by Anna Funder
‘At that time it was the right decision,’ she says through tears. ‘And even later too, I could always say to myself, “I did not make myself guilty. I can sleep at night with what I have done.”’ She doesn’t try to cover her face. There was no right answer here, no good outcome. ‘It is true that I didn’t burden myself with this on my conscience, but I did,’ she draws in breath in a spasm of pain, ‘decide against my son.’
It is so hard to know what kind of mortgage our acts put on our future. Frau Paul had the courage to do the right thing by her conscience in a situation where most people would decide to see their baby, and tell themselves later they had no choice. Once made though, her decision took a whole new fund of courage to live with. It seems to me that Frau Paul, as one does, may have overestimated her own strength, her resistance to damage, and that she is now, for her principles, a lonely, teary guilt-wracked wreck. ‘The result of this was that I was never interrogated again.’ She learnt that her husband and the three students had also been arrested, as well as some thirty others from all over the GDR who had been planning to leave through the tunnel.
23
Hohenschönhausen
Frau Paul and her husband were held at Hohenschönhausen prison for five months, and then, along with the three students, transported to Rostock on the Baltic Sea coast for trial. Frau Paul thinks this was because the western media knew of the plight of Torsten on one side of the Wall and of his parents on the other, and the authorities wanted to make sure there was no chance of publicity.
The couple never saw the charges against them, nor the judgment. They were offered the services of Dr Vogel, the lawyer with close government connections who became famous for negotiating the trade in people between east and west. But they mistrusted the arrangement and turned it down, insisting on their own family solicitor. He couldn’t do much to help them though, because he was handed the charges against his clients only five minutes before the trial began.
The prosecutor alleged:
Rührdanz, Sigrid, is accused of inducing or, at the least aiding and abetting citizens of the German Democratic Republic to illegally leave the GDR.
The accused maintains connections with members of a West Berlin people smuggling and terrorist organisation which lures people out of the GDR and facilitates their illegal leaving of the GDR either with illegal papers, or through the violation of the national border… [She] had custody of forged passports in her flat, organised meetings and conveyed information about planned people smuggling operations and accommodated persons to be smuggled in her flat. There exists the urgent suspicion that she herself will illegally leave the GDR.
Frau Paul reads this to me, and maintains, at each point, her innocence. ‘We’d long since, as I told you, given up trying to get out,’ she says, and, ‘I did not know what the students were doing at our flat.’ In 1992, twenty-nine years after the trial, Frau Paul saw in her file the judgment for the first time. There was no mention of Torsten. The judges wrote that her ‘attitude of rejection towards our State’ had been ‘exacerbated through the fact that the accused has been a constant listener to NATO smear-radio’.
‘They put that in about the NATO smear-radio because I would not let myself be misused as bait in their trap.’ Frau Paul and her husband were each given four years hard labour. She was put in a paddy wagon and taken from Rostock back to Hohenschönhausen to serve her time. Werner Coch got one year and nine months in ordinary prison, because the penalties for being an accessory to the attempt to flee the country were greater than the crime of trying to flee itself.
Hohenschönhausen prison is not far from the centre of East Berlin, but its existence was unknown even to people in neighbouring suburbs. Every street that leads in or out of the area around it was blocked off by a boom gate and a sentry. Hohenschönhausen was a prison for political prisoners—it was the innermost security installation in a secured area within a walled-off country; it was another blank on the map.
Frau Paul took me there one day. It was an ordinarily cold day, and we were in an ordinarily grey residential street. As we walked along she nodded and said, ‘That’s where the boom gates were.’ All that remained was a hip-height bollard on the pavement. We passed it into what had been the secure Stasi zone. ‘That building there was Department M, Postal Surveillance,’ Frau Paul said, walking slightly ahead of me and pointing with an open hand. ‘That one over there was the Forgery Workshop for the Stasi. That one was a special Stasi hospital.’ These were plain concrete buildings. They looked empty. ‘Those high-rises over there are Stasi housing,’ she continued. I followed her hand and saw a cluster of grey and white multi-storey towers. From one of them emerged a middle-aged man with a dachshund on a retractable lead. The man ignored us, but the dog eyed me warily as it pissed on the kerb.
Further inside the zone we reached a building with high concrete walls topped by barbed wire. The walls seemed to stretch on and on, enclosing an area as big as a city block. At the corners were octagonal guard towers, and underneath them, along the outside, an empty dog-run. Hohenschönhausen has been closed for several years. People are now fighting to preserve it as a museum of the regime. Frau Paul is involved with them, and she has a key.
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 businesslike 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 a squat building in the centre. 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 crossboard 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 bakers’ 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 any place 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 that 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 is 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 pa
st, 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-coloured 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 smelt of sweat and damp coats and bad breath. It was a mongrel smell, but it was the smell of pure fear. This U-Boat smelt 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.
There was nothing funny about this cell and there was nothing funny about standing in it with Frau Paul, feeling the spiky floor through my boots and touching the coarse yoke and imagining being bent nearly double in the dark, in pain and drifting between consciousness and drowning. But there was something barnyard about it. It seemed too primitive for the mid-twentieth century and too primitive for here. This contraption belonged further east and further back in time, in some Pythonesque sideshow of history.
But there was something even more chilling about the office with the little stool Frau Paul was made to sit on, and the ordinary administrative desk and chair where the interrogator sat over her. It was in offices that the Stasi truly came into their own: as innovators, story-makers, and Faustian bargain-hunters. That room was where a deal was offered and refused, and a soul buckled out of shape, forever.
Not one of the torturers at Hohenschönhausen has been brought to justice.
Four times a year Frau Paul received permission to have a visitor (mostly her mother) but she’d be transported elsewhere for it so that neither she nor her visitor would know where in the GDR she was being kept. Mail was sent to another Stasi address, and brought to her opened. She had been taken out of time, and out of place.
Torsten remained over the years at the Westend Hospital. The nurses and doctors fed him through tubes and gave him medicine and changed his nappies. They sang him songs, they taught him to speak, and they tried to teach him to walk. The hospital was the only home and its staff the only people Torsten Rührdanz knew. This is one of the letters that got through to his parents. It was written in November 1963 when Torsten was nearly three years old:
Dear Mr and Mrs Rührdanz,
I learnt that you would like to be informed as to Torsten’s health, which I can very well understand. Generally he is cheerful, making progress with his walking, and happy. He has become the darling of the ward. Of course from time to time we still have difficulties to overcome, which means that, unfortunately, discharge from hospital is not possible in the foreseeable future. We cannot manage to feed him without a stomach tube, because as soon as he eats normally he is in pain. His weight is still unsatisfactory, at 7670 g. His height is also significantly less than the norm for his age. His diarrhoea has virtually ceased though. There is nothing left for us but to continue as we have been, and in the hope that his stomach will gradually widen and that the problems at the end of his diaphragm will mend.
You can be assured that everything possible will continue to be done for your child. I will write again before Christmas.
Yours sincerely,
Prof. Dr L.
Michael Hinze has always lived in the west. He was never kidnapped by the Stasi; he didn’t even know that they were after him. And, until recently, he had no idea that Frau Paul was in any way connected with his continuing freedom. ‘I found out about it a couple of years ago, after the Wall fell. For years I’d heard nothing from the Rührdanzes. Then they called me,’ he says. ‘All this story with the blackmailing and the plans to kidnap me—I knew nothing about that at all.’ He is slightly uncomfortable with the whole idea. ‘I mean I always saw myself as small fry. I just put people together, got passports. I knew it was illegal under GDR law, but…’ he trails off. He didn’t really think it through. Even if he had, how could he have imagined that someone else was being asked to pay a price for his liberty? ‘She’s a very courageous woman,’ Hinze continues, ‘I have a great deal of respect for her. I’m also grateful to her. But at the same time I don’t think I need to feel guilty—I don’t feel guilty, I mean, I was just lucky that I didn’t fall into the clutches of the Stasi. That way, or by other means.’ He thinks that if they had really wanted him they could have got him, and this is probably true.
‘She was very active in the whole thing,’ Hinze says admiringly. ‘The Rührdanzes used to marshal the people from Halle or Dresden or wherever who wanted to get out, and help them. They were very committed people.’
Frau Paul has told me none of this, although it might be something another person would be proud of. The picture we make of ourselves, with all its congruences and fantastical edges, sustains us. Frau Paul does not picture herself as a hero, or a dissident. She is a dental technician and a mother with a terrible family history. And she is a criminal. This seems to me the sorriest thing; that the picture she has of herself is one that the Stasi made for her.
‘I told her that her story moved me deeply,’ Hinze says. ‘And that I don’t know many people who would not have betrayed me. I said that there are not many people who have the courage she did. To behave with’—he’s looking for a way to describe it—‘with such great humanity, can I say. She behaved with such great humanity.’ We are both silent for a moment. ‘But unfortunately,’ he says, ‘at her cost.’
In August 1964 the Rührdanzes were bought free for 40,000 western marks. But instead of being released into the west to be with their baby, they were dumped on the street in East Berlin with no papers. Frau Paul puts this down to their refusal of Dr Vogel as lawyer. Of the estimated 34,000 people bought free between 1963 and 1989 there are at this stage only nine documented cases of such cruelty, where the west paid hard currency and the east did not deliver the people whose freedom had been purchased.
Torsten was still living in the Westend Hospital. On 9 April 1965 when he was four years old Frau Paul had news of him from Sister Gisela, one of the nurses.
We all wish you and your husband a very healthy and happy Easter. Torsten has painted you an Easter picture, all by himse
lf—brown Easter bunnies and a nest with colourful eggs. He said, ‘That is for my mummy, she’ll like that!’ Yesterday we received your lovely card, and we thank you on behalf of Torsten. He was so happy, we had to read it out to him straight away. He never lets it out of his little hands, and keeps looking at the Sandman on it…
My dear Mrs Rührdanz, Torsten is really coming along now. It is such a shame that you can’t be here to enjoy his progress. It could drive one to despair, this drama between parts of a single city!! But I don’t want to write about that.
Better some more news of Torsten. He weighs 9450g now and is 84cm tall. He speaks and understands everything like a six year old. He doesn’t miss a trick! He told me I should write you that he’s coming home soon to Kaulsdorf. Torsten can walk 5 m by himself! Apart from that he wheels around all afternoon about the station. Dear Mrs Rührdanz, every best wish from us and one thousand kisses from Torsten—for his Daddy too.
They waited another eight months before Torsten was well enough to be released from the Westend Hospital. When he came home to East Germany he was nearly five, small and bent and very polite.
‘Of course he didn’t recognise me as his mother,’ Frau Paul says. ‘He didn’t know what a mother was. He only knew the sterile atmosphere of the hospital and the staff there, the doctors, the sisters and the other personnel. Even though they all dealt very lovingly with him and they tried’—she’s crying now, hard—‘tried to create for him in whatever ways they could something like a family atmosphere, it just wasn’t his home. He was frightened. And when I…’ She has to stop because she can’t get the words out. ‘And when I took him in my arms for the first time and held him to me he must have thought, “What does this old lady want with me? She says she is my mother, but what is that, a mother?” He addressed us with the formal “Sie”. He would say, “Mother, would you kindly be able to make me a sandwich, I’m hungry,” or “Father, would you mind lifting me onto the chair, I can’t manage,” and this, this terrible distance. They made our boy a stranger to us.’ She lowers her voice. ‘And it was then I fought with myself the most: did I decide right in the interrogation when I refused to be used as bait for a kidnapping? Or should I have come to my son?’ She is weeping and weeping.