Stasiland Read Online Free PDF Page A

long time. Then a train went by, and, unusually, it was a steam train. The two of them were covered in a fine mist.
    ‘Perhaps then he lost my scent?’ Eventually, the dog walked away. Miriam waited another long time. ‘I thought he would come back for me, but he didn’t.’ She climbed the last barbed-wire fence to reach the top of the wall bordering the train line. She could see the west—shiny cars and lit streets and the Springer Press building. She could even see the western guards sitting at their sentry posts. The wall was broad. She had about four metres to cross on top of it, and then a little railing to get under. That was all there was. She couldn’t believe it. She wanted to run the last few steps, before they caught her.
    ‘The railing was really only so high,’ she says, putting an arm out to thigh height, ‘all I had to do was get under it. I had been so very careful and so very slow. Now I thought: you have only four more steps, just RUN before they get you. But here’—she marks an X, over and over, on the map she has drawn me—‘here, was a trip-wire.’ The voice is very soft. She marks and re-marks the X till I think the paper will tear. ‘I did not see the wire.’
    Sirens went off, wailing. The western sentry huts shone searchlights to find her, and to prevent the easterners from shooting her. The eastern guards took her away quickly.
    ‘You piece of shit,’ a young one said. They took her to the Berlin Stasi HQ. They bandaged her hands and legs, and that was the first time she noticed her blood or felt any pain. The blood was on her face and in her hair.
    ‘But they really hadn’t seen me. No-one had even seen me.’ She came so close.
    In the west the neon shone and overhead fireworks destroyed themselves in the air. Miriam was returned to Leipzig in the back of a paddy wagon. The Stasi officer questioning her told her they had contacted her parents, who no longer wanted anything to do with her.
    ‘Did you believe him?’
    ‘Hmm. Well, no. Not really, no.’ It was very hard to be sure of anything, of anyone. Miriam pauses. It was an uncomfortable question. ‘I think they probably demoted that dog, poor thing,’ she says. ‘Either that or shot him.’
    Miriam was held in a cell in Dimitroffstrasse, which has been recreated in the nearby Stasi Museum. The cell is two metres by three, and at one end there is a tiny window of dull frosted glass recessed very high up. It has a bench with a mattress, a toilet and a sink. The door is thick, with metal bolts across it, and a spyhole for the guard to watch you. It is hung in a wall so deep I felt I was going into an airlock.
    Again, Miriam was allowed no telephone calls, no lawyer, no contact with the outside world. She was sixteen and back in solitary. ‘When they came to take me to interrogation,’ she says, smiling, ‘at least it was something to do. But that,’ she pauses, ‘that is when the whole miserable story really took off.’ Back in Leipzig, the Stasi let her have it.
    During the Korean War in the 1950s myths circulated of obscene torture methods practised on American POWs. After they were captured, the men would be taken to a camp, reappearing as little as a week later on a platform, mindlessly mouthing their conversion to Communism for the cameras. After the war it was revealed that, contrary to rumour, the Korean military’s secret was neither traditional nor high-tech—it was sleep deprivation. A hungry man can still spit bile, but a zombie is remarkably pliable.
    The interrogation of Miriam Weber, aged sixteen, took place every night for ten nights for the six hours between 10 pm and 4 am. Lights went out in the cell at 8 pm, and she slept for two hours before being taken to the interrogation room. She was returned to her cell two hours before the lights went on again at 6 am. She was not permitted to sleep during the day. A guard watched through the peephole, and banged on the door if she nodded off.
    ‘Once in a