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Sofie

Berlin,Germany

December 1944

They took me to the basement of the Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. My cell was only a few feet wide in each direction. As the officer escorting me pushed me inside, he barked an order that I wasn’t to speak to any of the other prisoners. Once the door closed, the cell was completely dark, other than a razor-thin line of yellow light along the top of the door.

There was no bed or toilet, and the walls were lined with bricks. The tiny space seemed impossibly dark and damp and cold, and there was no relief to be found, because all I could do was stand, or sit on that freezing concrete floor and let the moisture seep through my skirt. The space wasn’t even large enough for me to lie down.

Around me, I could hear the sounds of regret and suffering—weeping from a cell nearby, shouting in the far distance. Periodically someone would scream in pain. I thought I heard someone trying to whisper to me from an adjacent cell, but I didn’t dare reply.

I had no sense of time, only the growing awareness that while other cell doors were opening and closing, no one came for me. The sensory deprivation was torture in itself—sometimes I wondered if it had only been a few minutes, other times it felt like days. Eventually, I became so desperate to use the facilities I was crying in pain. I thumped on the door and called for help, but no one answered.

I was trying to figure out the logistics of relieving myself on the floor when the door clicked, and then a sudden flash of light appeared as it swung inward. I squinted, and a burst of pain shot through my skull at the sudden brightness.

“Toilet break,” a guard said. “No speaking.”

As he walked me back to my cell afterward, I gingerly asked for some water. His only answer was the slam of the door as he locked me back inside.

Soon I thought the thirst would kill me, maybe even before the cold. At one point I dozed off, but I woke with a start when a door closed somewhere else in the basement—the echoing vibration of the slam, then the sickening click-click-click of a lock snapping into place. After hours—days?—of darkness, my hearing seemed keener. When my stomach rumbled with hunger, it sounded so loud to me, I wondered if the people in the cells around me could hear it.

Then the door opened again. When my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw that it was the same guard.

“Toilet break,” he said. “No speaking.”

I wasn’t sure how long I’d been in that cell. My body odor was so strong that when I moved, a wave of it washed over me, and sometimes it left me feeling nauseous. With no access to sunlight, not even during toilet breaks, all I could do to judge time was count the interruptions to darkness—the delivery of a bowl of cold oatmeal and a glass of water, periodic toilet breaks. If those things were happening twice a day, I’d been in the cell for ten days—but it felt so much longer. My hips and shoulders were bruised from sleeping curled up on the hard floor. I’d been so cold for so long that my mind felt foggy—like my body was shutting down in slow motion.

This trip out of my cell was different. I found myself sitting in a stark room while a Gestapo officer shouted at me.

“You and your husband are traitors to the Reich! Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

Are my children okay?

Why did you arrest me so quickly?

Did Jürgen manage to do any damage before you arrested him?

Is he gone?

Why are you keeping me alive?

Am I ever going home?

And then—a thought struck me, clearer than all the others.

He had spoken about Jürgen in the present tense. Was that an accident?

I raised my eyes from the table to look at the man opposite me. The disgust in his eyes was hard to stomach. I wondered how he’d feel if he knew he’d just given me an unexpected gift. There was at least a chance that Jürgen was alive.

That was enough to make me strong again, even though my body was weak. I met his gaze as he shouted at me, insults and threats and accusations, but I didn’t say a word.

Two men took me again, dragging me with rough hands beneath my arms, along the same corridor—but this time, instead of taking me to my cell, they dragged me up a set of stairs. My eyes watered from the sunlight, but I could make out a car waiting outside. They pushed me toward it and into the back seat.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked. No one answered, but to my surprise, the streetscape around us soon told the story.

When the car came to a stop outside my house, the man in the passenger’s seat threw my handbag at me. I fumbled to catch it.