‘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.
Chapter 20
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.
When the Russians arrived, they had killed anyone they suspected of belonging to the Nazi party, the SS and Gestapo. The SS men had been especially easy to uncover. They all had their blood group tattooed close to the armpit of the left arm. If they were lucky, they were shot on the spot when the Soviets caught up with them. Kohl had seen one SS officer crucified on a wooden door. Thank heavens he hadn’t been one of them.
After a few weeks of bloodletting, the Russians began to reconsider. They had a country to run and they needed help. If they killed everyone who was a Nazi, there wouldn’t be anyone useful left. Even a few Gestapo men, after a year or two in one of the old Nazi death camps the Soviets had commandeered, were allowed to rejoin the security services. You could usually tell them by the haunted look on their gaunt faces, and the false teeth – ill-fitting steel replacements for those knocked out during ‘heightened interrogation’. But you could never tell, even now, what would happen if they discovered you were Gestapo. It was dependent on the whim of your commanding officer.
Kohl had known, as soon as it became obvious the war was lost, that he would have to keep his previous occupation secret. As the Russians closed in on Berlin he used all the skills and guile he had developed over six years in the secret police to fashion a false identity. He’d been Erich Kohl so long now he’d almost forgotten he had been born Gunter Schneider.
Erich Kohl was a policeman. Schneider had found him in the aftermath of an air raid in March 1945. As a match for height and build he was close enough. Kohl was a blast victim – there was barely a mark on him save for bleeding from the ears. Schneider removed the uniform and the identification papers and left the body to be found by the burial parties. What they would make of the young man in his shirtsleeves with no papers and missing trousers, he didn’t care. He traced the records a week later and was pleased to notice Kohl had been reported missing. Schneider removed the reference in the file and destroyed it. Then he replaced the photograph on Kohl’s pass with one of his own. Getting the correct stamp was easy enough if you knew the right people.
Just before the Russians arrived Schneider’s last act at his Gestapo HQ was to take out his own papers and stamp ‘DECEASED’ on them. He would trace his mother – if she survived all this – and let her know he was OK after everything had died down.
Then he put on Kohl’s uniform and was born again. The Soviets were happy to make use of a German policeman who was not a Nazi Party member. Someone had to keep law and order on the streets. Once or twice in the early years he’d let himself down, when people had addressed him by his new name, and he had not responded. But he had been Erich Kohl for so long now he had grown into his skin.
Yet sometimes, when he half heard car doors slam outside his apartment in the middle of the night, or shuffling in the hall on the other side of his front door, he would wake with a start, cold with sweat. Maybe one day they would take him to one of those whitewashed cellar rooms at Normannenstrasse where he had tied prisoners to chairs in front of rows of sandbags and shot them. He knew exactly what to expect.
Chapter 21
Geli was at home watching a newsflash on West German television. The Red Army Faction had set off a bomb at a US army base in Heidelberg. Geli felt sick for the people who had been blown to shreds as they went about their ordinary everyday business.
There was the sound of a key in the door. She leapt to her feet and barely recognised the crop-haired urchin standing in the hall.
‘We’ve been so worried,’ she said as she hugged Alex tight. ‘Sophie came round as soon as she was released. They let her out the next morning and she caught me in at lunchtime, and told us what had happened. Mutti and Vati were furious when they stopped being worried sick about where you were. They’d gone to the police the previous night to report you missing and we were up all night fretting about what had happened to you. You can imagine. Vati even went round to the Kirschs but no one would answer the door.’
Alex sat there too bewildered to reply. The Stasi had not even told his parents he was being held. No doubt they’d be livid with him now they knew what had happened.
Frank and Gretchen were both at work, so Geli went to phone them from the public telephone box at the end of the street. When she came back, Alex was sitting in exactly the same place she had left him. He looked stunned – like an animal caught in the road by approaching headlights.
She couldn’t believe what they had done to him. ‘I know they’re bastards,’ she spat, ‘but that stunt with th
e guillotine, that’s unbelievable.’
‘They wouldn’t really, would they?’ said Alex.
‘I don’t know,’ said Geli. ‘They’ve done enough terrible things in the past.’
‘What happened to Sophie?’ he asked.
‘I think she got off with a slapped wrist,’ said Geli. ‘You were the one they were after. Sophie’s been worried sick.’
‘I’ll see her this afternoon,’ said Alex suddenly. ‘I’ll catch her on the way back from school. I can’t go round to the Grims after this.’
Geli remembered something. ‘There’s a letter arrived for you – stamped district housing office.’
Alex tore it open. It was from Herr Kalb. The tone was very formal. The summer job was no longer available.
Alex waited in the park. He felt too unsettled to sit on a bench, so he paced up and down along the path they usually followed on the way back from school. Kalb had been his one hope of avoiding military service. He’d really messed that up.
Alex felt very conspicuous out there on his own. He watched the other people in the park with a wary eye. Were any of the distant figures familiar? Were they watching him?
Sophie was almost standing next to him before he realised she was there. She hugged him and cried. ‘What sort of a mess have we got ourselves into?’ she said, drying her tears on her sleeve. She composed herself and tried to be cheerful.
‘Whooo,’ she pointed at his head. ‘Now there’s a haircut my Vati would approve of.’
She looked around. ‘I can’t stay long, Alex. Mutter and Vater said I was to come straight home after school. Perhaps you could just walk me home?’
‘How was it at school?’ said Alex. ‘Did anyone say anything?’
‘No one knows, yet. I certainly wasn’t going to tell them. But it’s bound to get out sometime.’
It was an overcast summer afternoon and as they wandered through the fronds and tendrils of an overgrown area of the park, Sophie held Alex’s hand as tightly as an anxious child. Conversation was awkward. He wondered whether to tell her about the guillotine then decided against it. It would just make her worry more.
‘What did they do to you?’ asked Alex.
She looked away.
‘They kept telling me you’d told them it was all my fault,’ she said. ‘That I’d asked you to come to work with me so we could steal from the canteen cash register.’
Alex laughed. ‘They did something similar with me. Told me you’d said I’d bullied you into getting me into the building. Then they accused me of spying. I told them I just wanted to spend some time with you because your parents hated me and never let us see each other.’
Sophie’s eyes shot up. ‘Well, it’s true. They never said anything like that to me, and I never thought to say it.’ She looked worried. ‘So what have they got in store for us next?’
‘I don’t care,’ said Alex with a defiance he didn’t really feel. He wanted Sophie to think the Stasi were not going to intimidate him. Her eyes shone with admiration.
‘They got bored with me pretty quickly,’ said Sophie. ‘Let me out by nine o’clock that evening. Vati was furious, of course. All the neighbours staring out of the window, wondering what I’d been up to. “They probably thought you were streetwalking,” he said, “in that ridiculous mini skirt.” ’ She mimicked him cruelly.
They both sniggered. Alex loved it when she was rude about her father.
‘And what about your Mutti?’
‘Oh, floods of tears. You can imagine.’
‘Thank you for coming round to tell my family,’ said Alex.
‘I went as soon as they released me,’ she said.
Alex returned home to face his parents. His father was white with anxiety and anger. He could barely speak. Alex thought he was going to explode at any moment. His mother looked utterly disconsolate. She gave him a hug, at least, when she saw him, but neither of them could bring themselves to discuss what had happened. Alex could hardly bear to be around them. It was like being with people who had suffered a crushing bereavement.
He went to bed but couldn’t sleep. Quite apart from the horrible events of the last couple of days, there was something about Sophie’s story that didn’t add up. Had they got her too? Was she spying on him now?
Chapter 22
Two days later, Alex was walking home from school through the park. It had not been a good day. No one would talk to him in the school yard and his teachers were treating him with icy disdain. Even Sophie was keeping her distance at school, although she still walked there and back with him. That afternoon she had stayed behind for an orchestra rehearsal.
Lost in thought he was startled to be approached by a middle-aged man with greasy black hair, who offered to buy him a cup of coffee. ‘Get lost,’ said Alex under his breath and quickened his pace. He wondered whether to run for it. The fellow might be old but he looked pretty tough.
The man looked weary rather than angry. He took out an identity card and flashed it under Alex’s nose. ‘Erich Kohl. State Security. We’ll forget the coffee. You can just sit here on this park bench.’
Alex’s heart was beating hard and his mind was reeling. What had they discovered now? Were they going to take him back to Hohenschönhausen?
‘This has not been a promising start to our conversation, Alex Ostermann,’ he said. ‘Let us try to be civil from now on, shall we?’
Alex said nothing. But his fear ebbed a little. Perhaps he wasn’t about to be arrested after all.
‘You have been a great disappointment to your country,’ said the man. ‘You have made things very awkward for yourself and now you have a difficult future. You are currently one step away from the Jugendwerkhof. But you can make amends by helping us.’
Alex stared ahead as his anxiety turned to frustration. He knew exactly where this was going.
‘We will assist you in your attempt to further your education, but, in turn, you must agree to tell us about the behaviour of your fellow students – anything that strikes you as outside the norm . . .’ Kohl let his words sink in. ‘We will even pay you a reasonable sum to help you with your studies.’
Alex tried hard to think of a suitable response. His first instinct was to be rude – but he knew that would get him nowhere. Now he was feeling cornered and there was a terrible anxiety rising in his chest. He played for time.
‘You are asking me to do something I have never considered before. I would like to be able to think this through.’
‘Very well,’ said the man. ‘Think on it. We are asking you to provide a valuable and honourable service to the State. I will contact you again shortly.’
The man got up abruptly, leaving Alex to sit on the bench in an anxious daze. So this was what they had in store for him. All at once, there in the great wide spaces of the park, he felt trapped, almost as if he was locked in a little cupboard or nailed into a coffin.
Two envelopes lay on the doormat when Alex returned home. Both were addressed to Frank Ostermann. Geli was there too and she and Alex could guess what they were. They wondered whether or not to throw them away.
‘He’s got to find out one of these days,’ said Geli.
Alex shrugged. ‘When you’ve been threatened with the guillotine, a scolding from Mutti and Vati doesn’t register as much of an ordeal.’
Frank opened the letters as soon as he got home. Gretchen poured him a whisky. He drained the glass in a single gulp and sat on his chair staring straight ahead.
‘You’ll have a seizure, mein Schatz,’ said Gretchen and stroked his head. Then she turned to Alex and Geli. ‘See what you’ve done to your father.’
They both looked down.
‘Both of you rejected from your further education,’ said Gretchen. ‘What is this? Some kind of infection?’
She tried to maintain a pretence of anger but she could not keep it up. She was fighting back tears now. ‘It’s my fault, I suppose. I always encouraged you with your art and your music. And you were always so ke
en. Neither of you have your father’s head for mathematics. It’s a shame you didn’t take after Frank and study electronics. The State welcomes creative thinking in the field of engineering. How unfortunate that you were born into a world where art and music must follow Party guidelines you both chose to disregard. Well, we are all paying for that now.’
Frank spoke in a low, angry voice. ‘I should never have allowed you to follow these two pursuits. I should never have permitted you to waste your talents on . . . guitar,’ he spat out the word. ‘You should have done something more acceptable, like trumpet or trombone. But you always had a frivolous streak, didn’t you, Alex? You always had a vanity.’
He turned to Geli. ‘And you – we expected more from you. You had such drive and dedication. You were so determined. I wish I had never given you a camera.’
Geli was getting angry. ‘You are deceiving yourself, Vater. I only show the truth. Do you want me to go down to Alexanderplatz and make it look warm and vibrant . . . like they try to do on that stupid TV show? It’s a soulless place, just like this whole country.’
She stopped to gather her thoughts. No one said a word. ‘Just look at this apartment . . . this ordinary everyday building . . . It has elegance. Look at the windows and curves and lines . . .’ She opened up the curtain overlooking the street. ‘Look at our beautiful balcony . . .’ It had wrought-iron railings fashioned as intertwining leaves, in a russet-red art nouveau style.
‘Why could they do this seventy years ago and not now? It’s the same country. Do you think people will look back on Honecker’s buildings and think they’re beautiful?’
Frank would not look at her. ‘I have tolerated your false opinions long enough,’ he said in a flat, low voice. ‘Your consciousness is corrupted.’ He gestured towards the balcony railing. ‘Bourgeois art, made by good working-class craftsmen . . . exploited by capitalists for a pittance.’
Sektion 20 Page 11