Torture memoirs revive horrors of communism

Telegraph ^ | 07/12/2003 | Tony Paterson

[Tailgunner Joe]

Hankering in the former East Germany for a return to the supposed simplicity of life under communist rule has been challenged by a 73-year-old woman's account of eight years of rape and torture she suffered when she was a political prisoner.

Erika Riemann was 14 when she was imprisoned by by the communist regime in. She had defaced a portrait of Stalin hanging in her school by painting a red bow over his moustache with her mother's lipstick.

In three East German prisons, including a former Nazi concentration camp, she was repeatedly raped, starved and beaten. Finally she was forced to endure a mock mass extermination in a gas chamber.

By the age of 22, when she was released, Erika was a physical and mental wreck. Her mother had tried desperately to get information about her only daughter but had to wait seven years to discover her fate.

After her release, Erika felt so shamed by her experience that for years she told no one about her imprisonment. "I was so deeply ashamed of my experiences that I never discussed them, not even with my children," Mrs Riemann told the Telegraph last week. "I only summoned up the courage to write about them after my husband died last year. It has proved to be a spiritual release."

The book, The Bow on Stalin's Moustache, reached fourth place on Germany's bestseller list last week, its publication countering the trend for cosy portraits of East Germany as a happy society.

Nostalgia for the former East, known as Ostalgie, has been highlighted in popular films such as Goodbye Lenin and celebrated in a welter of largely uncritical television shows. Mrs Riemann appeared on one such programme, The East Germany Show, fronted by Katarina Witt, the former East German ice-skating champion at the Olympics.

Her unexpected account of dreadful suffering left the chat-show hosts severely embarrassed, conflicting as it did with the sentimental retrospective envisaged by the programme's makers. After her appearance, viewers who bought her book helped push it on to the bestseller lists.

In the book, Mrs Riemann describes how, as a teenager in the East German town of Muhlhausen, she was bemused to see a portrait of Stalin hanging in her school, in exactly the same place that Hitler's portrait had hung only a few months earlier.

She recalls uttering the words, "You look a bit sad" to the portrait and innocently drawing the bow on Stalin's moustache. Someone, it is not known who, informed on her.

Within weeks, two security agents arrested and charged her with membership of the Nazi Werewolf resistance movement. She was beaten repeatedly and interrogated by a Soviet army major who extinguished his pipe on her forehead. Finally she signed a concocted confession.

When the 14-year-old asked for a bath she was taken to a courtyard by soldiers armed with machine guns, stripped naked and knocked over by a torrent of icy water from a high-pressure fire hose. The soldiers looked on, laughing.

Later she was ordered to a Soviet military hospital on the pretext of being treated for constipation. There she was strapped to a medical examination table and gang-raped by drunken soldiers. She was later taken to Torgau prison, where she was locked in a suffocating "standing-room only cell" without food, water or access to a lavatory for two days for refusing to have sex with a soldier.

Mrs Riemann's ordeal continued over the next seven years first at Bautzen prison, near Dresden, where inmates were locked in cages inside the cells and forced to share a single narrow bed with another prisoner, and then at Sachsenhausen, a former Nazi concentration camp north of Berlin. New arrivals were told: "You will now suffer the same fate your people inflicted on the Jews."

Female prisoners were stripped and herded into a former gas chamber and told that they were to be exterminated. "We were pushed into a windowless room, which was tiled all over," Mrs Riemann writes.

"Everyone was crying and the panic drained away all the air inside. The women were praying and calling for their mothers or their children." It turned out to be a hoax. Warm water, not gas, shot from the ducts in the ceiling.

Erika Riemann was released in January 1954 as part of a general amnesty for political prisoners. She fled to West Germany to join her mother. Erika married twice and has three children.

"It has taken me nearly 50 years to come to terms with my past," Mrs Riemann said. "I think it is important for young Germans to know what life in the East meant. Today's adolescents were only toddlers when the Berlin Wall fell. They have little or no idea."

[68skylark]

I've heard there's nostalgia among some Germans for the old East Germany, but it's hard to know how much.

It's good when the brutal truth of communism comes out once in awhile. Some people will learn from this kind of story.

[txzman]

Another reason not to forget what communism is really about - power at any expense.

[tillacum]

It's time everyone hears about the wonderful treatment the communists showered on everyone they held captive. Thanks Tailgunner and thanks to Frau Reimann for telling of her first hand experience under the benevolent care of the tyrants.

[Waco]

The libs/rats/socialists (including hillary)would dump crap like this woman suffered on anybody's chillin.

[68skylark]

On the other hand, let's not be too hard on communist dictatorships like East Germany, Cuba and N. Korea. Sure, there are the political prisons, secret police, torture, rape, grinding poverty, pollution and early death, etc, etc. But hey -- there's free health care!

[Calpernia]

Not forgetting and teaching the younger baby boomers on through gen X is two different things.

Speaking as a borderline baby boomer/gen Xer, I will tell you, in public school I never learned anything about the wars, I never knew anything about communism except that was the stereotypical reference for a flower child and I definately never knew what Islam was about.

I've learned a lot since 9/11. And the scarey part is, no one else I interact with outside of FR seems to know.

[JoJo Gunn]

"Her unexpected account of dreadful suffering left the chat-show hosts severely embarrassed...."

The mind reels.

How quickly people forget how things truly were.

Every day I am more convinced that human "intelligence" is a myth.

[RightWingAtheist]

Shades of Milan Kundera's The Joke. As with all cases where man has forgotten his shared humanity with others, we must never forget.

[Texas_Jarhead]

BUMP

[Quix]

PLEASE,

Freepers . . .

avoid assuming for a microsecond that

Shrillery would not set up worse in a flash. She'd set up far worse merely for pride reasons, not to mention power mongering reasons.

She'd also set it up in a flash to support worse evil above her if she thought said evil above her would grant her more power, status, praise etc.

She IS that evil.

If you can't detect it, please consider the rants of some of us who can.

[Argus]

I detect a hunger for the truth among our brainwashed school children. They know their teachers in so-called social studies are just propagandists for the leftist "progressive" party line that rigorously excludes any criticism of the socialist utopias of our time.

[FR_addict]

Thanks for the post. It reminds us of how lucky we are to be born American, but we need to stay constantly on our toes.

[Calpernia]

I see the brainwashing. I don't think you know me as a freeper cause I don't recognize your Nic. I have too many endless stories I can post here as an example. I started too, but excerpting for one post...they weren't making sense.

Mind you, my kids go to a private Catholic school. I'm afraid I'm going to have to start homeschooling. I'm overwhelmed by this option since I have 3. But, wow, the reality of what I'm seeing is overwhelming.

Kudsman, we played with the idea of a conservative newspaper. What if we stepped it up to conservative charter schools?

[GeekDejure]

I've learned a lot since 9/11. And the scarey part is, no one else I interact with outside of FR seems to know.

That speaks volumes regarding the liberal Amerika publik skool, mind numbing, non-education system and "no child will be left behind" !!!

.

[Calpernia]

Yes it does. No child left behind for the communist agenda.

[Major_Risktaker]

Why was there an IRON CURTAIN?

[ladyinred]

That is really disturbing to hear, although I am not surprised. I know they have revised history now, the USA is not necessarily the good guys, and communism is most likely not the evil, godless regime it really is.

[Gritty]

BTTT

[Gritty]

This is not an unknown phenomenon.

We have plenty of people in this country longing for the good old Clinton Days!