extracted a confession, the interrogators produced a list of Mario’s family, friends, and acquaintances and exhorted him to provide information about them. Time after time he resisted telling them anything significant, stringing them along by providing minor pieces of useless information about the people on the list. For a long time after he was released, Mario had a guilty conscience about what he had told the interrogators. But he was so afraid that his knees shook and he had to hold them down with his hands to hide it. ‘I was never beaten and I was never tied up’, Mario explains, but the interrogators inflicted damage on prisoners without physically hurting them.19 They began to tire of his lack of cooperation. When the phone rang in one session, he was shepherded out of the room by one of the guards, but not before overhearing the interrogator on the phone say, ‘Alright then, we'll bring his parents in.’ This, of course, sent Mario into a panic, fearing for the fate of his parents. He pleaded with the guard, saying, ‘You can’t bring my parents in, don’t bring my parents in!’ before the guard replied, ‘They weren’t talking about your parents this time, but they easily could have been. Maybe you’ll be more cooperative next time.’ Mario recalls that the interrogators made other implicit threats relating to the well-being of his sister, who had a small daughter. They said, ‘Do you care about your niece? It would be a shame, wouldn't it, if your sister was killed in a car accident and your niece had to go into a state children's home.’ The interrogators seemed to know everything about Mario’s life and they used this information to exert power over him. Another East German dissident recounted a similar experience at the hands of the Stasi, recalling, ‘they knew which foods I prefer to eat, w
hen I typically took the children to school, even the toothpaste I usually buy’.20 The Stasi’s knowledge of every little detail about a prisoner’s life was disconcerting and could help break down their resistance to confess. These were the pressures that Mario faced when being asked to inform on his friends and acquaintances.
figure 13 An interrogation room at the Stasi prison in Hohenschönhausen, Berlin.
© Ineke Kamps/Flikr/Getty Images.
In the outside world, Mario’s parents were treated like social outcasts by many friends and colleagues once word got out that their son had tried to escape. No one would sit with Mario’s father in the canteen at lunchtime, so fearful were they of being associated with him.21 For Mario’s parents, their son’s treatment at the hands of the Stasi opened up a whole new way of looking at the communist regime, which they had previously loyally supported as Party members, and their dream of working with the state for a better Germany was over. At the point of Mario’s incarceration, Stasi officers said that Mario’s parents should sign a declaration saying that they would break off all contact with their son. Disillusioned, they refused, and left the Party.
Born in the GDR Page 8