"Please Free Elizabeth"

It seems like a dream that in July I was lying on the floor of a punishment cell in a work camp called Bautzen in the Communist half of Germany (G.D.R.), where I was (I thought at the time) slowly starving and dying of thirst. Yet now I am in the academic world of Cambridge finishing my Ph.D. dissertation in linguistics at MIT after being a guest of the East German state for two years--fourteen months at the top secret security interrogation prison MFS Hohenschonhausen (East Berlin) and eight months a la Solzhenitsyn at the work camp Bautzen near the Czech border.

When I got out America had reached the moon, Jimi Hendrix, Nassar, De Gaulle, and Janis Joplin were all dead. I had seen only one newspaper in the fourteen months at the interrogation prison; otherwise I only heard whatever the Secret Police decided to tell me--which didn't include a Harvard Satirical troupe performing nude on stage or that Encounter and Marathon were now American rages. In fact for me and most of the other political prisoners the only way for us to "relate to our environment" were not Encounter sessions but by rapping out morse code messages on walls, ceilings, and heater pipes until our knuckles were raw.

The nightmare began on the morning of Sept.21, 1969, when my East German fiancee Elizabeth Neumann woke me. I was still drowsy and remember only saying I would meet her Monday as she kissed me and walked out the door. But I never saw her again and at this moment she is said to be working in the kitchen of a work camp in East Germany where she has been for more than two years. Around noon I and my American friend Jack Strickland left Elizabeth's apartment in a VW camper bus to return to West Berlin via the crossing Checkpoint Charlie. We were run off the road by two carloads of eight plainclothesmen, presumably Secret Police, although they never identified themselves as they poured into the doors and windows of the camper and hustled us off.

The next day and night were like a whirlwind--twenty-four hours of interrogations without sleep, after which I was handcuffed and put into a black upright coffin in the back of a van and sped over to Secret Police Headquarters (MFS) for an examination of my body including up my rear end, under my tongue, between my toes, and in my hair. I reeled half-asleep into the office of the interrogation judge, Traute, who asked me if I had any wishes before he turned me back over to the Secret Police. He told me they had no bail here for the rich as in America, but when I requested famous East German lawyer, Professor Kaul, he asked me where I would get the money for him. Nevertheless he put down my request for Professor Kaul in writing to the State's attorney. Needless to say, I never heard anything more concerning Kaul.

A month later, however, following pressure from the West, I was allowed to sign a power of attorney for no less a person than Wolfgang Vogel, the lawyer who arranged the trade of U-2 pilot Gary Powers for Soviet master spy Abel, and who had defended many notorious Nazi concentration camp butchers and the like. But even then the Secret Service lieutenant waited until the end of eight hours of interrogation, called the guard to take me away, and then at the last second rushed around the desk to have me sign lawyer Vogel's power of attorney: "Don't bother reading it," he said, "just sign here, it's not important!" After I read it anyway, the lieutenant angrily told me that unless they got all the information they wanted (involving everything from MIT's missile research to the Black Panthers and including personal and political opinion reports on scholars and scientists at MIT and Harvard), "I'll personally see to it that it's two years before you see a lawyer, Jenkins." He kept his promise. It was six months, after their interrogations had closed before I saw Vogel, and then for only ten minutes.

It soon became evident that the Secret Police's real hope in obtaining information from me about American student groups and about MIT lay in the fact that they had me in the same prison with Elizabeth. She was on the second floor and I on the third, but we were safely out of Morse code range. Each of us was living, eating, and sleeping with a police spy informer, so that we were in effect being interrogated every waking hour for months on end. Every moment of sorrow, pain, and humiliation for me I knew was one for her as well. The spy holes on the door opened every ten minutes, the lights clicked on and off all night in a mad psychedelic light show. We were subjected to the "hot and cold water treatment" of having a roommate (usually a spy) and then enduring the anguish of solitary confinement (five months of it)--all this I knew to be the daily lot of the woman that I had decided to marry, in spite of war, in spite of barbed wire and hate, and in spite of the Secret Police who told me: "It is totally within our power whether you ever see Elizabeth Neumann again.

The lieutenant added, "There are two types of prisoners here--the ones who tell the truth and whom we treat well and then those like you, Jenkins. Shall I order the 'special treatment' for you?" The "special treatment" involved sleeping on a board bed (Pritsche) with a special board pillow, having your breakfast and supper cut down to bread and margarine with a bit of cheese for supper, and losing "lying-down priveleges," which meant you had to sit or stand for sixteen hours a day in your cell with nobody to speak to or anything to read. No matter how strong I might remain, the screams, the crying-fits, and the muffled shrieks of people shouting "Hold out a little longer (Aushalten)!" as they beat their fists against the iron doors and hurled chairs against the iron doors and hurled chairs against the walls before being led off to the rubber room--all of this made me wonder how Elizabeth was surviving.

We had made numerous legal attempts to get married before ending up convicts in our yellow-striped uniforms in work camp. I had studied East German marriage documents with members of the East Berlin Academy of Sciences where I was working on my MIT dissertation, had even poured over the legal text on Marriage Law (Ehegesetzbuch). Elizabeth and I had gone to the socialist marriage bureau in the East, tried to get a proxy marriage in this country, and investigated getting married in the American embassy in Poland and having it validated by East Germany. But the biggest blow came to us when Elizabeth and I visited the office of Kaul, famous East attorney, to ask him to take our difficult legal case. His representative refused to help us, saying our prospects were hopeless.

Then came the sensational and daring escape of Elizabeth's friend and Jack Strickland's fiancee Brigitte Heider, who escaped through the Berlin Wall in May, 1969, in the bottom of a VW bus with her pet turtle and another East Citizen. Brigitte had escaped under the very nose of her step-father, a top East German Secret Police official, credited as being the man responsible for the security measures involved in the building of the Wall in 1961, and who was quoted as having said of the intervention of the Russians in Prague in 1968, "each and every one of them (Czech insurgents) should be hung up on the lampposts of Prague."

Brigitte's escape, the reverberations of which were felt all the way to the Kremlin, unleashed a Secret Police manhunt which ended with the arrest, imprisonment, or interrogations of dozens of us. During this time Elizabeth was under constant surveillance so that when I arrived in June, 1969, she told me that she was on the point of suicide, that she had made a vain attempt to change the lock on her door to keep the police from searching her apartment and tapping her telephone. It was clear that Brigitte's escape had closed the final avenues open to us to get married. We had to talk in whispers in her apartment about our future. I had warned Elizabeth against escaping with Brigitte because I thought it was too dangerous, and I still thought we could be married legally in the East.

But now Brigitte's father and the Secret Police were going to have their day and do us all in. For a brief five minutes I discussed with Elizabeth various possible illegal avenues of escape. Little did I suspect then that the State's entire case against Elizabeth and myself would rest on that five minutes.

Proceeding on the assumption that "all MIT students must report to a special 'foreign office' (Auslandsabteilung) to receive their espionage instructions before being permitted to travel abroad in East Europe or else they will not be readmitted," the Secret Police conducted the early part of the interrogations with open terror. I was told by the boss of the investigation prison that every reprisal would be used against me unless I gave them their information, that they would "sell intelligence information to the West," that they would prevent me from finishing my dissertation (through an organization to which they belonged), that they could put me into a work camp for two years for trying to leave East Germany with Elizabeth and then take me out and interrogate me and put me away again in a work camp on espionage charges, and that if that wasn't enough they would destroy my personal existence (Existenz) after I was released. But what caused me the most moral anguish was their constant reminder that they had the sole power to determine whether or not Elizabeth would be released to go to the West to marry me.

But in spite of the daily barbing that I was flag-waving the American stars and stripes (den Sternenbanner hochtragen) when they didn't get their information, despite the threats to put me in a mental institution, despite their calling me a 'Schweinehund" (and Elizabeth even worse) I did not ever insult or use any improper language or raise my voice towards any member of the East German government, Secret Police or otherwise, as tape recordings would show if they dared produce them. Western press reports would one day quote East lawyer Vogel as saying that at the trial I had been "well-liked" and "co-operative."

But the reward for it all was an indictment on Paragraph 105 Slave Trade Hostile to the State--for enticing citizens of the German Democratic Republic to the West for Western imperialist organizations. I didn't see the indictment until eleven months after I was arrested--one week before the trial. A Secret Police Major told me as I read it: "Hurry up and finish reading it. What are you doing, memorizing it?" Elizabeth was convicted on charges of "Deserting the Republic" and on "Connection" with a Western agent, yours truly. Back in the cell some of the letters Elizabeth had written me ran through my mind:

"On television last Friday we saw the return of your three heroes from the moon flight, it was beautiful to see Americans, but simply because of you. You personify America for me and when I see or hear something of America, then you appear...I believe I live only for you, but I am happy that way...I love you and will forever be--your wife, Elizabeth" and, thinking of her prison cell.

I would like to he so strong, but when I am alone I can't--forgive me this misfortune, you must not lose your courage. Be strong for two for yourself and for me. I love you, because I married you. Elizabeth"

But in spite of all the promises of being allowed to go to the West and get married by the Secret Police, Elizabeth and I, the "enslaved" and the "enslaver," were to go to a socialist work camp.

My lawyer Vogel didn't get to see the indictment until a week before the trial, but only advised me to "get a good night's sleep." He didn't see any point in hearing my story since he had seen all the testimony I had signed for the Secret Police. When I pointed out that the Secret Police had neglected to include anything about the legal efforts that Elizabeth and I had made to get married, Vogel promised to bring that up as a question at the trial. But he warned me: "Don't contradict the (Secret) Police's testimony. I'm trying to help you and Elizabeth." And he said, "Don't worry about all the political terminology (slave trade, etc.), they always like to give high sentences to foreigners so they can show mercy later." Although Vogel showed up late to the trial, he did get the question in, but after I had listed the first three ways Elizabeth and I had tried to get married legally, the judge, obviously hearing this for the first time, cut me off; Vogel leaped out of his chair objecting, but the judge refused to admit the evidence that any Western agent and slave trader would try to marry the woman he was kidnapping and he promptly adjourned the trial. Before I got in points four-through-seven I was being hustled down the backstairs in handcuffs and into the rolling coffin.

The next day that state's attorney demanded that I be sentenced to two-and-one-half years, and in spite of Vogel's convincing defense that I didn't even belong under the Slave-trade paragraph, and that at most I should be remonstrated for giving Elizabeth escape tips and that on one in the West had put me up to it, the indictment stood. In my last word before the judge and two-man jury I simply told them that I took all the blame for anything that I or Elizabeth might have done, but that there was no intent to injure the German Democratic Republic, and that I simply loved Elizabeth and was determined to keep her with me always. But after a two-day adjournment, the judge upheld the sentences--there would be no paroles, and all time was to be served in a work camp. Two and one-half years for me, two years and nine months for Elizabeth, and four years for Jack Strickland for his alleged role in Brigitte Heider's escape.

The sentences were handed down along with some remarks which demonstrated that I was hostile to and not in agreement with security measures involved in building the Wall; viz., I had attended a speech given by Robert Kennedy in West Berlin in 1961 when the Wall was put up. Walter Cronkite of CBS telecast the sentences given us the very same night, but the only witness at the secret trial wasn't talking about the story behind the sentences--he was Major Hans Fuggeman of the East German Secret Police sitting alone in the rows of empty benches to make sure none of us decided to bring the true story of Secret Police interrogations onto the stenographic trial transcripts at the eleventh hour.

At one point the Secret Police seemed as if they were willing to honor their promises to recognize the human rights of Elizabeth and me to marry and come to America. On Dec.2, 1969, my birthday, my secret service interrogator, Lieutenant X, whom we dubbed Doctor Strangelove, tried the soft line, let me set a chicken dinner with him in the interrogation room, allowed me to write a letter to Elizabeth in her cell (which she answered) and promised me that I could visit her. I waited for over a year for that promise to be kept and when it was not I went into a work strike at the labor camp which nearly ended in the death of myself and Jack Strickland.

On July 4, Jack Strickland and I went on a work strike at the labor camp where we had been building elevator switches for eight months. It started innocently with me demanding to see Elizabeth and Jack demanding a re-trial. But it was soon escalated out of hand by the prison authorities. I was first threatned with and then put into solitary confinement for punishment on bread and water. The cell contained nothing but a wooden stool and a bucket for excrement. At night time the stool could be exchanged for straw mattresses (this was the "de-luxe" cell). I refused to eat the bread and the prison authorities escalated it all the way--no water! I went two days and two nights without touching a drop of water or any food and was going through a third. Jack Strickland declared a solidarity strike on the second day. So it was all the way to the death unless they broke our wills.

I decided to let them do what they wanted with my body; until I saw Elizabeth I would not move. At five in the morning some guards came in and when I wouldn't stand up straight, threw me on the floor where I remained in a catatonic state. After four back-breaking hours shivering on the cell floor I was carried on the shoulders of two guards to a Secret Polic Captain for interrogation. I remained limp except for the cold spasms running through my body while they dumped alcohol and ice water over me to revive me, all the while making remarks about the war in Vietnam and the "world gendarmes of the U.S." Finally I was carried to another partly bare cell with a toilet where my pants were ripped off to give me a shot to tranquilize me. The faucet on the toilet was dismantled to prevent me from sucking up any water from the toilet during the hunger strike. These were the same guards who had recently passed out copies of the East paper "Young World" (Junge Welt) which told the story of Angela Davis, American communist, who drank only fruit juice during her hunger strike because prison officials wouldn't give in to her demands. I could see these guys weren't going to be serving me any Minute Maid Orange Juice.

My thoughts raced back to the time when my Secret Police interrogator told me: "We don't have any reason to dig your grave here in the German Democratic Republic." He walked behind me and ran his finger dagger-style along the nape of my neck--"unless you force us to," he added. So maybe this was it. It looked as though the Secret Police was going all the way; so all the carefully devised plans Jack and I had made seemed to be headed towards death. We had only planned bread and water strikes (alarm stage one), unless put into solitary, where we would drink only water (alarm stage two), but the prison officials had themselves chosen to push us into alarm stage three--no food or water, which meant death under ten days unless they stuck some kind of tubes in us. But even if they put us on some crazy kind of nourishing machine, which we fondly dubbed the Robotron in our plans for counter-attack, we decided to stay on the tubes until our sentences ran out and we were carried across the border like dehydrated prunes. If one of us got back to the West first, we agreed that he would tell the East Secret Police the code words "Black Beauty" since that would be the only way they could get the other off the tubes and back onto alarm stage one--bread and water--until the first guy could get the story of the treatment of ourselves and Elizabeth to the world, at which point the Secret Police wouldn't want to send any coffins with corpses out of their pris ns over such trivial points as seeing one's fiancee or getting a retrial.

But during the third day of our march towards self-destruction, a dramatic change came. The prison officials backed off and gave in. We were rushed up to Berlin where Wolfgang Vogel sped us James Bond style in his pastel blue Mercedes across a secret checkpoint to transfer us to black State Department limousines with British military escorts. We had been saved by the signing of the Berlin Pact! A week after starving and thirsting on the dimly lit floors of Bautzen work camp, we were heading towards the nearest Hofbrauhaus to get rid of that thirst with a couple of mugs of dark Bavarian beer.

But the end of one story is only the beginning of another bigger one. Elizabeth remains in her work camp, the least guilty and the most punished of all involved. One of the last times I saw her I gave her Marvin Gaye's record, Ain't no Mountain High enough, which goes:

"There ain't no mountain high enough

ain't no valley low enough

ain't no river wide enough

to keep me from gettin' to you, Babe."

And no mountain, not even the Berlin wall, is high enough to keep us apart. Elizabeth yearns to be here with me. If each of us lets his voice be heard, she will be here. There are two ways of doing this: one is simply to dial the Cambridge number 864-2180. My recorded voice will answer and ask you to give your name and town and say "Please Free Elizabeth." Dozens of messages can be recorded on the same phone call. You can also drop a post card in the mail that says the same ("Please Free Elizabeth") to: Free Elizabeth, P.O. Box 32, Cambridge 02139. The cards will be delivered to Elizabeth in her East German work camp and the calls will be played on West German television over the Iron Curtain to let Elizabeth know that she hasn't been forgotten