Saturday Matinee: Cold War Conversations

Lindsay Graham
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sometimes you just want an escape. You know, get away from the daily grind. Go someplace where you can reconnect with yourself. Be yourself. So maybe you plan a vacation.

I mean thats what those are for, right? To escape. But it turns out that its a little more difficult than buying a plane ticket and booking a hotel. In fact, to get where you want to go, you first have to acknowledge that its really probably a one way trip and you cant take much with you, only what you can carry. And you wont be traveling by plane, train, or automobile.

Youll be walking. And the reason youre walking is that you have to cross miles of thick forest. Its really the only way for you to go because if you were to take the roads, youd surely be stopped and even walking in the forest. And lets be honest, youre crouching, sneaking along. Walking in the forest is dicey too, because of all the armed guards.

This escape youre hoping for is from East Germany in the late 1980s. The Cold War is raging and the Iron Curtain is as formidable as ever, but youre determined to make it to the west, though the authorities are just as determined to stop you. On today's Saturday matinee, we bring you a thrilling tale of a foiled escape from the always riveting podcast Cold War conversations. What makes this show such a favorite of mine is that host Ian Sanders has dedicated his show to documenting real, firsthand accounts of life during the Cold War. It's just different when you hear true stories told by the people who live them, and this story is no different.

You're going to hear how Henrik and some friends attempted to escape from communist east Germany, but were discovered and fired upon by czechoslovakian border guards in a dense forest near the austrian border. Captured and then imprisoned, Henrik endured incredible hardship, especially at the work camp he was incarcerated in, which was populated with not just political prisoners like himself, but also violent criminals and even murderers. I hope you enjoy. While you're listening, be sure to search for and follow cold War conversations or for ad free listening to cold War conversations and many other amazing history podcasts. Subscribe@intohistory.com Dot we put links in the show notes to make it easy for you.

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Ian Sanders
This is cold War conversations if you're new here, you've come to the right place to listen to first hand Cold War history accounts. Do make sure you follow us in your podcast app or join our emailing list@coldwarconversations.com. dot this is part two of Henrich's story. You can hear part one in episode 307. It's the late 1980s, and Henryk and his friends plan to escape from East Germany via Czechoslovakia.

Henryk provides a very vivid account of their discovery by Czechoslovakia border guards in a forest near the austrian border, and he describes the heart stopping moment when the border guards opened fire on them. Henryk is separated from his friends and held in various czechoslovak prisons before being flown back to East Germany. There he is interrogated for a number of months before being placed on trial after his conviction for republic flucht, or desertion, from the Republican. He's held in a rough criminal prison in Dresden before being moved to a work camp. The prison and the work camp hold two types of prisoners, politicals and criminals.

And there he is exposed to the hardcore criminals of the GDR, violent criminals, murderers and neo Nazis. I'm delighted to welcome Henryk back to our cold war conversation.

Henrik
The escape attempt goes like this. We were stupid teenagers, and we were thinking, hey, let's go on camping. So let's buy a tent just as a cover, and let's go on the train, let's buy the tickets. And, you know, we did silly things. We were stupid 19 year olds.

We were virtually thinking, you know, in our prime, male, teenagers, 19 years old. This is gonna happen. We still want to do it. We went to a football game, a Fauf B, Stuttgart, with Jurgen Kleensmann at Dinamo Dresden, both of the UEFA cup games in Dresden. And then we went to see Steao Bucharest, one of the Bucharest teams, against Dynamo Dresden in the old Dynamo Dresden stadium.

And afterwards, we went on the pitch, because people were just walking around everywhere. And we sprinted on the pitch to see how fast we could run, and said, oh, you know, if we can run that fast from the middle line to the goal line, we're going to so make this. We're kind of really. I really think we have a chance and stuff like this, you know, some really naive, stupid things, you know. And so we went down to Czechoslovakia in the morning of the 5 May, took a train to Prague.

It was noontime when we were there. It was really sunny. We walked around from one train station to the next. And then we took a local train down to Cesge Butjevice, which is the original Badweis place. And then from there, we took another, even more local train to that place near the austrian border.

And in that train, already, there was a border guard, a czech soldier, who checked our passports, and he asked us, where are you going? And we just say, oh, camping. Camping there. Yeah, Lipno Lake. And so he said, okay, okay.

So he didn't do anything, but he took our details. He wrote a name, stone. So that was number one. So. And then we arrive at that place, that little village by the lake.

And when we get out, we're the only ones on getting off that train. There was no one on the platform, so we walked off the platform into the. It's not even a town. It's virtually not even a village in a way. It's just a settlement with houses and an army base.

So all we see is czechoslovakian soldiers marching down the road opposite us, going to the base camp, which you could see somewhere up the hill. So we then had to find the camping site. And then we arrived at the camping site. That's what I'm saying, with stupid teenagers. The camping site was still closed.

It wasn't open. It was pre season, 5 May. It's not warm enough here to open the camping site. So we were there and ring that bell and from the reception bungalow comes an old man and he says, no, no, no camping site close. Not possible.

And we said, please, please, just one night, let us. Can you not open a bungalow for us? And in the end he said, okay, I give you a key, but you need to leave tomorrow morning at nine. You need to be out and you can stay in that, in that bungalow. So we went in and we were all excited, thinking, okay, guys, that's for real.

Then suddenly the other friend, he suddenly had doubts and said, oh, I don't want to go anymore. I don't know. We just kind of convinced him, yeah, we need to go. We go, we're going to do this now. We got to.

Have we got that far? We need to go now. You might think this being a lake and the other bank of the lake is Austria being Austria, we would try to swim. But again, we had kind of made that clear from the outset that this would be stupid, it would be suicide. A.

It's very cold, pretty big lake to swim as well. You'd be very slow. You'd slow down even more. You would be seen from distance and you would never make it. So we didn't intend to swim across the lake, neither in the dark nor during the day, but walk around the lake, up into the mountains, where we knew from the map, somewhere up there must be the iron curtain.

And we had kind of hoped there's not going to be many border guards there, but with this village being right on the austrian border, there were a whole army camp. There was a whole army camp there. So we got out in the morning, shouldered a rucksack and walked up single file, steep hill amongst fir trees and walked up there. And after about, I don't know, we got up at 06:00 in the morning, we left at six, something like this. And once we had walked for about 45 minutes, we could see the iron curtain through the trees.

And I remember some kind of. Some silvery metallic kind of color shining through the trees. So we sneaked around a little bit, and then we saw a guard tower, but it didn't look occupied. We couldn't really see. We didn't dare to go close enough.

So we thought, no, we can't be here. We need to go somewhere else. And then just as we were trying to go, like, parallel to that iron curtain, we never really got that close. We were. I think we must have still been 100 meters away from it.

Yeah. Suddenly my friend says, there's somebody between the trees. And we saw someone with, like, a blonde hair head, a blond hat, someone. Then there were some voices. And we thought, damn it, that's border guards.

Let's duck down. So we duck down amongst the ferns and, like, a little ditch in the. On the forest ground. And we lay still, like, you know, I thought it might have been ages. It seemed ages, but it probably was just a couple of minutes.

And then the other friend got a bit impatient and popped his head up to see what was going on. And at that moment, the border guards were right in front of us, and they hadn't seen us either. So they were just virtually as shocked and kind of, you know, startled. Not shocked. They were startled at us being there.

So they started shouting really loud, all the swear words in slavonic languages, which I don't have to repeat here. And we jumped up. And again, this is kind of the safety measures we had put in place, so maybe we weren't that naive and stupid. We had agreed we will never run. If anything, anybody catches us or sees us, we do not run towards the fence, towards the iron curtain, because this is when people get shot.

And so we ran backwards down the hill for about five steps. And when they started shooting their Kalashnikovs into the trees, this is when you stop because it's so loud right next to you. Three guys firing. Or I think it was six soldiers. Yeah, it was six soldiers firing their guns into the trees and with the twigs and branches splintering above your head.

And there was three shepherd dogs circling around us. You just stop. It's so, you know, your knees go wobbly and soft. And then basically they just handcuffed us back, two soldiers to one guy, and went into a rucksacks, got some spare t shirts out, put them over our head, and then made some RTO radio contact with their base while these dogs were still kind of running around barking. So I was lying on that forest floor somewhere just before, like, midday, late morning.

And strangely enough, I remember that I felt very, very calm and I was quite surprised myself about that because I thought, something is happening now. A first step has been taken. All these years of thinking about how can I get out of East Germany, how can I get to the west? Now something will happen one way or another. It's going to be a hard road.

It's going to be a long road, but at least I'm not somebody who's just talking about it, never does anything about it. What did the border guards do with you next? And then we heard some jeeps coming with more soldiers, and they put us on there on these jeeps. And then after a few meters of driving, maybe 100, 200 meters, as soon as they turned away from the iron curtain, they took our t shirts off, our hats. Yeah.

So I could see the other soldiers sitting there in that. In the back of that car. It was at least two cars, so we weren't all in the same car and going down, back to the village and into the army base. And in the windows are sitting all these czechoslovakian soldiers, and they were shouting, Bravo, Pavel, bravo. And they were kind of just congratulating that group of soldiers on arresting us.

And then, you know, I had no space in my head to think about what had really happened and how it had happened. But when I was then in prison, I had lots of time to think about it. And it really occurred to me after a long time, not immediately, maybe months later, that with this search party being six soldiers and three shepherd dogs, it wasn't just some kind of random half platoon of soldiers doing their duty on the iron curtain. They were out looking for us. And then again, I didn't make that jump until years later.

I thought that must have been that old man at the camping site. Now, I viewed my Stasi file in 2007, and there's a whole page in there from the czechoslovakian border guards in Czech with a man of where we got arrested in relation to the lake and the Iron Curtain and so on. And I just took that. I didn't translate or understand it, but then I showed it to a czech person years later, and they confirmed that it says in that file that the man from the camping side, the manager from the camping side, had basically told the army base that there's three teenagers from East Germany and to have an eye on them in case they try to escape. And this was basically what happened.

They were looking for us out there. And then we were taken in and we had to write a statement. That statement is in my Stasi file as well. It's kind of. I can still see it with a shaky handwriting, big childlike letters, kind of make a statement, what we were trying to do.

And there was in civil clothes check, probably czech secret Service guy, really big old guy, a really fat guy, just came in, and he sits opposite me, and he goes like, so how old are you? I said, I just turned 2020 years old. So young. What about papa? What about mama?

Your whole life is destroyed. So I thought, oh, I just want to go back to East Germany. Just let me go back to East Germany. Then we can sort it all out from there. Yeah.

And of course, we all get loaded onto an army truck. And in our kind of naivety, we thought, that's they're going to drive us all the way. That would be hundreds of kilometers to the east. To East Germany in that army truck. No, we just drove as far as Cesko Butjevic.

And then we kind of. It was late afternoon. Meanwhile, like I remember, it was May and sunset, and we stop in front of a massive yellow wall. And now in Czechoslovakia, lots of houses are yellow or orange. That's kind of the plaza they put on, but it kind of looked ominous.

And then there was this big metal gate. And I thought, oh, my God, that's a prison. So they're going to put us in this prison? Yeah, maybe just for a few hours to process us. But then we got out of that army truck, and I was taken up the building onto a different floor where there were cells.

And the police officer, czech police officer, opens the cell and says, gives me some bed linen and says, mach bet make bed. And that's when I thought, damn it, I'm going to stay in here. I have to stay in the cell until tomorrow. And I was sitting in the cell and I thought, wait a minute, tomorrow is Saturday. The 5 may fell on a Friday in 89.

Yeah. So tomorrow is Saturday, and then it's going to be Sunday. So nothing will happen for two days. That's really why my heart sank. And I was sitting there for these 48 hours without anybody speaking to me during the night.

I had to lay down at 10:00 at the latest. Then there was lights out, and every ten minutes, the lights were switched on to see whether I was still there. And somebody was peeping through the hole in the door, through the spy eye. And then the next day on the Saturday, I just tried to kind of lay back on my bed, and immediately the cell door open, said, no sleeping. And they were.

Threatened me with their bait and stuff like this. So I had to kind of sit on a chair, and it was like, in the movies, it was virtually thin soup and thinned down jam with some dark rye bread. Probably not unhealthy, but not tasty at all. And, you know, in a tin pot. And outside were some crows on the roof crowing away the whole weekend.

And that was just really when it sank into me that this is going to be rough. That was the story of the arrest and how we did that. I mean, how did you cope with those three days? I mean, there must have been all sorts of thoughts running through your head at that point. In circles, always the same thought in circles, which is what you're going to think.

There's not much you can think. You just think about how is it going to be received at home? What will the parents think? Will they already know? When will I be there to explain?

I think that was my main thing. I wanted to get back. I didn't want to kind of regret it and say, I don't want to go to the west anymore. That was not the case at that point. I really thought this is the first step.

But I just wanted to get back and communicate with my family. And you feel like worse than a child not being picked up from kindergarten. You know, it's like you're sitting there and you have no idea what you. Nobody tells you anything. And then on Monday, the door opens, and they put some kind of czech guy they picked up off the street in there like an old man who didn't smell very good, and he didn't say a word.

And he was really grumpy. And we were in that cell for Monday and Tuesday. And then on Wednesday I felt really sick. On Wednesday, suddenly the cell door opens, and the policeman comes, take bed. And I thought, that's it.

I'm out of here. And he marches me down the corridor, opens another cell and puts me in there and says, make bed. So they just basically switched cells around on a Wednesday, and I was sitting there again. And then finally on the Friday, they picked us up. So I hadn't seen my two friends since the arrest.

And then we were all put on a big coach, on a traveling coach with blinds pulled down on the window so nobody could look in. We couldn't really look out. And they had collected up in Budweise. They had collected up almost an entire coach of people who had tried to escape in this area of Bohemia, tried to escape to Bavaria and Austria within a week. And it wasn't just the three of us.

There was other people as well, young guys, the whole family and so on. And so we were driven off to. Some people seem to know that we would be another week in Prague. Some. Somebody had got that information, and that was true because that's what happened.

So it kind of could set my mind to the fact that now we're going to be another week in Prague, at least. I know it's a week, and then it goes on. Yeah. So when we got from the prison cell out of the. In the inner courtyard of the prison into the.

Into the bus, into the coach, there was, like, about five guards on each side forming that path, with dogs barking at us and they're shouting at us. And we get in there and we were made feel like really, you know, rough in a way. So. And then we went to Prague and were put in that cell. And that cell has a lot of interesting, interesting story as well, in terms of the inscriptions in the wall, because that's when the whole story about how we would possibly get to the west became a bit more concrete.

Should I talk about that? Yeah. Yeah, please do. Yeah. So I'm in that cell in Prague.

I have no means of telling that this is Prague. I just heard we're in Prague, and it made sense. Yeah. It was around the back of the airport somewhere. And so I'm in this cell on my own again.

And the whole wall is full of inscriptions on all four sides. And everything is in German. So it's clearly a holding cell for East Germans who had tried to escape. And there was lots of names was here and whatever dates and so on, and the classic kind of strokes in fives, so to count your days and that sort of stuff. And there was two messages, I remember.

So one said, back by plane, back by plane to the zone, which was the derogatory term for East Germany, the soviet zone. And I thought, that can't be. They're not going to fly us from Prague to East Germany. That's. I can't imagine.

But. So it was okay. And then the other inscription was, definitely, take lawyer Vogel. So I thought, lawyer Vogel? I've never heard about that guy.

But it kind of. Because I had time to think, I thought, that must be the lawyer who kind of gets you to the west, because it didn't just say that. It said, definitely no one else. Definitely nobody else get lawyer Fogel. So now I've got a mission to kind of find that man, contact him however I can from prison.

And that seems to be the one. Let's go with that piece of advice on the wall. So, yeah, after a week, we were all taken out again. I could see my friends again, really briefly marched around the back of the airport in another of those little transport coaches. And there was the East German Stasi expecting us.

And they had come in their own little coach. Young men, late twenties, early thirties, in short sleeved, pastel colored shirts and beige trousers. This sort of guy, brown, tanned, I remember, tanned as if they'd just been on holiday in the balato. Unhealthy looking guy. So they come and handcuff each of us, including the family and so on.

There was even more now there was even more people than the ones they had collected up in Budweise. And everybody got handcuffed to one Stasi guy. So the plane had half prisoners and half stasi guards in civilian clothes. And we were given a window seat on the plane. It was an interfluke machine, the east german airline, but really far away from any terminal.

And so we walked there and then up the gangway, and then we were sat at the window, and the Stasi guy was sitting next to me. And there was already one Berliner they had caught. Like the typical guy with a Kaiser Wilhelms moustache, like drilled up upwards. Yeah. And like curly hair, like woody fella, like a mullet and stuff like this.

And he was sitting there and he was making jokes. So the Stasi was laughing at his jokes the whole time in the air. And at one point, we kind of are over east german airspace. You could see Berlin from above and you could see beautiful West Berlin from above, obviously. Yeah.

And then that Berliner made that kind of joke. So what about diverting the plane to temple hoof or something like this? Yeah. And the Stasi just found it hilarious. Told him to shut up.

So, you know, and then we landed in Schonerfeld, which is now the big airport in Berlin. And then. So we actually had traveled by plane back to East Berlin. And then when we got out there, what awaited us was one of those little mini buses the East Germans had. They're called Barcas.

It's an east german production car. They are slightly smaller than the VW mini buses. And they have these kind of cubicles in the back. So they. The Stassi used them to listen in on people.

They sometimes had whole recording and microphone listening stations in there. And they were usually camouflaged as vegetable or fish monger vans or something like this. So if one of those stood in your street for a longer time, I didn't know this then. I know this now from movies like Life of the others and so on. Yeah.

But we were put into one of those minivans. But the minivan had six separate cells inside. Now, that cell door would close on me because I had no weight on me whatsoever. I was just a lanky, skinny teenager who just turned 20. And the big Berliner, he wouldn't fit in, so they couldn't close the door on him.

And again, that led to a lot of amusement amongst the other prisoners and the Stasi guys. And they just basically just placed a guard on a little chair in front of him, that door. And then he would just comment the whole time, yeah, what was going on? And once they told him to shut up, quite roughly, several times, you could hear the Stasi talk in the front of the minivan. So you have the situation.

You're sitting in a complete dark mini cell. If you just bend a few centimeters forward, your forehead would touch the metal wall, and your shoulders were already touching the metal wall. And you're sitting in there and you're feeling quite sick because it goes off the motorway after a point into East Berlin, and it's quite a drag up to Hohenzschoenhausen. So you need to go, like, straight on, on the motorway, then down the Aardleagestel, which is a straightforward, lined road in East Berlin along the Berlin Wall, but then it gets Berlin center and then out Hohenschoenhausen up in the northeast. And then that car started rumbling over.

The East German had a lot of pavement, still, the cobblestones, roads, and you could hear that, and the car was rattling, going around bands, and. And in the front, there was a Stasi woman and the Stasi driver, and they were having the most mundane conversations you can imagine, usually sitting in there, and you think, oh, my God, prison and what's going to happen? And they were talking about a garden fest, a barbecue fest, and didn't say barbecue. It was a grill fest and where to get some. Or she would have several casks of beer still at home, and she would bring that and so on and who to invite and stuff like this.

And it was really weird to kind of see this sort of everyday life. It's like a domestic conversation, domestic conversation. Of the people who are driving you arrested and handcuffed through Berlin to a prison. And then we arrived there in Hohenzschenhausen. We get strip searched, and we did not smell good after this week in Prague and so on.

So remember the Stasi guy was holding his nose. He got. Ooh, as if, you know, this is the first time he sees anything like this. So we got strip searched and then put back into one of those vans and were driven to our hometowns. Yeah.

And I knew that because once we were back on the motorway, I could hear it's always like in a train, it goes, dum, dum, dum, dum. That was always the tar line between the concrete slabs on the east german motorway. So when you went over this tar line, so you knew, and going straight, you're going back. So it's dawned upon me. And then what I really remember was this.

In Hohenhausen, we were given a lunch packet, a packed lunch, a packed lunch which consisted of nice east german grey bread, graubrood with salami on it. And I hadn't had anything like this for a whole two weeks and never had a salami sandwich. Tasted so good. And it was, for me, the taste of, you know, this is what I would have eaten at home, this sort of thing. And it just tasted so good.

Like, I'm going home. I'm going home to my hometown, and now I can sort everything out. So it wasn't a really good mood. I was really, really, I don't know, almost excited and enthused to be in that. You know, you always think, oh, how can you survive in a car like this for 250?

Stuff like this? And, you know, I was just happy to get back to Dresden and have a nice salami sand, which I had eaten, like, within five minutes. But, yeah, I remember that detail. And it kind of foreshadowed, in a way, what was happening next, that the Stasi would treat you nicely, as cynical and weird that this might sound, but this was the case throughout my whole imprisonment in the secret service prison in Dresden. About Snarstrasse Boston street for the next two and a half months.

Yeah. History daily is sponsored by Mint Mobile. One of my favorite spring cleaning moments is finishing the windows. Holy wow. The whole house feels brighter, cleaner, better.

Lindsay Graham
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Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire you. Need indeed. So when you say they treated you well, you were fed well, and, I mean, you were interrogated there, I presume. Yeah.

Henrik
And I expected physical violence, in a way, at least to be beaten up or something like this. I had no idea, really, but I was kind of wary that this might happen. And so when I arrived at Bautzner Strasse Stasi prison, we got out, and I remember it was all kind of really huge space. And, you know, not like you imagine a prison from the, the old prisons that you have in Berlin with the brick buildings and so on, which is kind of this new complex. And it was almost like, you know, there's your, I was taken in, had to hand in my stuff that they had given.

So I had to get out of my private clothes for the first time, was given one of those blue jumpsuits kind of things and some slippers, given another, you know, meal, I think peppermint tea and another sandwich with something on it. And then I was given bed linen. I think we even showered then. I think we showered. Yes, we got to shower and put and then freshen up and got the clothes.

And then I was put into a cell on the ground floor, and it was already after lights out, so they switched on the lights and up jumps a guy on the other bed, and he said, oh, I'm falk I'm from. From Dresden. What's your name? So I say my name, and so on, and then the door closes, and I had to make my bed, and they left the light on for a while. So I just look at him and say.

And he goes, like, why are you looking at me like this? I said, well, I was just looking. Whether you got any, like, bruises in the face or something like this. What, do you think they beat me up here? No, no, no.

They don't beat you up. If you go to an interrogation once a week, that's a lot. It's actually a change in your boring day, so they treat you nice here. He goes. I said, why?

What's going on? Why? You even get a quarter of a liter or half a liter of milk each day. I said, what? And, you know.

And that was one of the first things he said. Do you know what they had on the 1 may? Because I was still out in Dresden, because I got arrested on the 5 May. He was already in at that time. They had chips and lettuce, so basically promised chips you couldn't buy in East Germany unless you were an international hotel.

And so he tells me, we get the same food that the Stasi guys get in their canteen and so on. So I said, okay. And then. So I make my bet, and then he goes straight away. So, no, I say to him, do you know who lawyer Fogel is?

And he was, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the one you need to get. I think 80% of people here get Laurier Fogel. So I thought, that's great, but hopefully, I'm not one of those 20%. Yeah, there was a bit of a tension there, but it was all really, you know, kind of the thing.

And then the next day, they wake you up in the morning and then give you breakfast, and then you had to sit around, and you could sit on the bed. You could lay on the bed. They gave us books to read, so, like, on a rotational basis, you always had two books per week, like, big, fat books about some. Something non political, such as some historical novels or something like this. And then we learned how to play chess because we kind of rotated.

So I was with this guy. I was with Falk. I was about two or three weeks, and then they changed me, and I was with another person on a different floor, and this was the chess master of Dresden, by his own account, and he taught me how to play chess. And so we did that. We had a chess board, and we had other board games and things like this.

And then on the first day I was called for an interrogation by a kind of older stasi guy in his mid forties, and he would kind of yell at me, we're gonna take down all the details, gonna fill in this form. This woman didn't have to fill any form, I have to say. And they were typing. That's how that went. And maybe sign this or that that, you know, you had given in your clothes and whatever you had on you and how many east German and the 20 west german moxie had on you so that would all be put away.

You have to sign that sort of stuff. And then he was again, this guy was trying to put pressure on me and going like, so why did you try to escape? What did you do? What do you think? Do you think they want you in the west?

He goes, do you actually think you will be let out in the west? They will just chuck rotten tomatoes at you. They don't want you in the west. That's how it was going. You really have, you know, kind of endangered your entire career here.

You're not going to go to uni now. And, you know, he didn't talk anything about going to the west. He was just going like this. What did you do? Think about it again and so on.

Go off and think about it? In a way, yeah. And it was really rough and yelly and just kind of yelling at me. And then I was down with in the cell for a few days and I got caught up again. Maybe it was just the next day or the day after, so.

And then it was a young Stasi guy, I guess just a few years older than me, friendly face, big eyes again, suntanned as if he'd already been on some kind of black Sea resort and sitting there and going. So I'm. Of course, they didn't get names. I'm the officer who's going to be interrogator for the entire time now. And we have to do a few things, have to take a few protocols down, and you have to tell me again everything that happened and how it happened, although we have the reports from the czechoslovakian branch of the border station and so on.

And then he goes, and by the way, you have the right to a lawyer. And in your case, the best would be lawyer Fogel. Here's the address, and you can write to him at the end today. And I just couldn't believe it. I thought, this would be so hard to get, that lawyer.

And he just offered it to me. And in a way, this interrogator never pressured me. Into anything. He never said, what have you done? And you spoiled your entire life.

And he knew about this, obviously, and I'm not portraying him in a very humane way, but he just, you know, in a way, I went through that sort of interrogation once, stuck to my guns in terms of, I didn't go. And they say it was a mistake. Can you please let me out? I don't want to be here. And they didn't really try hard.

And that kind of really boded well in terms of, you know, being sent to the west. I did not know at the time that the west german government was buying political prisoners free, that they would actually pay hard cash, deutsche marks, to buy prisoners free. Or, as the rumor went, whole coal wagons towards the end of the east german republic for. And there were different prices for a doctor would cost them more than a skilled worker, would cost them more than a student. So that's all stuff, you know, afterwards.

But I just thought, well, lawyer Fogel, that must. That's the guy who gets you to the west. And I thought, that would be much harder. And they must already have made up their mind, let's not try again. Let's just let them go.

There's more important things to be. To be dealt with. And in a way, I really believe that this was the case at that time. In May and June 89, there was already so much going on behind the scenes. East Germany, although there was, you know, pretty much the state was still keeping tabs on everything.

The Hungarians hadn't opened the iron curtain yet. Nobody was running out through a hole in the fence. Nobody was demonstrating on the streets yet. But the churches were already going big since the late eighties on the church groups as being kind of civil rights groups and burger Rechtler in Germany. And they had completely other cases to deal with than us three idiots who just tried to escape like so many others.

And probably there were hundreds of people. And that's also the other thing I said to my cellmate at the beginning. I said, so what are you here for? Why are you in here? And he goes, like, what do you mean?

I'm here for what? Everybody in this building is here for trying to escape. There's nobody else in this building. Maybe a couple who held up a protest poster or got arrested in a church circle, but that's it. The rest is virtually all people trying to escape.

And he told me his escape story, which is the one. He's one of those who got arrested by having Steig Eisen. So these kind of spikes on you for the feet to climb the iron curtain in the boot of their car 60 km from the, from the border. So I heard lots of kind of escape stories in these months there. And yeah, so it was of course it was rough, it was new, it was.

You were in prison, there was no doubt about it but I had imagined it much worse. Also in contrast to the czechoslovakian prison, it was pretty much being home in East Germany and being in a, being well fed and you know we had 30 minutes of going out every day into the inner cell yard in a way this kind of roofed cell things maybe 10 m² big where you could do your little rounds and above you could see a guard walking and looking into all these different small courtyards and to kind of get some fresh air. I remember it was balmy. Late May, June. It was really like the trees were all kind of dark green and it was lovely outside.

And when I then had to change cells it wasn't in the afternoon anymore. We had our outdoors half hour but early morning and we were even, you know, we didn't even want to go out because it was like too early, like six or like 630 or 07:00 was too fresh. But of course they made us go out so there was no negotiation with them. But same with medication and so on. You couldn't have your inhaler from my asthma.

It was like you had to give it to them. They need to press the button, the buzzer and then the light would go on above your cell on the outside. And then whenever they bothered they would come and ask what the matter is. And then they also did what we called the wishing round. Every evening before lights out they came around and asked anything for the protocol, anything that needs to happen on the next day, that sort of thing.

Yeah. And then when you needed your medication you need, you got your inhaler, then you gave it back to them, that sort of thing. And it was quite surprising. And meanwhile once a week also you were called up for interrogation for the next bit in the bureaucratic process, the next bit to fill out and this and that. And meanwhile the interrogator was typing away on his typewriter a Stasi file which I now have, which is a big fat folder and nothing else is in there apart from that.

Ian Sanders
Did your parents come to see you there? Yes. That was the hardest day. So on the topic of writing letters, so I could write a letter as soon as I was in the Dresden prison, in the Stasi prison. And one of the first days I could write a letter, of course the first letter I wrote, I got straight back from the interrogator and said, you can't write this, you can't write that.

Henrik
You can't tell anything that's in here. Not even positive. I wrote stuff like, oh, they are well fed. I wasn't allowed to say that that was information should not go out because, you know, what do the people out there do with that information? So I could really just write, I miss you, I'm in prison.

I did something stupid, something like this. Yeah. And then. But nothing about any details about the inside of that prison. And so that was all checked by the Stasi, and then it was collected in by them and allegedly sent off.

But when my parents came to visit in mid June, that was like, several weeks after I had been away from home, they had received, like, one or two letters from me. And when I got the first letter from them, I don't know, it must have been two or three weeks after I had what I thought sent off my first letter. That letter said, you never write. So the Stasi had necessarily sent on my letters, and that was, again, some sort of game, I think, that was played there. And so then I wrote again.

And then they had a few letters when they came to visit, and that was really rough. That was the day when I really didn't want to be there anymore at all and had my doubts about the whole thing because my mother was really not well, my father was kind of stone faced, and he's a really, really easy going, lovely guy. And he was just kind of sitting there and said, I'm going to be a ferryman, a ferry boatman on the river. Elbert. That was always kind of his definition of a low down job, which he will do if he gets kicked out of university, you know.

And so you must imagine a little square table and my parents opposite each other, and me and the Stasi guy opposite each other on the other side. So pretty much a very close encounter, me and my parents. And the Stasi guy was just nicely nodding over to my parents and saying their names to them and saying, yeah, and yeah, yeah, almost like a teacher and a parent's evening. It was almost like that. And of course, I had to kind of.

My parents couldn't say much, and we had to kind of just discuss that. And I had to kind of say to them, I want to believe that I can, I need to go to the west, and everything will be fine once I'm there. Yeah. Stasika was just kind of, you know, neither shook his hand nor he was nodding. He was just sitting there listening to everything and making sure that, you know, nothing happened.

And they could bring stuff. They brought me stuff like food and things, and. And I could have that over the next week. They would search. They brought me.

I don't know where they got them from, because they had yogurts from the west. I don't know how they got them from there. Must have been because my grandmother was not alive anymore. So they had some even, like, western fruit yogurts for me, which you could never buy in East Germany. And all of that in a kind of a little parcel for me.

And the Stasi would give you this bit by bit. You could actually say, I want this. But now I went that way, but not all at once. So on that day, I was so down that I asked as soon as I was back in the cell, I was there. I told my cellmate all about it.

And then I pressed the buzzer, and the guard outside came pretty swiftly because they know who'd been in for what kind of. I suppose they had some sort of logbook like this one spin had a visit today or something like this. So a guy comes, I say to the officer, I say, could I speak to my interrogator, please? So he took note, and virtually 20 minutes later, I was up there, which usually when you did that, when you ask for interrogator, you would sit for about two or three days before they call you up. And there he was and leaning back in his seat, always in front of the window, whereas you were facing the window on this long table.

The whole room smells of linoleum and cardboard and old files. Yeah. And you're sitting there. And so I say, well, you've witnessed today the state my parents were in, and what would it be if I said that I've made a mistake? Would I be let out?

And then so he leans back and goes, it's entirely your decision. I'm not going to advise you either way. He couldn't say to me, I want you to go to the west. But he did not put any. He could have put pressure on right there.

And then, like that interrogator, the other interrogator, on the very first day, he did not. So he just leans back and goes, you know, it's your decision. Entirely your decision. If you did that, we. You would probably come out before the trial, which is kind of in about two weeks.

We would let you out in about two weeks time, but, of course, you would not go back to. You would not be able to take up your university place in September. You would not just go and choose somewhere to work. We would put you in one of the state owned factories, the faux EB Volks agnew tribe people owned enterprise, they were called, and we would expect you to write some reports on what's being said. He didn't say that clearly in these terms, but it was clear what he meant, that you would have to do some jobs for us.

One hand washes the other. And I just said to him straight there. And then, no, I can't. I don't want to do that. I can't.

I just go back to my cell and think about it. And then I went back and I told my cellmate that, and he, oh, well done. Well done. You did the right thing, because I was still doubting myself. And he goes, no, you did the right thing.

You would just so not regret that. And so on. Stick to your gun, that sort of talk. Yeah. But I'm still so amazed about what was going on behind the scenes in this last year of East Germany.

And I'm sure in previous years this would have been a different conversation, let's say early eighties, late seventies, something like this. But the way they did not exercise any pressure, they gave you straight away the lawyer that you really hoped you would get by some miracle, that's still puzzling to me today. And that was that story. And then, you know, we had the trial, and something happened at the trial, which I was told by my friends, who I hadn't seen since we had been processed in Berlin. And so I hadn't seen them for two and a half months.

And then at the trial in late July, early August, I saw them. And, you know, obviously, lawyer Vogel wasn't personally dealing with us. We know now that he was a lawyer from East Germany who was actually a Stasi employee. But he was too big to be just that. He was also employed by the west german government, or if not employed, he had a registered office, a lawyer office practice in West Berlin and in East Berlin.

So he was a lawyer on both sides, and he did the negotiations. Of course, he didn't turn up to defend us in a, in a provincial city for, you know, he was dealing with the spies, with the big people, with the business people and so on, and the sports personalities. And so we had a sub lawyer, unter Anwald, and he came to defend, in inverted commas, what there was to defend. I mean, we're all kind of saying, yeah, we did that, and we still sticking to it. There was nothing to kind of convince anybody you know, and.

And then the law, the. The verdict was passed as. As expected, in the name of the people, you know. And. And the.

The judge was leaning in big time. He was kind of really going. And then what the lawyer did was just say, oh, yeah. But they were all very good students, actually, because I did the scab year and the other two were already at uni and they had skyped so many seminars. And in East Germany, it wasn't just like, you can turn up to uni when you want and go to the lectures you want.

It was pretty much, they would keep a book, who's turning up for the seminars and the lectures? And these two guys hadn't my friends, so that was held against them, whereas I was. I think he pleaded for me for a slightly lighter sentence because I had been such a good worker in the meanwhile, something like this. That was all he could say. And because we were three, it was already a heavy case, like a case which.

How would you say that in English? It wasn't just a light case. There were circumstances which made our case asking for a higher sentence. And that circumstance was the fact that we were three. If you had just been in East Berlin on your own and in the heat of the moment, yes, something like this, a planning.

Planning had been going on. If you just do a knee jerk reaction and you're on East Berlin and see checkpoint Charlie and make a run for it, you would get like a year. And for us, it was already the fact that we had planned, had a map and where the three of us was already asking for at least one year and ten months, and that's what we got, and all of us the same thing. And then just before we separated, my friend said to me, oh, and by the way, the lawyer told me and the other one, that just see it through about two thirds of the sentence and you'll be in the west. I said, why did he not say that to me?

Why? What's going on? I felt really sick to the stomach. And I was really thinking in my head, with the other two's parents being just normal East Germans. One was a car mechanic, the other one, yeah, was a doctor, but not something which, in the same kind of league that my dad was at university.

And so I thought it must have to do with that. It must be that, you know, I wasn't allowed to have friends in the west. We had to get letters from my grandmother via other people from the west, not directly to our house, to our dress. That was impossible. How on earth can my father have a son in the west.

So in those moments, I thought, that's not going to happen. I'm going to be one of the 1015 percent of escape would be escapees who's going to be stuck in East Germany and get let out after full sentence and work in the churchyard or something like this, because the church would be the only ones giving me some sort of job. And I was really, really scared. And I asked to see the lawyer, but of course, I wasn't at the Stasi anymore. After the trial, I was in the police prison in Dresden, which was the roughest of the rough.

It was an old imperial building from the Kaiserreich. It was like how you imagine it, with cockroaches, with bars and dark cells. And first I was with a guy who, as an East German. Now imagine this as an East German. He was an IRA supporter.

This guy had never been to Ireland. He'd never been to Britain. But he must have read a book or something. Yeah, Cal. Or something like this.

Like some kind of book about the. The IRA. And he had a tattoo of the irish map on his arm in the orange skin color and green colored in the shape of the island with Ira underneath. And he had the sort of John Lennon hairstyle, like long hair behind the ears and really thick glasses. So he kind of looked apart in a way, like, I would imagine that.

And I don't know what the agenda was. He was in prison for beating up a foreigner. And in East Germany, there weren't many foreigners. They were from other socialist countries to train in factories like Vietnamese, Angolans and Mozambique, from the third world sort of countries going the socialist way. And he had beaten one of them up.

And then. So he was in for that. And then I was taken to a cell with somebody who had killed a taxi driver and another guy who did some dodgy dealings with the russian soldiers. And so they were young guys, and that was a six square meter cell for three people in a triple bed above each other. Yeah.

And so I think I was top, which is actually the good bed, but I was up there and then. So that was awful. And nothing happened for four weeks in there. So in these circumstances, I tried to write to my lawyer, and there weren't many kind of occasions where they actually would say, you can write now, because you had to be taken somewhere, given paper and pen and so on. It wasn't the same as the stasi.

It was really hard. I don't remember how I got it in the end. So I wrote to the lawyer, and again, of course, nothing happened. That was like this the week I felt the sickest, these kind of three weeks there was awful. And then the lawyer turns up, like at Koto's office and just sits there and with his kind of, you know, golden rings on his hands and golden teeth and this big glasses, intelligent looking man in a really nice suit and so really impressive.

I should sit there and say, oh, you said this and this to my friends at the trial that they probably would be let out after two thirds of their sentence and after having served two thirds and to the west, not to worry. Just stick to it. Why did you not say this to me? He just looked at me trying to think, like, wait a minute, that was a while ago. Yeah, okay.

And then he said, I give no guarantees. And he just shook his head. I give no guarantees, is all I heard from him. And then I said, is it because of my dad? He just shook his, he just shrugged his shoulders and said, I give no guarantees.

And kind of confirmed to me, me. So I didn't feel any better after that. Not at all. And that was, this, for me, was like the roughest part of the entire. I mean, obviously that first visit by my parents and then that kind of waiting for some sort of word of hope which never materialized.

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Henrik
Well, that was just kind of the holding prison, the police prison in the center of trace. It's like a remand prison. Yeah, it's kind of. It was loads going on. It was like in the movies, people clap, you know, it's like these kind of barred gates and just kind of iron gates and people on the corridors, and you couldn't really go out of your cell, but you had to go and wash sometimes and shower and all of that sort of thing.

And it was just like nobody knew. I could see sometimes my friends from the window, like when I look through the bars down. So in the Stasi prison, you couldn't look out. It was all kind of glass bricks, but in that thing, you could look out and you could see down in the courtyard them walking in a bigger circle, or the prisoners. And I saw my friend and I shouted at him and he shouted back.

And we had some communication there and there was lots going on. When these prisoners would communicate via the drains, they would talk to each other. You could talk into the Louvre and you could hear them below and stuff like this. Yeah. And they would kind of smuggle things in little matchboxes on a string.

So there was this sort of thing you just didn't want to know about. It wasn't your world and you didn't want to be with these people. And it was just all, ah, no. And then after four weeks in there, we were taken to Dresden Central Station in a big group of political prisoners. Everybody who was, like, going because of trying to escape, I suppose, saw my friend again.

Actually didn't see him immediately, but we were like, handcuffed, walking through the train station, seeing normal people in their everyday life, and they saw us. That was, again, very weird. It's like marching prisoners of war through the streets. So of course it was a train at the back of the platform, but we had to get there first. Yeah.

So we went on a train which had milky glass windows and so you couldn't look out. And that train, I already knew my destination. I knew I would go to Rakwitz, which was somewhere near Leipzig. And then, whether by coincidence or on purpose, I was sitting opposite my friend, the one, the good friend, the one I was really good friends with. And we were in that kind of train compartment with, like, four others for the whole journey from Dresden to Leipzig, which takes about a couple of hours.

And he went on, he went further, so he knew he would go further on to another prison camp. And I would go to Ragwitz, near Leipzig, which was a steel factory and aluminum factory with a prison complex. So when I arrived there, it was meanwhile, late August, and something very, very big had happened. In that time I was in the police prison in Dresden, and that was the hungarian government organizing some cross border festivals of friendship with the Austrians, to which every East German on holiday, who any ever thought I might want to go and try to live in the west, just went there in their Trapansen wardboard cars and joined that festival and walked across the border where an austrian, and so virtually the hungarian government, had opened the iron curtain in certain places. And it was very unpredictable because people still got arrested in Hungary in other bits, but in some bits it was open.

And so when I arrived in Rakwitz, there were lots of political prisoners. It was about 60% political prisoners and 40% criminals in that prison. And these 60% politicos, of course, had nothing much to talk about then, the political climate and how do we get to the west? And it really annoyed the criminals because they had so many other interesting things to talk about, such as, why am I in? What did I steal, who did I beat up and who did I kill?

And then there are kind of everyday things of how many cigarette packets you get for which tattoo and things like this. So we were in there, just the criminals called it you and your room rumor mill. It's really doing a head in, they would have said, if they had spoken English, that sort of thing. So I arrived there and the mood was down amongst the politicals, because they were waiting to be already. Some people were in there already for months.

And it was. It should have been by normal course of affairs. They should. Should have been picked up already and sold to the west, ship to the west. And they said to me, no single bus has come.

Coach, police coach has come to pick anybody up in weeks. And that's because we know from stories that in Hungary, the borders open, and we will be the last that are sitting here. We will be the last workforce of East Germany when everybody else is left. We're not going to get out now. This is too late.

And we always thought we would be the last ones to get out. And now we thought, nah, we're the ones who stay behind. And that was pretty much the mood in that prison. And it was a typical work camp, in a way, that you had to work a three shift system in the factory bit, and then you would spend the rest of your time in the barracks around some inner courtyard in the shadow of some massive chimneys. Factory chimneys, which would blow down stinky old smoke and that sort of thing.

Yeah. And then you were in some sort of prison cell, like these kind of open barracks were one, two, three. About eight people in it. Eight or ten people in double. Double beds, like above.

Bunk beds. Bunk beds, sorry. And. And there were lots of different kind of guys. There were quite a few neo Nazis, actually, there they had arrested.

So meanwhile, East Germany had a neo nazi problem. And skin hats, they were just called skinheads, but they were pretty right wing and they were talking a lot of racist nonsense while they were in there. And. But, you know, again, we. There was a library.

There was even one day a week, one of the. I think he was a doctor or something. He had organized a classical music listening, so there was a record player and you could sign up for that. And they would listen, just have some vinyl records of Beethoven or Schubert or something, and we would listen to, like a record, just sit still and listen to that music and things like this. And of course, for the criminals, that was just too highbrow.

They would hate that. But that was the typical thing us political prisoners would do in there. And then you had to go to the shift. So I happened to start on a night shift. And of course, I had done night shifts in my gap year, so called gap year in that data processing factory in Dresden.

Actually, also twelve hour night shifts. So I kind of was used to this sort of thing, but I hadn't done it for a while and I was really tired. And my job was to sort bad aluminium pieces from good ones, like Cinderella. I was sitting there with another political person who had just arrived, and we were just chucking these into this. Into this box or that box.

So then we go back in the morning and go to bed and a minute, I must have just fallen asleep a few minutes later because I was sleepy. I was. I slept on the top of the bunk bed. This kind of face is right in front of my face and it's a prison guard with a. With a big moustache.

I think he looked a bit like Freddie Mercury. And he was shouting at me in German. Yeah. What I was doing that I would go to the isolation tract for the statement I had made during the night shift. I said, what statement?

I don't remember anything. He goes like, yeah, you and the other guy. It was reported that you had said you would not want to work for the east german government anymore, that you were doing a bad job on purpose, kind of sabotaging the work in a way, that sort of thing, and making stupid comments. So we had never said anything like this. But the criminals, of course, were the shift leaders.

They were like, what? You know, I'm really not going to draw any parallels to any nazi encampment, so I'm not going to use any of the words for the roles prisoners had there, because it was not the same. I've got to be really, really clear. It was not the same. This was kids stuff compared to what was going on in nazi times.

Absolute kids stuff. And I have to say that East Germany was not the Third Reich, despite all the profitnesses and so on. Yeah, so. But I was taken to this dark cell for a statement because one of the shift leaders, a criminal, had observed us just being tired and being a bit sloppy with our Cinderella job. And so we were.

I was just marched up and I don't remember how long I was in there for. Several days, one, two, three days. No more than one. And it was completely dark and the bed was up against the wall during the day and there was virtually nothing to think about and nothing to look. There was a bit of light coming in from somewhere, but it was really that.

And then when I was let out again, I think that was the weekend. Then I came out and the whole track was kind of applauding me. Oh, nobody's managed that within the first day of arriving here to go straight into isolation. And that was the deed of these political prisoners who hated us so much. And any new teenage or early twenties guy who turned up had to be put through the motions.

So there was this guy called Pierre. Pierre was. He looked a bit like a neanderthal, in a way. He had a very low brow, virtually. His hair, you know, his hairline was very low down, just short, blonde, curly hair.

And he was tattooed from forehead down to his toes. And I know that because we all had to get undressed. So when we. When we went to the factory where it was called the white part, where you put your prison clothes into some sort of. Somebody took them in.

Then you had to go through the showers, of course, you didn't show up before, but just walk through naked. And then you got your dirty clothes on the other end. And then we had to work on the way back. We got to shower. And then, of course, after one of my first shifts, I showered.

There was just holes in this, in the pipe, in the ceiling. And I showered there. And then suddenly this kind of guy comes up at me, who I hadn't known at that point yet, but he was basically. He was called Pierre. And it was this tattooed guy.

And he just comes up, quite muscular, really, like, no, naked and full of tattoos, and just hits me right in the jazz with the big fist hit and points at the hole in the. In the pipe and says, this is my shower hole. Don't you ever stand here again. How do you not know that sort of thing? He didn't say that much.

He just said, that's my shower hole. And so, you know, I was really in pain. I just couldn't hardly breathe. Went somewhere else. And then the same evening when it was dinner, he was the guy dishing out the food.

So everybody just moves up with a bowl and gets one ladle full of potato goo, something. Yeah. And when I come, he just keeps shoveling and shoveling. So first I think, that's great. I'm getting extra portions here.

And then he just overfills the thing and just looks at me and says, say, stop. And calls me a name. And then chucks this whole food over me. Yeah. So I didn't have anything in the end, and somebody else had to share it with me.

And they just went, the other. The other prisoners just went, oh, just, you know, it's just. He does that to loads of people at the beginning. And so it was kind of one of the next days, the next load of political prisoners arrives. And the prisons were full in East Germany in the late eighties and in 89, because they also arrested now people in the demonstrations that kicked off all around East Germany, because people felt emboldened by the fact that they could escape through Hungary.

So now suddenly, they dared going out on the streets in protest. And of course, initially the reaction was quite fierce and many got arrested. So the prisons were full and with political prisoners. And the next day, it was somebody else's turn, virtually. But Pierre had to kind of put you through that to show who's boss.

Ian Sanders
It's the pecking order and. Which exists in many institutions. It's not just that. And of course, you know, there was one business within this kind of state owned factory prison system, and the one private business was making tattoos.

Henrik
So anybody who could draw well would draw on trace through paper, which for some reason was available, and pens were available. If you could draw naked women really well, he would draw them and pass them on to a guy who would tattoo them onto somebody's back, upper arm or something like this. Yeah, they would do this at night in the bathrooms, because it's the only place where there was light, and they would use just normal needles, sewing needles, and some face cream for disinfection and school ink. And they would ink people. Of course, outside tattoos was not known in East Germany.

And I think in the eighties, it wasn't a thing anywhere, nowhere as big as it is today. So these people would tattoo each other, and then the guy who drew the artwork would get cigarette packets as payment, and then, at a profit, would sell this on to the guy who did the tattooing and so on. And then the one who got the tattoo would pay, obviously, the most for it. So this was going on there, and there were stories of, I hadn't met these people, but somebody died because they over tattooed. They put a jean suit on him, and the kind of.

The skin gave, you know, something like this. I don't know whether so true or not or even possible. And one, um. One got dismissed, let out of prison before the tattoo was finished. So the legend had it, he came back in to have that Eiffel Tower on the back finished, because it was the only place.

Nice children. And these are kind of the episodes. But, um. Why am I saying this? There was a guy called Charlotte because he had eye shadow tattooed on.

Ian Sanders
Charlotte. Charlotte. Yeah. He was called Charlotte because he had kind of makeup tattooed on. He was done with life outside, and he just made it look like this.

Henrik
It was bit like Cleopatra, like, going out on the sides, like, you know, like big eyeshadow on in green and black. And so this guy was also one who gave us grief. And I made quite a few new friends there and there amongst the political prisoners. I was sitting with one of them and learning French because we had asked our parents to bring our french books from school. And so we were sitting on the bed and going.

And, you know, just reading texts to each other in French. And the guy gets really. He sits by the table and has his back tattooed by somebody else. It was like one of the weekends again in the afternoon, and he really berates us from, do you think you're something better? And stuff like that?

Yeah. And then we just continued. And then he got up and walked out. And what they had tattooed on his back was born to be wild, but it was completely misspelled. It had wild with a y, and two was t, u, and B was by as well.

And so when we saw that this was forever etched into his skin, we just thought, you know, you do your thing, we do ours, and we just kind of really laughed at them. What happened when the political prisoner amnesty was announced? The amnesty was announced, I think, the 23 October 89 for political prisoners. That's when the criminals hated us the most, because they knew they would be there still when we all go out. And, of course, our rumor mill, as they called it, was now going on high tours.

And so the amnesty was announced for political prisoners that everybody would get out of prison. And nothing happened then for a whole week. Not a single one got released. And, of course, we were all kind of, whoa, whoa, whoa. And now the first talks are happening with the camp commander, so to say, with the prison guards and the police.

And it took a while until it was my turn, about five days. And then, yeah, I was sitting there and the guys said, yeah, you'll be released tomorrow. And I'm just. It was two days before the world came down on the 7 November. And.

And he says, I'm just telling you, do not be so stupid again, and run against the Berlin Wall. Of course, at that point, we didn't know the Berlin Wall would be open in two days. But there are many legal ways which are really easy now. Legal as in their system of legal. I never, of course, think that I've done anything illegal in the greater schemes of things.

And so I just got released and then was glad to leave Pierre and Charlotte behind. And I didn't even immediately go to the west. I went back to my hometown and had my passport stamped that I would be dismissed from East Germany, that sort of thing. And then traveled just by normal train to West Germany, to my aunt at the end of this, in mid November. So where were you when the Berlin Wall opened?

I was back home in my teenage room, so to say. And quite a few friends from school had come around because they had heard about me and what happened, and they just wanted to talk about what it was like in prison, what I've just done with you. And then suddenly the door opens and my mom comes in. And, by the way, my parents were completely changed. She comes in completely enthused.

Come to the television. The Berlin Wall is open. It's on tally. That was even on the east german telly. Something that I don't think they showed the big pictures that, you know, nowadays with people on the wall and having all this.

But there was some sort of state announcements, something in the news, something where, something, you know. Of course, they wouldn't say something went wrong, but. And so the wall is open. Come and have a look. And I just, you know, said, I'm coming in a minute.

I just want to talk to my friends. And as it goes with these big historical events, when you're right in the middle of them, you don't see the magnitude necessarily. And I just saw the pictures as everybody else much later, in hindsight. So that's why I was. I was just touching base with my, with my friends after a long time, after half a year, I was in prison for half, for six months and two days.

Yeah, that's. That's what that was. Did Pierre and Charlotte ever share their story as to how they ended up in prison? They were just not part of your crowd. You would just always be with the political ones.

You would walk in circles with them in the nicole. You would just think about the rumor mill. That was all. Yeah. And, oh, have you realized there's lots of police outside the prison being like, pulled together, and that's because of the demonstrations in Leipzig and so on.

So there, you know, there's a lot going on outside. And of course, even in the east german newspaper, there wouldn't be anything about the demonstrations, but you could sense and read that people were. That things were changing. I remember one thing. The jungle, the young world, was the youth newspaper paper for the youth organization, the free German Youth.

And in there was an article when I was in Ruckwitz prison camp by a guy, a young guy my age, who had escaped to the west in the summer and come back because he didn't like it. That's probably a made up story or something. Yeah. But it was saying, oh, it was awful, and everybody was unemployed and people were really unfriendly, that sort of Arctic, and you could read. And then with what your, your parents were telling you on, on the visits.

I had two visits by, by them during my time in Ruckwitz. It all kind of made sense. And you knew what was going on. Yeah. And until that amnesty was announced, everybody was really down because nobody had been released from prison on that magical boss which would take you to the Golden Cage prison, the Vogelbauer, the bird cage, where lawyer Vogels clients would end up before they got shipped to the west, which was this mythical place nobody only people knew about from rumors about, but which really existed, that prison in back then, Karl Marx, now Chemnitz, where you would be taken if you actually got sold to the west.

And you would spend two weeks there being sun tanned and some sort of sun studios and being fed really good food, so you would look healthy and well relaxed when they release you out of that bus in West Germany. And we know this now, and there's movies about this and so on, but that was like what we were hoping for. But it hadn't happened because the political situation had changed. But when the amnesty was announced, we knew we're out, and we can. We will find a way to go.

Yeah. When your parents had those other visits, did you see any change in them because of what was happening within the country? Pretty much the climate, the social climate in a country like East Germany, which is some sort of repressive dictatorship, and people are always interested in what other people are doing. And of course, we know nowadays how many people informally spied for the Stasi, whether out of their own will or because they were forced and blackmailed into it. It was a country of paranoia.

There was a lot of paranoia, and nobody was really free of that. And probably we as teenagers, were the most careless with it. But anybody who was a bit more experienced and older would be very careful and you would be very concerned about perception, how you were perceived or your family was perceived. And when I got arrested, my parents knew nobody who had done something similar, apart from the two guys I was with, who they had known, because they were my friends before. Yeah.

So they knew nobody. This was exceptional. This was. Why us? This was.

I don't dare to go to the shopping center anymore because people might ask me and see me and I don't dare go out in the street, that sort of thing. Yeah. And it was very much, how on earth did this happen to us? This sort of almost like strike of destiny. And then I, you know, during that first visit, that pretty much came across visit in Stasi prison.

But then when they visited me in Rakwitz in the work camp, late August, it was completely changed. My mother was like, and this person is gone and that family is gone and they've gone to the west and they went to Hungary and went across. And then this. And this person, they're thinking about it and it was just like this. And.

And, yeah, we will support you in your way. And it was suddenly. And it was pretty much. I do not judge my parents in any shape or form. Everything they've done was completely natural.

But within the context of this, the social climate in the country, it was.

It changed as much as conditions outside changed, as if some sort of pressure cooker had been taken off, some sort of switch had been turned because everybody else was now doing what I had done, or at least loads of people. And. And of course, the east german government tried to react. You suddenly couldn't go to Czechoslovakia anymore because you needed to go through this in order to get to Hungary and so on. So they tried to make it real.

People got arrested for going to Czechoslovakia just because they had a torch in their luggage when they were going camping, because that was seen as like a tomb to escape in the night. And so suddenly this was a thing which my parents kind of at least accepted, saw that it was happening and me being their son, and they always said, you always have son. That's not going to change. So we will support you in this, and hopefully you can go to your aunt in the west after that. And it was, for me, it was a very big relief to see that change within virtually two months.

Ian Sanders
And how did they get on during the vendor? I mean, did they retain their jobs or lose their jobs? My mother didn't want to teach anymore. That was just something, having been in that east german system. She just found the whole new.

Henrik
She just didn't want to add her age. She didn't want to start with a whole new west german real or gymnastium kind of syllabus. So she just. She worked for my uncle for a while in the. In the car garage, which now had switched from Moskvich and Volga to Opel voxel.

It was the Opel house. Yeah. And so your uncle did all right, did he? He did all right. Yeah, he did all right.

And then. So he got an opal contract as a dealer. An opal dealer and garage. And then. And my father, basically, he got voted by the students of the university on the back of all of this because they had kind of known in those, in the new term in September, October, when people could speak more freely about things, the students had known what somehow what had been going on with me and him and so on.

And he was a candidate for the new rector or deacon or something like this of the university department. And he got voted by the students to this position and had a really good career after that in West Germany, in the United States. And they never went different places to. But, yeah. And he went on several antarctic explorations afterwards, this time with the Americans and the Argentinians.

So he went on to their stations. Thing. I saw. I saw my Stasi interrogator again in Dresden after the fall of the wall. So I went.

When I came back, just on, I think, Christmas or something. So I had gone to the west in the autumn. So I had gone back from prison to my hometown, and a week later I was in. In the Ruhr area in west Germany. And then I had come back for Christmas and then we went to cinema and Dresden, and he sat, like two rows in front of me and I said to my girlfriend, that's him.

That's him. And he saw me and he walked suddenly very fast. So I didn't address him or speak to him, but he saw me sit down when everybody walked out. He just kind of liked it. Don't miss this the episode extras such as videos, photos, and other content.

Ian Sanders
Just look for the link in the podcast information. The podcast wouldn't exist without the generous support of our financial supporters, and I'd like to thank one and all of them for keeping the podcast on the road. The Cold War conversation continues in our Facebook discussion group. Just search for cold War conversations info. Facebook thanks very much for listening and see you next week.

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Saturday Matinee: Cold War Conversations

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1: The Escape Plan

2: Discovery and Capture

3: Prison Experiences

4: Life in the Work Camp

5: Reflections and Resilience

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