Stasi Child (40 page)

But she is Mutti.

My Mutti.

She is home. And I know that in accepting
Oberstleutnant
Jäger’s arrangement, I have made the right choice.

61

March 1975.

A forest near East Berlin.

The Stasi officer was disorientated by all the deliberate false turns and stopping and starting inside the Barkas van; for the prisoner, it would be even worse. He would have little idea, if any, of their location. The officer knew they were somewhere on the outskirts of the Hauptstadt, but no more than that. He was fully aware of the job he had to do, but not how it fitted into the larger picture; he didn’t even know what the prisoner was guilty of. But for them to be here, for him to have been assigned this task, it would have to be something serious. It was usually espionage: undermining the Republic, helping the fascists and counter-revolutionaries in their attempts to destroy the socialist state of workers and peasants.

He listened as the guards dragged the prisoner out of the van and tried in vain to shut out the noise of the screams, the protestations, the terror. Of course, very occasionally there would be a late intervention. Or the ritual would be followed to the very edge of the precipice, before it was suddenly aborted and the prisoner taken back to whichever jail he had come from. Usually a ‘he’. Not always, but usually. An extreme form of
Zersetzung
, of psychological terror: the last trick in the arsenal to try to break them, to get them to confess.

This, though, was not
Zersetzung
.

The moment was near. He shuffled his hands into the white gloves, which wouldn’t stay white for long.

He picked up the case and – crouching – made his way out of the van.

They were in a forest clearing, surrounded on all sides by spruce trees, the air fresh and crisp, a welcome contrast to the Hauptstadt’s pollution and smog.

The officer adjusted the gloves, bent down and clicked open the aluminium case. The weapon was already prepared, checked, oiled. He’d done all that back at Hohenschönhausen.

Kneeling in front of him on the forest floor, constrained in a straitjacket and held by a guard on each side, the prisoner was quieter now. No more screaming, no more protestations of innocence through the heavy fabric of the hood that covered his head.

The officer loaded the gun, released the safety catch and then held the barrel against the back of the prisoner’s skull. The accused tried to flinch away, began shouting unintelligibly through the close-knit material. But it was too late now.

The officer paused for a moment as a bird chattered overhead to allow the solemnity of the occasion to settle on the forest, to allow the condemned his last thoughts.

Then he squeezed the trigger.

EPILOGUE

March 1975.

The island of Rügen, East Germany.

The woman’s eyes darted around the handful of people in the café, never resting for more than a moment, moving on before any return gaze could challenge her. Where was he? This was the correct meeting place, she had made sure she was on time, but none of the customers here carried the package that was the agreed signal. She glanced down at her watch. He was ten minutes late already. She resumed her surreptitious observation: watching, but not wanting to be watched.

Were any of the others in the café informers? The waitress who’d just brought her coffee – the one with the painted-on, over-blacked eyebrows and a sour, Pomeranian farmer’s-wife demeanour. She looked like a loyal party type. Or the unshaven man in the grey fishing sweater, sitting in the corner nursing a beer even though it was not yet midday. He hadn’t drunk a drop of it. She’d noted that.

The woman rubbed her hands together as though the chill of an Ostsee Easter had invaded the inside of the salon. In fact – under a portrait of a middle-aged man in horn-rimmed spectacles – an open fire crackled and spewed smoke, as though suffering indigestion from its meal of low-grade coal. She brought the coffee to her lips: the edge of the cup trembled against them, so that some of the liquid spilled. The woman smiled ruefully to herself. So careless.

She checked her watch once more, and then looked up again at Comrade Honecker’s portrait. She had the sensation he was watching her too, from behind the glass of the frame. For the last few years he and his ilk had held her captive, like a bird in a cage. A chief jailer with a network of helpers, who she knew were carefully trained to spy on people like her.

The woman was indeed being watched, but not by anyone in the café. Her observer was concealed by the shadow of a white wooden veranda on the opposite side of the resort’s main street. A slender figure, with an angular face barely visible inside a tightly drawn hood, seemingly busy sweeping the building’s entrance, but concentrating on watching the coffee shop, not the motion of the brush.

The hooded figure’s gaze became more alert as a man in an overcoat and suit approached, carrying a bouquet of spring flowers. There was something distinctive about them. They were too early for Rügen island flowers. The blooms seemed to attract the woman’s attention. She rose from her seat, hurriedly threw a couple of marks on the table and then rushed to join the man outside. Her face lit up as they embraced. Almost a look of love, but the hooded figure didn’t think that was what it was.

They moved off, walking up Wilhelm-Pieck-Strasse, past piles of cleared snow from the unseasonal blizzard just days earlier, the stems of the flowers bending in the bitter wind. They strolled towards the sea and the cliff steps that would take them down to the Seebrücke, with its wooden legs stretching out through the ice-cold water.

After a few moments, the figure on the veranda followed, keeping pace a few hundred metres behind the couple. The figure stopped at the telescope at the top of the cliff, the one used by children to watch passing ships in the summer. However, anyone checking the angle of the telescope would see it trained not out to sea, but to the end of the wooden pier. There the couple still talked, standing by a lamp post thickly iced with frozen sea spray. Winter’s grip clinging on until spring finally arrived.

After a few moments, the figure moved to a yellow public call box, just a few metres away.

A finger turned the dial, calling a Bergen auf Rügen number.

In Bergen, the Ministry for State Security operator heard the caller ask for
Hauptmann
Gerd Steiger.

‘Can I ask who’s calling?’ asked the operator.

In the call box, the figure drew back her hood and ran her fingers through her newly styled red hair.

‘Tell him it’s Wildcat. Tell him the subject has made contact.’

The girl with the angular looks waited for Steiger. She wondered if she was doing the right thing, but she was sure she was. That was the price of her freedom; the payment to avoid being sent back to the
Jugendwerkhof
. To be allowed to live with her grandmother.

To spy on her own mother.

After all, that was what she was.

Like Mathias before her.

A spy.

An informer.

A Stasi child.

GLOSSARY

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This novel is a work of fiction, but some of the story is inspired by true events – in particular the way the Stasi recruited young people. It is estimated that by the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, around six per cent of the Stasi’s 173,000 unofficial collaborators were under the age of eighteen. Recruitment of youths began in the 1970s and gathered pace in the 1980s. You can find out more in the book
Stasi Auf Dem Schulhof
by Klaus Behnke and Jürgen Wolf.

The favoured method of execution in East Germany was the guillotine up until the mid-1960s and from then on a bullet in the back of the head. The death sentence was not abolished until 1987. In 1982, the head of the Stasi, Erich Mielke, was quoted as saying that Stasi operatives should ‘execute if necessary, even without trial’. You can hear those chilling words as part of the exhibition at the Museum in der Runden Ecke, the old Stasi HQ in Leipzig.

Although the
Jugendwerkhof
featured in this book is fictional, the ‘closed’
Jugendwerkhof
at Torgau was notorious for sexual and physical abuse of the children there. One harrowing first-hand account comes from Heidemarie Puls, who was an inmate in the 1970s. Her book,
Schattenkinder hinter Torgauer Mauern
, provided some of the background inspiration for this novel. The only
Jugendwerkhof
on Rügen was shut down in the 1950s. However, Prora itself is still there and makes for an interesting visit.

The idea of Neumann and Ackermann’s fictional escape tunnel was inspired by one built for East German leader Erich Honecker. He had a fifty-metre escape route built under the Berlin Wall in the event his people turned against him. Like my fictional Ackermann, he never got the chance to use it.

The island of Vilm does exist and was used by the East German political elite. The story of sexual abuse set there in this novel is, however, entirely fictional, as is the fancy-dress party on the Brocken. The Soviet base at Gross Zicker on Rügen described in this book is fictional, but there was a base nearby at Klein Zicker (since dismantled).

I have no evidence that the children of
Jugendwerkhöfe
were involved in making furniture for the West. Political prisoners of the Stasi were however used to produce items of IKEA furniture in the 1970s and 1980s. This included the well-known Klippan sofa. In November 2012, the head of IKEA Germany, Peter Betzel, made a formal apology to a roomful of former prisoners after a report by auditors Ernst & Young confirmed that IKEA managers were aware of the practice.

The plotline of the repatriation agreement for under-sixteens derives from a fascinating story on the internet called ‘Flight to Freedom’, told by a former American serviceman, Thomas Pucci. Thomas and his friend Harry Knights witnessed a fourteen-year-old boy escape near the ‘Doppel housing area’ in Berlin one day in the mid-1970s. Harry even took photos. But although the boy successfully evaded the death strip and reached the West, Thomas says he was taken into custody by the West Berlin authorities. Three days later, according to newspaper headlines, he was returned to the East under the terms of the ‘agreement’.

Sending Stasi agents to the West to get a hire car back to the East for forensic tests did actually happen in a murder case from 1977 related to me by Dr Remo Kroll, author of
Die Kriminalpolizei im Ostteil Berlins (1945–1990)
. The Stasi did have a special homicide division and would become closely involved if the suspect was related to the ruling party, the SED (Socialist Unity Party). And they did sometimes take over criminal investigations from the
Kripo
– Dr Kroll cites the example of the 1986 murders of babies in a Leipzig hospital.