by Anna Funder
Herr Bock is still talking, and I am still taking notes. Every meeting with an informer had to take place in a covert location. ‘In fact,’ he says proudly, twisting his neck towards the stairs, ‘I have a covert location here upstairs in my house.’ His upstairs bedroom is still fitted out for the purpose, with a round table and brown vinyl-covered chairs. ‘Every informer,’ he says, ‘knew exactly what he or she was doing.’ He reaches behind himself to switch on a small lamp.
I look at my watch. It’s nine o’clock. ‘If you don’t mind me asking,’ I say. ‘What is it you do now, Herr Bock?’
‘I am a business adviser.’
I don’t say anything.
‘You look surprised,’ he says. ‘You are wondering what I could possibly know about business.’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘I work for West German firms who come here to buy up East German assets. I mediate between them and the East Germans, because the westerners don’t speak their language. The easterners are wary because of their fancy clothes, their Mercedes Benzes, and so on.’
Terrific. Here he is once more getting the trust of his people and selling them cheap. Stasi men are by and large less affected by the unemployment that has consumed East Germany since the Wall came down. Many of them have found work in insurance, telemarketing and real estate. None of these businesses existed in the GDR. But the Stasi were, in effect, trained for them, schooled in the art of convincing people to do things against their own self-interest.
‘We never thought, no-one ever thought, that it would all come to an end,’ he says. ‘It would not have occurred to anyone that our country could somehow cease to be. Just like that! Up on the sixth floor over there’—he gestures again with his head in the direction of the academy across the road—‘at the end of 1989 we used to joke around. We’d say, “Last one here turn the lights out” because, at the end there’d be no-one left in the GDR.’
I think I should leave too. I thank Herr Bock and pack up and walk to the bus stop. There is only one street lamp along this road, and it is right here. So that the bus will stop for me, I have to stand in its cone of light. I can’t see much beyond it; there are no lights on in any of the buildings around. Here I am, standing in a blank on the map, lit up for all to see. According to the timetable, it is forty-five minutes until the next bus comes. In ten minutes’ time, the cold will be through to my bones.
I pick up my little pack and walk back to Herr Bock’s. There are no lights on, but where could he have gone? No cars passed. The gate is stuck and it rattles. A piece of wire I can’t see bites into my palm. I imagine Herr Bock looking through his curtains, and in fact the moment the gate springs wide he opens the door. He is chewing.
‘I think I might call a taxi, if you don’t mind,’ I say. ‘It’s three-quarters of an hour till the next bus comes, and I’ll miss the connection for the Berlin train. May I come in?’
It is dim inside. He has turned off the lamp to watch television, and now he switches that off too. He swallows and says, ‘I don’t know anything about taxis. I don’t think they come here.’
‘Let’s try calling one, shall we?’ I say.
He is enjoying himself, here in the dark. ‘It might be a while,’ he answers, ‘they probably have to come from Potsdam.’ But he finds a phone book in the gloom anyway, and calls a cab company. We sit down. My eyes are adjusting. He takes something off a plate.
‘You are not afraid of the dark, are you?’ he says, mouth full.
‘It is very dark.’
‘This way we can see the taxi come,’ he says.
I don’t see how. All his curtains are drawn and, even if there were any light in here, no chink of it could escape to the street. I start to fiddle around in my bag, looking for I don’t know what. I am buying time to think and avoiding peering at him. I am tired and hungry and this language is not coming easily any more. This man with his brown cocoon and his conspiratorial room is unlikely to touch me, but I resent his enjoyment in having me at his mercy. I am worried the taxi will see a dark house in a dark street and turn around and leave. And I am thinking of ways out of here when he gets up and peeks through the curtains. He does this in a way so as not to let any movement be seen. But he turns from the window, disappointed.
‘That was quick,’ he says.
I grab my things and I leave him there, all lights out in the GDR.
21
Frau Paul
I know very little about this woman. The guide at Stasi HQ was so adamant I needed to speak with her that I just called and made a time. I take the train from Mitte to the end of the line at Elsterwerdaer Platz, in the southern part of East Berlin. Then I wait for a bus to Frau Paul’s.
At the bus stop there’s a Vietnamese flower-seller with a stall of sad and frostbitten flowers. The GDR imported North Vietnamese ‘socialist brothers’ as workers, and treated them badly. They lived in camps, and were bussed to work in factories each day so as to avoid contact with the locals. Now, they manage as best they can.
I buy the least tired-looking arrangement I can see. It’s baby’s breath with carnations. For some reason it looks funereal. The vendor is a tiny man with a face stretched like a mummy and teeth that don’t fit in his mouth. He gives me change from a leather pocket in his apron and offers me a cigarette. I take it and we smile at one another. Then he bends down under the counter, and pulls out a carton of Marlboro Reds. ‘Cigarette?’ he asks again, grinning widely.
‘No, thanks,’ I say. So this wilted flower stall is a front for black-market cigarettes. Truckloads of them are smuggled in from Poland to avoid duties and taxes and are sold, largely by Vietnamese, on street corners, at the entrance to the underground, or, more poetically, at flower stalls. I like this man’s cover, and his generous style.
A large woman in her early sixties opens the door. She has a cap of dark hair and very blue eyes in a soft face. I follow her into the living room, filled with a pair of vinyl couches and hanging potted plants. Everything here is, as my mother would say, ‘spic and span’, and so is Sigrid Paul. Her clothes and hair are neat and she has the tapered plump fingers of a mournful magdalene. In them she is already holding a pressed handkerchief. She has made exquisite open sandwiches of mashed egg, and pink meat with stripes of gherkin.
Frau Paul apologises to me in advance. ‘I lose my track,’ she says. ‘It might use up lots of tape. I have written a short biographical note’—she picks it up from the coffee table—‘so I don’t depart from the theme.’ She seems wobbly, a woman holding onto notes on her own life. She hands me the two-page account. The heading reads, ‘The Wall Went Straight through My Heart’.
Frau Paul doesn’t, however, use the notes. It is true that she loses her thread, and sometimes repeats herself. But she tells her story well.
In January 1961, Frau Paul—who then went by her married name of Rührdanz—a dental technician, gave birth to her first child. The labour was difficult—a breech birth. The doctors were changing shifts and there was a delay in attending to her. By the time they did, she says, ‘one leg was already out’ but they performed an emergency caesarean anyway.
For the first few days after he was born Torsten Rührdanz spat blood. He couldn’t feed at all. The doctors thought it might be some kind of stomach trouble and tried to give him tea. Six days after the birth Frau Paul was sent home from hospital, but her baby was keeping very little nourishment down. And he was still spitting up blood. She took him to a hospital in the eastern part of the city but they could not find what was wrong. ‘This made me very nervous,’ she says. ‘For my husband and me he was the child of our dreams.’
Then she took him to the Westend Hospital in the western sector of the city, where they gave her a diagnosis within twenty-four hours: Torsten had suffered a ruptured diaphragm during delivery. His stomach and oesophagus were damaged; there was inflammation and internal bleeding. The condition was life-threatening, so they operated immediately. Torsten recuperated in hospital.
> By early July 1961 he was well enough to be taken home, with strict instructions for his feeding and medication. Frau Paul and her husband Hartmut were to collect special formula and medicines regularly from the Westend Hospital. Although there was no wall, the sector border was controlled, and they needed permission to bring over the medicines. Frau Paul applied to the Ministry of Health for the authority each time before she went across to fetch them.
Over the next weeks, Torsten made slow but undeniable progress. ‘We were told that with this special nourishment and the medicine, he was likely to be able to develop normally,’ she says. She starts to cry, so silently it is more like leaking. Tears roll down her face and she mops them up. ‘Please,’ she says, ‘eat something.’ I put something in my mouth. I look around for family photographs, but there are none on the walls, and none that I can see in the cabinets.
On the night of 12–13 August the Berlin Wall was rolled out in barbed wire. Frau Paul lived then with her husband in this same half-house deep in the eastern sector. They didn’t see or hear anything of what was going on to divide the city but they woke to a changed world.
The next time Frau Paul went to the ministry for permission to collect the formula and medicines, it was refused. She remembers pleading with the official, telling him how sick her baby was, and how without these provisions he might die. ‘If your son is as sick as all that,’ the official told to her, ‘it would be better if he did.’ Frau Paul’s tears have stopped now, and her broad face is hot with anger. The couple had no choice but to switch Torsten to ordinary formula. He started spitting up blood again. They took him one midnight to the Charité, the big eastern hospital. The doctors kept him under observation and told Frau Paul to go home.
‘The next morning when I went to the hospital again to see my son he wasn’t there. No-one had spoken with me about it. There was no time to speak with me about it.’ When they realised they couldn’t help him, the eastern doctors managed to have the baby spirited across the new border, back to the Westend Hospital. Frau Paul doesn’t know how they did it, but she thinks that it saved his life. ‘I hold absolutely nothing against the doctors at the Charité. What it would mean for him, what would come of it for all of us, was not possible to foresee.’
Her baby was now on the other side of the Wall. Frau Paul and her husband went back to the health ministry to get permission to visit him. But crossing the ‘anti-fascist protective measure’ was now a matter for the Ministry of the Interior.
Frau Paul reaches down and passes me an old photograph. It is of her, smoother-faced, and with stiff, 1960s hair. She is holding a baby and smiling uncertainly. The child sucks his bottom lip and looks straight at the camera. His body is not visible. A man in a pastor’s black cassock and white collar stands next to them and they are flanked by nurses in hospital uniforms and wimples. ‘That was October 1961,’ Frau Paul says, ‘the emergency christening.’
After nine and a half weeks of separation from their baby, who once more seemed likely to die, Frau Paul alone had been issued a day pass and a visa to attend his christening. The authorities would not let her husband visit in case, together, they decided to remain in the west. She is weeping again, as if she is overflowing. Everything is silent here, there’s not even traffic noise. The only sound is her breath.
Each morning for an instant Sigrid Paul would wake up like her old self, before the image of Torsten’s small sick body flooded into her mind. His condition was not improving. He was operated on four times in the Westend Hospital. He had to have an artificial oesophagus, an artificial diaphragm, and an artificial pylorus inserted. He had to be artificially fed. His parents were told, again, he might die. ‘I went to see him that time and of course I wanted more,’ she says. ‘I wanted more.’
As Frau Paul puts it, in the language of the authorities, ‘My husband and I decided to attempt illegally to leave the territory of the GDR.’ She holds the handkerchief with both hands in her lap. ‘I am not your classic resistance fighter,’ she says. ‘I was not even part of the opposition. To this day I am not a member of a political party.’ She blows her nose. ‘And I am not a criminal.’
She takes a deep breath and sits up straight. ‘I did used to listen to RIAS, western radio. It was illegal, but everyone did it. It was important to me to get news from outside. And, in the end, it was RIAS that saved me.’
Frau Paul and her husband, a boat builder, began to look for ways to be with their son. In 1961 and 1962 countless small communities of interest were forming in East Germany; people united by nothing more than a tenuous acquaintance and a desire to get out. A Dr Hinze and his wife lived in the town of Rathenow in Brandenburg, and they wanted to join their son Michael in the west. Michael Hinze had been studying sociology at the Free University when the Wall went up, and he’d decided to stay. Dr Hinze had spoken a few times with Frau Paul’s husband about building a yacht and sailing around the world. Clearly, that was not going to happen now, but it meant he knew of their plight. And his son Michael, along with some other young western students, was involved in a scheme to get people out.
Michael Hinze lives in West Germany, where I called him up. He’s softly spoken and humble. He doesn’t speak of what he did as if it were risking his own freedom to free others. He doesn’t even sound like a modest man uncomfortable with suggestions of heroism. His tone is more that of someone recalling how he once, step by step, and in the usual manner, repaired his car. ‘In 1961,’ he says, ‘I was twenty-three years old, inexperienced in these things.’ After the Wall went up Michael contacted a human rights group in West Berlin. ‘Someone there told me about a way to get people out.’
When the Wall was built, the GDR tried to block every avenue of escape. It altered bus routes, prevented its trains from stopping at stations in the western sector, set up road blocks along the border and stepped up patrols in the waters of the Baltic Sea. But it is impossible to seal off a country from the outside world altogether, and certainly impossible to do it in all places and for all methods of transport at once. Trains travelling from western Europe to Denmark and Sweden passed through East Germany, and they stopped at the Ostbahnhof in East Berlin on the way. With valid transit visas in their passports, West German citizens could travel through East German territory on their journey to Warnemünde on the Baltic Sea coast to catch the ferry to Malmö or Copenhagen. And at the station in East Berlin there was as yet no wall, no checkpoint between the local train platforms and the long distance ones. As it always had been, and as it is today, the check for tickets, passports and visas was on the train. A person with a West German passport and transit visa could board a train in East Berlin and ride out of there.
‘There were maybe eight or ten of us,’ Michael Hinze says, ‘students who were doing this. I’d say all up we managed to get about fifty people out in this way.’ Then he adds, ‘I was really no big wheel.’
The scheme was clever and simple. It consisted of turning an East German into a West German for a day. The students asked West German citizens to give up their passports for the cause. ‘We had no trouble getting hold of the papers. People were more than willing to help others get out of there.’ They chose those who resembled, in age and height and eye colour, the East Germans they were going to smuggle out. The passport-holder would send off to the East Berlin authorities for a transit visa. At the same time, passport-sized photographs of the East Germans were conveyed across the border into West Berlin. When the passports came back to their owners with the visas stamped into them, the students took them to a graphic artist who inserted the photograph of the person trying to escape. The complete passports were then smuggled back to the East Germans wanting to leave.
‘We would wrap five or six passports up in newspaper and stick them in the airvents of my VW beetle.’ Michael could travel to the east on a day pass. Along with the passports he would take over articles necessary to complete the East Germans’ transformation into West German tourists. ‘We brought them things like western
brand-name toothpaste to put in their luggage, and the driver’s licences of the passport-holders. Western cigarettes too, of course—Marlboros or whatever. And we’d tell them to remove the labels from their clothes so that they didn’t read ‘People’s Own Manufacture’.
In an alley near the station Michael handed over the passports and supplies. The East Germans, with a case no bigger than for a holiday, prepared to leave for their new lives. By Christmas 1961, Michael Hinze’s father and stepmother were safely in West Berlin.
Over the winter of 1961 Frau Paul had permission to visit Torsten four times. Once, an envelope was waiting for her at the hospital. It was a brief note from Dr Hinze, with his telephone number and some small change. When she phoned, Dr Hinze told Frau Paul his son would help get them out. The next time she was over at the Westend Hospital she brought passport-sized photos of herself and her husband. Michael had them inserted into West German passports.
‘So in February 1962,’ Frau Paul says, ‘we planned to get out using the transit route from Berlin Ostbahnhof through Denmark in order to reach West Berlin. It was a very roundabout route.’ Frau Paul is a woman utterly without irony. She seems to have, in fact, very little distance from what happened to her. Things remain close, and hard.
Three eastern students were going to escape with them: a young man called Werner Coch and another couple. Frau Paul and her husband gave their car away to a friend and sold, discreetly, some of their belongings. They left their home intact, full of furniture. ‘It was a terrible, uncertain time,’ she says.
Werner Coch is a chemical engineer in his late fifties. Soft spoken and exact, he has dark hair, and dark eyes in a calm face. He is dressed neatly in pale clothes and light-coloured shoes. We sit in the living room of the spacious and comfortable house he built himself and he tells me about the escape route. A small grandfather clock strikes the half-hours of the afternoon.