Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [101]
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 past, 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