Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [100]
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