Coward

My name is Günther Schreiber, and I am a coward.

One cannot choose where one is born; being born in Berlin in 1942, in the middle of the war, might seem like an announced curse. Anyone would say my fate was sealed, verpfuscht, when I appeared in this world in that swampy, putrid land that had been the scene of so much suffering since time immemorial. The terrible Thirty Years’ War. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden’s armies plundering, raping, and murdering Berliners, whose favourite tortures for civilians were mutilating, roasting, boiling them, or making them drink what they merrily called “the Swedish drink”: sewage water. To the “Soldier King,” Frederick William, we owe the greatness of the Prussian Army, instrument of the Silesian Wars and the invasion of the Kingdom of Saxony. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Napoleon entered Berlin victorious, marching with his army along Unter den Linden boulevard and through the Brandenburg Gate. After suffering the French conqueror, a century full of internal conflicts followed until Germany united, and after that more horror: two terrible world wars. Berlin is a city built on blood and bones.

After the Second World War, the country was divided into the east, controlled by Russia, and the west, controlled by the Allies: America, Great Britain, and France. Berlin, the city of greatest industrial importance, although located in Russia-controlled East Germany, was also divided like a cake, with a communist eastern side and a capitalist western side divided into American, British, and French sectors. West Berlin was therefore a capitalist island behind the Iron Curtain. All the imaginable tensions and ridiculous situations undoubtedly occurred in divided Berlin. As would later all possible dramas and misfortunes. Despite the city’s political division, life proceeded with a certain normality; Berliners lived our lives on both sides of it, not without ever-increasing tension from the clash between the Soviet bloc in the east and the American bloc in the west: the Cold War.

My story begins in the summer of 1961, the year Greta Kühn and I fell hopelessly in love. We both lived in East Berlin but worked on the western side: she as a waitress at the Plaza hotel in the American sector, on the famous Kurfürstendamm avenue; I as an assistant in my university’s library, the Free University of Berlin. Studying and working in the West had advantages. One of the main ones was earning D-marks, West German marks, which at the exchange rate against Ostmarks, the marks of the German Democratic Republic, made one rich merely by crossing the street to the East. Another advantage was the range of American products; everything was better in the West, even the radio. But above all, the best thing the West had given me was Greta. We met in the winter of the previous year and shared our first kiss at New Year; what followed in 1961 was a classic young love story. We wanted to be together constantly and seized every chance to see each other. When spring came, we began having picnics in the city’s gardens, our Gartenlauben. Sometimes we went into the forests around Berlin, took the train out to lose ourselves somewhere in the countryside, and brought a basket with cheese and bread Greta stole from work and a bottle of wine I bought. We spread a blanket on the grass and spent the whole afternoon laughing and making love. When we were not together, we thought only about being together. We both often dreamed of moving to West Berlin, renting a small flat and living alone, saving enough over a couple of years to marry. We dreamed with our eyes open, talking about what our lives would be like, about our bright future. At the beginning of that summer, we began making the necessary arrangements. By the end of July, we had found a small flat and rented it with our combined wages. It was a rat hole, a dark little room with dirty walls and the smell of damp in the American sector, but it would be our little room; together we would turn it into a home. In the following days we began furnishing it with old furniture and decorating it. I remember the excitement we felt then, that feeling of owning the world, ready to begin the rest of our lives, fulfil every dream, and do everything together. Then came what would be remembered as Barbed-Wire Sunday, Stacheldrahtsonntag.

That Sunday in August, we awoke trapped in East Berlin. During the night, the army had surrounded West Berlin with barbed wire, preventing anyone from crossing. They interrupted trains; even the underground, die Untergrundbahn, which had allowed travel through the city between East and West, ceased to let eastern citizens pass to the western side. With one stroke they cut the city in two. Despite the city’s post-war political division, it had been common to move freely from one side to the other; it was normal for friends and families to live on opposite sides and visit each other constantly, and, as Greta and I did, normal to live on one side and work or study on the other. That day East Berliners awoke as prisoners. That day marked the beginning of the Berlin Wall. For years, many East Germans had travelled to Berlin to cross into the West and request political asylum, deserting communism in numbers that reached thousands per day. Although the communist government of the German Democratic Republic had made every kind of effort to halt desertion, more people from all over East Germany crossed every day into West Berlin and were taken to freedom through the air corridors. East Berlin itself was becoming deserted; young people, especially technically trained professionals, were gradually leaving the communist side, and the regime could not allow it. I remember the fear and disappointment Greta and I felt that Sunday, when we had planned to continue fixing up our flat, to which we could no longer return and perhaps never could again. We could not return to our jobs either, and I could not go back to university. That day and the next, all sorts of rumours circulated: that the closure was temporary, that the government would issue visas allowing people to move freely. We were all somewhat incredulous; the idea that the city might truly be permanently divided seemed impossible. Telephone lines to the West no longer worked, which should have been a clear sign that the barbed wire and the Grepos, the Grenzpolizei charged with guarding the border, would be permanent. By Tuesday we were desperate, and Greta proposed that the only solution was escape. It seemed impossible and too risky to me, but I yielded to the idea that we should spend time cycling around sections of the border to determine the best point to escape. Greta thought our best option would be to swim across the River Spree into the western side between Treptow and Kreuzberg, at night so as not to be seen so easily. The idea seemed taken from an adventure novel. We argued for hours, and when I knew I could not persuade her, I had to give in. I thought that the longer we spent planning it, the likelier she was to realise how risky and impossible escape was. To my surprise, she wanted to go the following night. I told her we needed a few days to plan, perhaps weeks, to watch activity on the river and see whether the situation changed and escape ceased to be necessary. I could not persuade her. She said—and she was right—that the more time passed, the more surveillance there would be and the more difficult escape would become. We agreed to meet the following night at a point on the river at midnight and watch for a few hours until we were sure we could swim without being detected. The next day we saw each other briefly in the morning only to go over the night’s plan. Everyone lived in a state of paranoia those days, especially those of us who had worked or studied in the West, because we were automatically considered suspects by the Stasi, the State Security Service, Staatssicherheitsdienst, dedicated to protecting the communist regime’s interests, principally from its own citizens. Greta and I feared we were being watched. The meeting was brief; we reviewed the place and time: midnight sharp. We said goodbye with a quick kiss. My heart raced; I felt the looming weight of guilt. I knew I was still considering my options and was not convinced by Greta’s plan; perhaps that would be the last time I saw her. I spent the rest of the day startled, consumed by anxiety over my options. I was convinced Greta’s plan could not work: we would be discovered and arrested, or worse, shot in the middle of the river. If I decided not to go, several things might happen. If Greta managed to escape, I would never see her again; if she aborted the plan because I did not show up, she would hate me for life; if she was arrested, I would never see her again and she would hate me for life. My palms were damp. I constantly dried them on my trousers, clenched my fists in desperation as the hours went by. When midnight came, I felt anguish followed by a brief relief. It was done: I had abandoned Greta to her fate and would not follow her plan. At that moment I hated her. I hated her for confronting me with an impossible choice. I resented her as I thought her plan might work and she might escape. I could not sleep. I waited for dawn and thought of looking for her; I wanted to see whether she had decided to stay. There was no time. Two Stasi men came for me, took me out of my flat, put me in a car, blindfolded me, and took me away.

Hohenschönhausen, the Stasi prison, lay in an industrial complex badly damaged after the Second World War. During the war it had been a Gestapo camp; after the Axis defeat, it became an operations centre of the NKVD, the Russian intelligence agency that would later become the KGB. At the beginning of the 1950s, the Russian government handed the facilities to the Stasi, and from then on it was its principal interrogation centre. The prison was inside what was known as the restricted zone, an area civilians could not approach and that did not even appear on maps. Once we reached the prison, they took the blindfold off and, with shouts and shoves, took me to a room where they removed my clothes and put me in a prison uniform. Then they took me to a dark cell containing only a bed and a latrine. Without explanations or reasons, the psychological nightmare of interrogation had begun. I imagined the Grepos had discovered Greta as she tried to escape; perhaps they had interrogated her and she had given my name. I was not taken from the cell until the next day, when I was led to an interrogation room. The prison corridors had traffic lights to indicate when another prisoner was being moved; in that case, they made us stand with our backs in special recesses in the corridors, facing the wall while the other prisoner was taken along the passage behind us, so prisoners could not see one another. This increased one’s paranoia even before reaching the interrogation room, where they sat you on a small stool facing the interrogator, who sat at his desk about three metres away, with a window to the outside behind him. The promise of freedom, of the outside world, fresh air, and sunlight, right behind the interrogator. To my surprise, the Stasi seemed not to know anything about Greta yet. The first interrogation seemed motivated instead by my studies in West Berlin. At the second interrogation the next day, there were questions about Greta. They did not mention her attempted escape, but they wanted to know everything about my relationship with her. At the third, they told me Greta had tried to escape and said I had helped plan it. I always denied it. I repeated until exhausted that Greta was simply another young woman with whom I sometimes had relations, that I had no real closeness or intimacy with her. I invented that I was simultaneously seeing another young woman who lived on the western side, that Greta meant nothing to me. I repeated the same thing again and again. Although I truly believed they had Greta in custody and she had told them everything, I needed to deny the accusations of treason with a lie and hold to it. I was released two weeks later. In freedom, I remained uncertain whether they had really caught Greta. Perhaps she had escaped and, not finding her to interrogate her, as they were doing with everyone who had worked or studied in the West, the Stasi realised she had fled. I would retain that doubt for almost thirty years. The only thing I knew for certain was that Greta was gone.

Those of us who had studied or worked in the West would be suspects for life. In the case of students, some with technical training were used by the government under strict surveillance. Those of us who had studied social sciences or the arts were condemned to work as labourers or in the fields. I was sent to work on a farm in Thüringen. I spent the rest of my life in East Germany there. I had opportunities to return to Berlin, but I could not separate the city in my mind from the painful memory of Greta. Life in the country and hard work kept my mind quiet most of the day, but at night, in the darkness of my bedroom, the memory of Greta came to me. It was a kind of wound impossible to heal. During the first couple of years, I tried to learn where she was, to know at least whether she had been imprisoned, because if not I would know she had escaped. But after my inquiries failed, I decided to make a quiet, solitary life in Thüringen, trying to leave the past behind. Despite efforts to forget, I lived reproaching myself for my cowardice, for abandoning Greta. I felt that even being discovered and arrested together would have been better than living with the constant doubt and painful memory of her. Perhaps she had escaped, perhaps we could have escaped together. In those first days, so many people managed to escape; perhaps Greta had as well. There were even famous escapes, such as Conrad Schumann’s, a Vopo, an officer of the Volkspolizei, who escaped by jumping the barbed wire he himself was guarding. After listening for a couple of hours to young people on the western side shouting for him simply to cross, he found his courage, took a run-up, and leapt to freedom. There were also failed leaps, such as Ida Siekmann’s. Her flat was right on the border with the western side, and on the day the Vopos came to evacuate residents because the building would be demolished to prevent escapes, Ida, like others, jumped from her fourth-floor window towards a tarpaulin the western fire brigade had laid out, but fell onto the pavement and died on the way to hospital. I liked to imagine Greta had managed to reach the other side of the river; that thought helped me. Yet the opposite possibility was a shadow under which I lived constantly. My life in the countryside was generally quiet. Only once, in the middle of the sixties, some Stasi men knocked at my door and took me away. They interrogated me for a couple of days; I learned they had also questioned people who knew me, neighbours and other farm workers. I had no idea why. I supposed that as a routine they randomly visited those who had been suspects and interrogated in the past; I imagined I would remain a target of suspicion all my life. Afterward everything returned to normal. I returned to my normal anxieties and sadness.

At last the Wall fell in 1989. I was forty-eight then. The first thing I did was visit Notaufnahmelager Marienfelde, the transit centre for refugees that received East Berliners when they managed to escape to the West. If Greta had succeeded in escaping, she would have entered the centre and there would be a record of her. At last I obtained the information I had waited for all those years: Greta had indeed been there in August 1961; she had escaped. The Stasi had invented the lie that they caught her and that she gave my name only to draw information from me. In truth they never caught her; she escaped alone that night by crossing the river. Immense joy flooded me. I remember crying, crying a great deal. An enormous weight had been lifted. I cried so much that the woman who obtained the file for me at the refugee centre also cried. The tears, first of joy, became tears of profound sadness. Had I gone with her that night, we would have escaped together. I had deliberately thrown my life away, but the greatest suffering was thinking that I had broken Greta’s heart.

Refugees arriving at the transit centre, once they received residence permits, were normally sent through the air corridors to other places in West Germany; it was not common for them to remain in Berlin. I followed Greta’s trail for several months to Bonn, which had been West Germany’s capital until then. The address I obtained for her flat was the only clue I had left. As I feared, she no longer lived there, but by asking the neighbours I found an old woman who lived on the same floor and had known Greta. She gave me all the information she had. Greta and her husband, a government official, had lived in that flat for about three years. They left the city, and the old woman did not remember where or why. What she did remember was that Greta’s husband was called Dieter Schwerdtfeger and was a government official. It was not easy to trace Dieter, but after weeks of searching I discovered he had left government work to work for Berlin’s governing party, where he now lived: die Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands. After a couple more weeks of investigation, I finally got his address in Berlin.

Dieter was an affable man. When I introduced myself, he was quite surprised and hugged me; he seemed moved to meet me. In the sitting room of his small flat, he invited me to sit and offered tea. I immediately noticed he lived alone, but I still hoped that by speaking with him I could learn Greta’s whereabouts. We talked a little about our “war stories.” Everyone in Berlin had at least one; everyone had lived through some personal tragedy in those times, had an unpleasant encounter with the Stasi, taken part in a heroic act, lost contact with a loved one, or at least known someone with an extraordinary escape story and tragic capture. I told him my own experiences with the Stasi in the East, and the more I described what had happened to me and the escape Greta planned, the more uncomfortable and anxious Dieter became. At last he decided to recount, in great detail, the other half of the story, the piece I was still missing. He and Greta had indeed married, but they had never been truly husband and wife. Their marriage was a façade: Dieter was homosexual. The arrangement worked well for both. He needed a beautiful wife to present to superiors and colleagues, one who would help conceal appearances and climb the political ladder; Greta needed someone suitably placed to find a way to rescue me from East Berlin. Dieter told me the only thing keeping Greta alive was the wish to rescue me somehow. She made numerous unsuccessful attempts to investigate my whereabouts. Despite Dieter’s contacts in government and even a contact he made with the Americans, they did not know where I had been sent. They learned I had been interrogated by the Stasi and had left Berlin, but not where I had been sent. Not knowing my location made any prospect of rescuing me through official channels impossible; even the opportunity to provide me false papers, which would have been easier in the first years, had been squandered. Then, at Greta’s insistence, they moved to West Berlin for greater chances of finding me and planning an escape.

During the time the Berlin Wall existed, various groups formed to carry out escapes. At first they were students from my old university who, perhaps through the courage and naïveté of youth, began rescuing students who, like me, had been left trapped on the eastern side. Perhaps, had I remained in Berlin, they might have contacted and rescued me. In time, different people, even government officials, became secretly involved with these groups. Many of the oldest participants had hidden or helped Jews escape during the Second World War, so they had some experience. They operated in secret because the Stasi had agents in the West, even in transit centres for refugees, and had even managed to infiltrate groups organising escapes. Inquiring into escape plans, even in the West, was dangerous. There were rumours of Stasi agents secretly kidnapping people in the West who planned escapes and taking them into the East to arrest them. After a few months, Greta managed to contact one of these groups. Having escaped herself in 1961, she earned their trust and made important progress. Because she had escaped, the communist regime considered her a deserter, and she could not cross into the East; but some members of the group with Western or foreign passports could cross and serve as intermediaries with people on the eastern side. Through one member, an Austrian named Friedrich, Greta obtained information about me. Friedrich had contact with an eastern government official named Eberhard, who accepted bribes in exchange for information and even said he could provide false papers so people from the West could pass as eastern citizens and travel freely through the rest of East Germany. This contact was relatively new, but so far he had released some useful information. Eberhard discovered that I lived in Thüringen and offered, for a not inconsiderable sum, to obtain papers for Greta so that she could travel in the East under a false identity and make the journey to where I was. Dieter offered to go, but Greta would not put him at risk. She said this was her mission and only she should endanger herself. On the advice of the group helping Greta, I was not contacted. Their experience was that the best way to extract someone was without giving them too much information in advance, preferably contacting the person on the very day of escape. In time they had learned the risks of contacting someone beforehand: some people told relatives or friends who could denounce them to the Stasi; others were watched, and on saying goodbye or behaving unusually aroused suspicions. There were even cases of people who, instead of escaping, ended by confessing and turning in those who would help them escape. Thus they would not contact me until the day my escape was ready; all that remained was to plan how to get me across to the West.

Escaping with false papers had become virtually impossible. In the Wall’s first months, many people escaped with altered Western or foreign passports, but the Grepos soon discovered the technique and, when someone from the West entered the East, gave them a pass that had to be presented on departure. This pass invalidated the passport technique. Crossing the Wall was impossible. First there were a couple of fences with a gap of two or three metres between them, then came the “no man’s land.” No man’s land was a space of roughly thirty metres that allowed escapees to be shot from watchtowers. It was filled with vehicle barriers, the so-called dragon’s teeth and Czech hedgehogs; there were lamps, floodlights, and even mines at certain points. At the end of that space were trenches to crash any vehicle that had managed to pass all the previous barriers, and finally, after this deadly route, stood the enormous concrete wall, almost four metres high. The river and canals were also impossible to cross. The Spree, by which Greta had escaped, the Teltow Canal, and the Havel Canal were heavily guarded. Many people had died attempting to escape there, some drowned or victims of hypothermia but most hit by Grepo gunfire, sometimes even when they had already reached the western side. Another method that had become virtually impossible was the sewers, as the drainage system had been sealed with strong barriers on the eastern side. Tunnels were likewise a very difficult escape method. They were expensive, required too much labour, and involved enormous risks of collapses and flooding. Several had already been discovered on the eastern side on Bernauer Straße, and the Vopos patrolled constantly near the Wall where tunnels were suspected of emerging from abandoned buildings; they also placed microphones in cellars to detect activity. The last tunnel successfully used ran from a basement in the West to a cemetery in the East. Its entrance was a grave, and more than thirty people escaped through it successfully until some traitor told the Stasi and two women were arrested just as they entered the grave. As the years passed, the cat-and-mouse game between the Stasi and escape organisers grew more sophisticated and complicated. There was, however, a new route the group had recently discovered and tried only once. It had been kept secret because, after the cemetery tunnel, suspicions that a traitor was feeding the Stasi information had grown. Greta and Dieter, who in addition to planning my escape had offered the group several services through Dieter’s government contacts, had earned the leaders’ affection and trust. For that reason, they decided to tell them of this new route and make my escape the second carried out through it. During an exploration of the sewer system in Reinickendorf, in the French sector of West Berlin, they had found a labyrinth of pipes that, partly through narrow spaces where barely one person fit, partly by diving, and elsewhere by overcoming obstacles such as waterfalls and rubbish-catching pits, connected to a storm-drainage system on the eastern side in the Pankow suburb, emerging through a storm drain relatively out of sight. Dieter told it all in such a way that I felt the rescue had been an important part of his life too, and he confirmed that his deep friendship with Greta had made him hopeful and increasingly involved in planning my escape. At last, the plan to get me into West Berlin was agreed. The two members of the group who had helped with the recent escape by the new route would guide Greta through the drains to the eastern side. Once there, one would take her to the safe house of a woman named Gertrud, who had helped the group several times because her nephew was one of their successful escape stories. Greta would receive clothes and spend the night there, then contact Eberhard the next day and receive false papers guaranteeing her free transit to Thüringen. There she would contact me, and the same day we would return to Berlin to hide for a few hours in Gertrud’s house and, at nightfall, escape through the storm drain, where the same two group members would be waiting to guide us back. Every part of the plan was risky; the chances of success were small, and Greta still had to reach me and I had to agree to leave with her at that moment. Nevertheless, Greta and Dieter hoped everything would turn out well.

Despite the escape’s good planning, it failed and ended in tragedy. Neither Dieter, Greta, nor the group had ever calculated the possibility that Eberhard would betray them. When Greta met him to receive the false documents, the Stasi were already waiting for her. A few hours later, Gertrud was also arrested. It was unclear whether the betrayal was Eberhard’s alone or came also from someone inside the group. Everyone assumed Gertrud’s arrest was because Greta had confessed, but Dieter was convinced that was impossible. Knowing Greta, he knew she could not have betrayed that woman. In any case, regardless of who betrayed whom, the worst had happened. Greta was the worst kind of criminal for the regime: a deserter who had also crossed illegally into the eastern side, collaborated with people planning escapes, and at that very moment was carrying out a plan to get someone out. The time of her arrest coincided with the occasion when I spent a couple of days under Stasi interrogation in the mid-sixties. I could never have imagined that was the reason. They must have interrogated me to discover whether I intended to escape. Greta must have told them I did not even know about the plan, which was possible, since Eberhard himself would confirm that he had told her my whereabouts and that without the papers Greta could not have travelled to contact me. Suspicion might nevertheless remain that I had been contacted through a third party, but after two days of interrogation they must have understood I genuinely knew nothing of a plan for my escape. After a couple of months in Hohenschönhausen, the same Berlin interrogation centre where I had been interrogated in 1961, Greta was sentenced and sent to Bautzen prison, a Stasi prison reserved for spies and dissidents. She died two years later. Records are scarce and incomplete, but it is suspected that she died of dysentery because of the poor hygienic conditions in which she was probably held. Dieter was devastated after losing his friend. After what happened, he stopped working with the group, which had broken up. Among the few collaborators who remained united, growing suspicion of betrayal and espionage had made planning escapes almost impossible; according to Dieter, they possibly even suspected him. Resigned, he returned to his normal life and, over the following years, watched with hope as political changes in the Soviet bloc increasingly opened the possibility of a unified Germany and the possible fall of the Wall.

Now I must live knowing that Greta always fought to rescue me despite my abandoning her that night, despite my destroying our dreams, our chance at a life together. I live in a mixture of guilt, nostalgia, gratitude, sadness, and self-reproach. Sometimes I cannot sleep thinking of it all. Sometimes, if I manage to sleep, I wake with severe anxiety attacks. Desperation consumes me, the inevitability one feels before a terrible future because one cannot change the past; I grind my teeth, shout, clench my fists. Sometimes I simply sigh and cry in silence. I cannot believe I let the chance to leave with Greta go that night; I cannot believe I lost her—her, my freedom, our dreamed life together. Through cowardice.