by Adam Johnson
A woman steps up to us. “I am Berta,” she says. She is a modest woman with short hair and stoically sad eyes that make her look Ukrainian. Berta surveys the students, then expressionlessly examines me. I always believed women should have their own prison. There were no problems, mind you. Perhaps I am simply old-fashioned. Grünwald pointed out that the degree of inmate isolation meant each person basically had an individual prison. I think he just liked interrogating women.
Berta wastes no time. She begins walking us to the cell wing, and we follow. “I arrived at the Hohenschönhausen remand prison in a vehicle disguised as a delivery van. It pulled up here,” she says, indicating a patch of asphalt near the receiving door. “There was once a structure here, so that when you exited the van, nothing of the prison could be seen. I’d been driven around for hours, so I suspected I was far outside of Berlin. The first rule of Hohenschönhausen was that no prisoner had contact with another. For the next two years, I saw no one but my jailers and interrogators. Warning lights were used to make sure no prisoner accidentally encountered another. When I stepped out of the van, a light was shining red, which meant another prisoner was being moved through the cell wing. Right away, I had to crouch in a stress position.”
I laugh a little, remembering the poor color-blind prisoner. Everyone looks at me.
Through the steel door and into the yellowed hallway we go. Right away, I am struck by the smell of the place, that Hohenschönhausen Prison smell—a mix of ammonia, battleship paint, sound-deadening panels and electricity coursing through the security wires. It feels deeply wrong to be escorted by an inmate. I recall a prisoner who came to believe that Hohenschönhausen was not a prison but a movie set. When she didn’t like what you said, she would call out, “Cut!” When she didn’t feel right about the direction things were heading, she’d start repeating, “Take it from the top!”
We rise through the caged staircase, but before we emerge into the second-floor cells, Berta stops us. The kids look up the steps to her.
“I always observe a moment here,” Berta says, “to pay respect to the dead.”
The students are from good working-class families. They bow their heads.
I gaze intently at Berta, to make sure my video footage is steady.
“What dead do you pay your respects to?” I ask her. “The dead in general?”
“I pause for those who did not make it out of this prison. They are not here to speak for themselves.”
“The death rate here was no higher than in the rest of the GDR,” I say.
“Actually,” she says, “a young person was five times more likely to die in here.”
“You’re comparing the prisoners to normal people,” I counter. “This facility housed criminals, subversives, depressives and suicidals. For this group, the death rate was the same, inside the prison or out.”
Berta takes a moment to appraise me.
“Did you ever see any inmates die in here?” I ask. “Did you ever witness any of them suffer, for that matter?”
“I did not see inmates of any kind,” she says. “I only speak for my own experience.”
“Actually, as a tour guide, you have made yourself the voice of the entire prison.”
“One of the unfortunate laws of atrocity,” she says, “is that the ones who truly come to know its nature are never left to tell of it. Far from trying to speak for them, we mark their experience with silence.”
I am itching to attack this word atrocity, but the students eye me with uncertainty, and I don’t want to turn them against me. We observe the moment.
Moving slowly through the wing, Berta goes on and on about her treatment—the lights being forever on, the feeling of isolation, the lack of sleep. She holds up the blue slippers and baggy blue uniform prisoners had to wear. In the hall she makes us walk the prisoner walk: legs wide, hands high behind the back, head bent. She shows us the warning wire along the walls that, when pulled, would summon the immobilization squad.
As we pass through the east wing, a young man points at a door more heavily bolted than the others. The name on his coat is Matthias.
In a deep voice, Matthias asks, “What’s behind this?”
“It is one of the isolation rooms,” Berta says.
“That?” I ask. “That’s a maintenance closet.”
Matthias looks from Berta to me and back.
“It’s of no importance,” I say. “Mops were stored there, to clean up after incidents.”
The boy points at the door’s array of locks. “Then why all the security?” he asks.
“In here,” I tell him, “the smallest item can become a weapon or tool of escape.”
Berta tries to reclaim her authority. “All these rooms are for punishment,” she says.
I flip through the keys on my master ring until I find the right one. In front of everyone, I unlock the door, and I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to hear the snap of the action and the slap of the bolts when I pull them. For a moment, I listen to the sound ring through the ward. Then I open the door. Inside, there is a sink and a bucket and, on a shelf, a lone jug of cleaner.
I ask Berta, “Are you sure you’re qualified to lecture on this prison?”
“What in your life,” Berta asks, “qualified you to run this place? Do you have a degree in criminal justice? Did you write a book on prison administration?”
The students turn to me.
This question can easily be edited out of my video, so I do not respond.
“We kept plenty of cleaning fluid on hand,” I tell them, “because of the intellectuals. You may have guessed that I once worked at this institution. In my opinion, intellectuals fared the worst. Questions of why and how plagued them. They endlessly bemoaned their fates and covered every surface of their cells with scribbling about absurdity and injustice. Of course, there was only one answer to their philosophical musings: they had conspired against their country, and now they had to pay. Give me a prison full of carpenters and butchers and plumbers—these people knew how to answer questions rather than ask them. They could follow rules and serve their time.”
“During my time here,” Berta says, “I was given not a moment with a pencil or paper or reading material of any kind.”
Did she never stop fighting? Did she never settle into the routine enough to gain a privilege or two?
Then she moves on into Grünwald’s territory—the Interrogation Wing.
We move down rows of identical interrogation rooms until we reach 124.
“This was my personal interrogation room,” Berta says. “For two years, no other prisoner was questioned here but me. I would be hooded and brought here for regular sessions in which I was hounded about my allegiances, associates and accomplices and crimes.”
I ask Berta, “So what were your crimes?”
She stops and looks at me, right into the camera. “In 1985, my husband and I ran at the Berlin Wall with a window washer’s ladder. It was early dawn, and we were near Potsdamer Platz. The location is now a shopping mall. We easily reached the top, straddled the wall and pulled up the ladder. But we were quite foolish. We had thought West Berlin would be on the other side. Instead, there were one hundred meters of barbed wire, sensors and Dobermans that patrolled the corridor along cable leads. Then there was another wall. We resolved to run for it. Shots were fired, and my husband was hit. The dogs took me down.”
One girl fingers the cross around her neck. Embroidered on her jacket is the name Katja. “Why did you want to escape so bad?” she asks.
Berta and I glance at each other, reminded of how little the young people know about those days. In response, Berta lifts the peephole cover so students can take turns looking into a Stasi interrogation room.
“Allow me,” I say. With a passkey, I open the door.
We regard a high-backed chair, a large desk and a little stool.
When a boy moves to enter, Berta stops him. “The tour does not go here,” she says.
“This
looks like a place for conversation,” I say. “Not for torture.”
Berta looks nervously at the stool. “This part of the tour is over,” she says.
I appeal to the students. “How can talking be torture?”
Berta stares vacantly into the room. “When you haven’t slept for days,” she says, her voice subdued. “When they question you in shifts, saying you’ll never see your family again, saying your father has lost his job and your sister was removed from college. When they tell you your husband is dead from his wounds, even though he lives, even though he’s in the same prison with you for two years and you don’t even know it. When they show you your death certificate, all filled out except for the date, and they do you the courtesy of asking your preference for the day you wish to expire. When you finally say you’ll confess to whatever they like, and instead, they send you down to the U-boat.”
Berta wipes her eyes and heads alone down the hall.
The students eye one another with uncertainty.
We follow Berta. I admit that no person should be shown her own death certificate. And no wife should be separated from her husband. Yes, the woman was a subversive criminal, but that doesn’t mean I don’t sympathize with what she endured in the wake of her defiance. However, when we catch up to her, the sadness in her eyes disappears. She enters high gear again, walking backward, citing various studies about torturers and victims. Then she goes into talk-show mode about mercy and empathy, throwing in a couple of public-service announcements on the topic of humanity. Passing the control rooms, she minimizes the inmates’ crimes, insinuating that they were incarcerated for reading banned poetry, attending protest concerts and listening to Wessi radio broadcasts.
In the housing unit, Berta directs us to housing cell 124, which is standing open.
“I was 124,” she says. “For two years, that was my only name. And this cage was my home.” She does not enter, and neither do we. From a distance, she points out the reinforced door, the peephole, the muck-tray slot, the dripping ceiling and the wooden bunk. “You had to sleep on your back all night, spread-eagle,” she tells the students. “All night the guards looked through the peephole, and if you were not sleeping in the proper position—punishment.”
“What kind of punishment?” Katja asks.
“It varied over time,” Berta tells her. “It could be as simple as your toilet privileges being revoked, which meant doing your business in a bucket. When I first arrived, it was gynecological exams.”
“Please,” I announce. “There was no such thing. There were rules to be followed. A guard would have been written up for such an infraction.”
Berta ignores me, answering only the student. “A battery of female exams,” she says. “Each day for my first three weeks. Twenty-one sessions with the speculum.”
Katja crosses herself.
“This is a fabrication,” I say. “Dr. Werner would never have submitted to this.”
To the students, Berta says, “When we visit the U-boat, you will see there were worse punishments.”
“The U-boat was never punishment,” I say. “It was part of the interview regimen.”
Berta ignores me. “Now to the medical wing,” she says. “Where you can judge for yourself the nature of the health care.”
I hold up my ticket stub. “I have paid my money,” I say. “I am on this tour as well.”
“Yes,” Berta says, “and the tour is moving on.”
“But we’re not done here,” I say, and step inside cell 124. “This is not so bad,” I announce. “There are smaller rooms in the world. A person could stretch out here, even do some exercises.”
“This feels roomy to you?” Berta asks.
“It is not the Kempinski Hotel,” I say. “But it’s certainly no cage.”
“Have you felt the room this way?” Berta asks, and closes the door on me.
I hear it lock. When I try to open the door, there is no handle or mechanism to grab.
“What’s the meaning of this?” I ask.
“Does the room still feel large?” Berta’s voice is faint through the thick metal.
It is a strange experience to reach for a door and find nothing to grasp. I run my hands along the metal, but without any purchase, I can find no way to even rattle it.
I speak into the door. “Okay, you have made your point.”
“Did I?” she asks. “Does the room feel different?”
I look over my shoulder at the wooden bunk and moldy concrete walls, at the open-throated cast-iron toilet. “The room is the same,” I say. “Now open the door.”
She does not answer.
I say, “If you will now open the door, please.”
There is no response. I place my ear to the metal but hear nothing.
“Hello,” I call. “Are you still there?”
“I know who you are,” Berta says. “I remember you.”
Now I’m the one who’s silent.
“Do you recognize me?” she asks.
“This is not part of the tour,” I call out. “I would like the door opened.”
“I cannot open the door,” she says. “I do not have a key.”
I lower myself to my knees and look out through the muck-tray slot. I see the students’ athletic shoes and Berta’s ankles below the hem of her dress. She has a small tattoo of a butterfly. I reach through the slot and extend the ring of master keys. I hold them out for a long time, but they are not taken.
“First,” says Berta, “I must know if you remember.”
“I do not need to recall the past,” I say. “I am certain of what it was.”
“If this place was so innocent,” she says, “how come they closed it down?”
“If this place was so horrible,” I ask my guide, “how come you keep returning?”
“Part of my identity was stolen from me,” she says. “I’m trying to get it back.”
I have a good comeback line for this, but I will save it for the red letters on my video.
“This is not legal,” I tell her. “I am not a criminal. You can’t treat me like one.”
The keys are taken from my hand. One thing about these cells is that the light switches are on the outside. I’m reminded of this when everything goes dark. Then I hear the footsteps of everyone walking away. I don’t bother to bang and shout. Berta won’t get that satisfaction from me. I stand and put my hand out into the dark. Even though I have these rooms memorized, I trip on something and almost go down. At last I find the wooden bunk. My video glasses are filming this black moment, but I don’t know how to turn them off. How did this come to pass? What parade of indignities led to being locked alone in my own prison?
What I think about is Gitte’s father, who somehow knew that his family was soon to be torn apart, and during one of their last beautiful moments together, he decided to take action. I wonder which moment was ours. I scan all the holidays and school events for such a time.
A family outing comes to me. We took our little blue Trabant up the hills and into the columbines overlooking Cottbus. Gitte had an old Praktica she wanted to test. Driving along, I pointed out many picnic spots. She rejected them all. Finally, she picked a location littered with trash and old tires. But when we parked and got out, I saw how the light fell through the trees, how if you faced just right, the backdrop was a wall of dappled granite. Gitte positioned her tripod and set the camera’s timer. Then the three of us raced to pose upon a fallen log. I adjusted my epaulettes, Gitte teased her hair, Nina balanced on both our knees. The timer ticked. We stretched wide our camera smiles. We smiled and waited, the timer ticking. We looked at each other with our overwide smiles and rolled our eyes, and still the timer ticked. It was Nina who started laughing at how ridiculous we looked, and soon all of us were truly laughing. The timer never did go off, which made it all the more funny, and the picture was never taken. But this was the moment. Nina bouncing upon the two of us. Gitte, head back with laughter. Me in the middle of it all. This was the time to
take up the brick, to raise it high and swing with everything into the face of the bomb.
Before long, I hear footsteps, a key in the lock. When the door opens, Berta regards me.
“I thought you forgot about me,” I say.
Even backlit by bright light, I can tell by her look that forgetting me is not possible.
“Doing this was wrong of me,” she says. “This is not who I am or what I believe in.”
“The truth is that I don’t remember you,” I tell her. “I was responsible for a great number of inmates over many years. I’m sorry, but I don’t recall.”
“Of course,” she says, and extends the keys. “I don’t like possessing these.”
“I wish I could remember,” I tell her. “But perhaps that book is better left closed.”
She nods. “If this is what you believe, then why not let it rest? I’ve seen you walking your little dog. Why not go home to him and forget about all this?”
I accept the keys. She returns to her tour. I decide to take her advice.
When I exit into the courtyard, I hear the students singing. They’re in the central yard, circled around the Memorial Stone, and they are singing “Ins Wasser fällt ein Stein.”
This is the video they will post of their visit.
Yes, I think, Prinz has waited long enough.
It’s when I’m walking toward the main gate that I hear Berta directing the students toward the hospital wing. “And now for the house of horrors,” she calls out. Her tone is indignant and angry. I stop walking, watch them file inside, and even from here, I can hear her indicate the rings in the walls where sick inmates were manacled and the waiting stations where wheelchairs were chained. Next she’ll start again on those nonexistent exams and begin spewing the usual hogwash about how Dr. Werner healed the patients only enough to endure more interrogation.
This I cannot take, this is too much to stand.
I head in through the white-tiled corridor and find them standing around a lone examination table, where the students, wide-eyed, study the stirrups and their rotting leather straps. Berta seems surprised to see me, but she continues even more manically.