Adam Johnson - Fortune Smiles - Stories

A woman steps up to us. “I am Berta,” she says. She is a modest woman with short hair and stoically sad eyes that make her look Ukrainian. Berta surveys the students, then expressionlessly examines me. I always believed women should have their own prison. There were no problems, mind you. Perhaps I am simply old-fashioned. Grünwald pointed out that the degree of inmate isolation meant each person basically had an individual prison. I think he just liked interrogating women.

Berta wastes no time. She begins walking us to the cell wing, and we follow. “I arrived at the Hohenschönhausen remand prison in a vehicle disguised as a delivery van. It pulled up here,” she says, indicating a patch of asphalt near the receiving door. “There was once a structure here, so that when you exited the van, nothing of the prison could be seen. I’d been driven around for hours, so I suspected I was far outside of Berlin. The first rule of Hohenschönhausen was that no prisoner had contact with another. For the next two years, I saw no one but my jailers and interrogators. Warning lights were used to make sure no prisoner accidentally encountered another. When I stepped out of the van, a light was shining red, which meant another prisoner was being moved through the cell wing. Right away, I had to crouch in a stress position.”

I laugh a little, remembering the poor color-blind prisoner. Everyone looks at me.

Through the steel door and into the yellowed hallway we go. Right away, I am struck by the smell of the place, that Hohenschönhausen Prison smell — a mix of ammonia, battleship paint, sound-deadening panels and electricity coursing through the security wires. It feels deeply wrong to be escorted by an inmate. I recall a prisoner who came to believe that Hohenschönhausen was not a prison but a movie set. When she didn’t like what you said, she would call out, “Cut!” When she didn’t feel right about the direction things were heading, she’d start repeating, “Take it from the top!”

We rise through the caged staircase, but before we emerge into the second-floor cells, Berta stops us. The kids look up the steps to her.

“I always observe a moment here,” Berta says, “to pay respect to the dead.”

The students are from good working-class families. They bow their heads.

I gaze intently at Berta, to make sure my video footage is steady.

“What dead do you pay your respects to?” I ask her. “The dead in general?”

“I pause for those who did not make it out of this prison. They are not here to speak for themselves.”

“The death rate here was no higher than in the rest of the GDR,” I say.

“Actually,” she says, “a young person was five times more likely to die in here.”

“You’re comparing the prisoners to normal people,” I counter. “This facility housed criminals, subversives, depressives and suicidals. For this group, the death rate was the same, inside the prison or out.”

Berta takes a moment to appraise me.

“Did you ever see any inmates die in here?” I ask. “Did you ever witness any of them suffer, for that matter?”

“I did not see inmates of any kind,” she says. “I only speak for my own experience.”

“Actually, as a tour guide, you have made yourself the voice of the entire prison.”

“One of the unfortunate laws of atrocity,” she says, “is that the ones who truly come to know its nature are never left to tell of it. Far from trying to speak for them, we mark their experience with silence.”

I am itching to attack this word atrocity, but the students eye me with uncertainty, and I don’t want to turn them against me. We observe the moment.

Moving slowly through the wing, Berta goes on and on about her treatment — the lights being forever on, the feeling of isolation, the lack of sleep. She holds up the blue slippers and baggy blue uniform prisoners had to wear. In the hall she makes us walk the prisoner walk: legs wide, hands high behind the back, head bent. She shows us the warning wire along the walls that, when pulled, would summon the immobilization squad.

As we pass through the east wing, a young man points at a door more heavily bolted than the others. The name on his coat is Matthias.

In a deep voice, Matthias asks, “What’s behind this?”

“It is one of the isolation rooms,” Berta says.

“That?” I ask. “That’s a maintenance closet.”

Matthias looks from Berta to me and back.

“It’s of no importance,” I say. “Mops were stored there, to clean up after incidents.”

The boy points at the door’s array of locks. “Then why all the security?” he asks.

“In here,” I tell him, “the smallest item can become a weapon or tool of escape.”

Berta tries to reclaim her authority. “All these rooms are for punishment,” she says.

I flip through the keys on my master ring until I find the right one. In front of everyone, I unlock the door, and I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to hear the snap of the action and the slap of the bolts when I pull them. For a moment, I listen to the sound ring through the ward. Then I open the door. Inside, there is a sink and a bucket and, on a shelf, a lone jug of cleaner.

I ask Berta, “Are you sure you’re qualified to lecture on this prison?”

“What in your life,” Berta asks, “qualified you to run this place? Do you have a degree in criminal justice? Did you write a book on prison administration?”

The students turn to me.

This question can easily be edited out of my video, so I do not respond.

“We kept plenty of cleaning fluid on hand,” I tell them, “because of the intellectuals. You may have guessed that I once worked at this institution. In my opinion, intellectuals fared the worst. Questions of why and how plagued them. They endlessly bemoaned their fates and covered every surface of their cells with scribbling about absurdity and injustice. Of course, there was only one answer to their philosophical musings: they had conspired against their country, and now they had to pay. Give me a prison full of carpenters and butchers and plumbers — these people knew how to answer questions rather than ask them. They could follow rules and serve their time.”

“During my time here,” Berta says, “I was given not a moment with a pencil or paper or reading material of any kind.”

Did she never stop fighting? Did she never settle into the routine enough to gain a privilege or two?

Then she moves on into Grünwald’s territory — the Interrogation Wing.

We move down rows of identical interrogation rooms until we reach 124.

“This was my personal interrogation room,” Berta says. “For two years, no other prisoner was questioned here but me. I would be hooded and brought here for regular sessions in which I was hounded about my allegiances, associates and accomplices and crimes.”

I ask Berta, “So what were your crimes?”

She stops and looks at me, right into the camera. “In 1985, my husband and I ran at the Berlin Wall with a window washer’s ladder. It was early dawn, and we were near Potsdamer Platz. The location is now a shopping mall. We easily reached the top, straddled the wall and pulled up the ladder. But we were quite foolish. We had thought West Berlin would be on the other side. Instead, there were one hundred meters of barbed wire, sensors and Dobermans that patrolled the corridor along cable leads. Then there was another wall. We resolved to run for it. Shots were fired, and my husband was hit. The dogs took me down.”

One girl fingers the cross around her neck. Embroidered on her jacket is the name Katja. “Why did you want to escape so bad?” she asks.

Berta and I glance at each other, reminded of how little the young people know about those days. In response, Berta lifts the peephole cover so students can take turns looking into a Stasi interrogation room.