Heysel

Stasi prison July 04, 1985

Thursday shower routine.

I especially like it prior to visits.

Dad is coming today and I hope he is better.

Other than our cells the bathroom cell windows allow a minimal glance outside.

This only works when unattended and since I am sentenced now the guards could care less.

Maybe it is because they won’t need to interrogate me anymore or because they got to know me.

The only piece of sky I have seen since mid April is the one above the outside cells.

Now, finding a gap between the window and the shield that it covers I see the yard for the “other” prisoners.

There is a police jail complex next to the Stasi one and those guys have a football-field size plaza to hang out.

Outside yard for criminal prisoners across the Stasi pre-trial jail in Leipzig Beethovenstrasse 2.

Rob a store or kill your neighbor and you get better treatment than the “enemies of state”.

They also have windows that are only partly shielded like this one.

So, fresh air and a way to communicate.

Nobody must know that this country holds political prisoners.

I approached Schubert one day with a number I had heard.

“100’000 political prisoners since 1949”.

Of course he claimed it to be fabricated by the west.

Like pretty much everything else I argued.

What a waste of human skin.

Last visit today before prison.

Dad does look better.

I’m relieved.

He even jokes a bit about the sentence and the state.

“I know you guys met someone, no details, I’m glad”.

The guard tries to make an uninterested face too.

As if they’re not recording every word in here.

“We can handle it all a lot better now”.

He keeps on joking, seems free.

The only dark cloud today: Liverpool FC.

My life long passion: a stadium collapse at Heysel.

I only realize now that such secondary passions take a remote back seat.

Still, there are people who have it way worse.

And I’m glad that my folks seem to cope much better.

Can’t wait to hear details when they visit me together in prison.

*Testimony -> Start. This blog entry is part of a linear narrated testimony of the contemporary witness Jens Thieme who was imprisoned 1985-1986 as a political prisoner in various GDR prisons by the GDR Ministry of State Security. Stasi prison, Stasi jail, Stasi detention.