Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [99]
‘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