zeitgeschichtliche reihe

Berlin: A Baby Between Two Worlds

von , ,

Englische Fassung von „Mauer durchs Herz”

In the noose of the Stasi: from
Dommitzsch to the secret Stasi-Prison of Hohenschönhausen

Sigrid Paul was born in 1934 in Dommitzsch, on the River Elbe. After the war the town was occupied by the Red Army and became part of the new communist state of East Germany. Sigrid’s father died in a Soviet prison camp. The family’s pottery works was sequestered and became state property. Faced by the loss of the bread winner, Sigrid’s widowed mother fought a desperate battle for survival with her three children.
In 1957, she married and moved to East Berlin, where in 1961 her son was born: a traumatic experience. Baby Torsten was severely handicapped. Only an immediate transfer to a better-equipped hospital in West Berlin could save his life. Meanwhile the Wall was built, and East Berlin’s notorious bureaucrats cut back on the exit visas needed to visit him. A sequence of events began that led to Sigrid being arrested by the Stasi secret police and sent to prison. Even after she was released, her trial and tribulation did not end.

Millionen DDR-Bürger wurden über Nacht eingesperrt – das letzte Schlupfloch für eine Flucht in den Westen und in die Freiheit war verschlossen. Welche dramatischen Folgen der Mauerbau für die damals 27-jährige Mutter Sigrid Paul und ihren im Januar 1961 geborenen Sohn Torsten hatte, zeigt dieser erschütternde Bericht. Ein Stück deutsch-deutscher Geschichte zwischen Kriegsende und Gegenwart. Mit Geleitworten von Simon Burnett und Karl-Wilhelm Fricke.

Simon Burnett, author of Ghost Straße: Germany’s East Trapped Between Past and Present:

“A terrific read. Sigrid Paul’s story, set in the shadows of cold-war Berlin, is a harrowing chronicle of one family’s tragic struggle against East Germany’s desk-bound tyrants, its Stasi secret police thugs, and its institutionalized stupidity.”