I“I’m going crazy!” shouts the senior citizen in a denim jacket and sunglasses. “Someone is running around out there saying that buses with prisoners never left here.” She now asks Elke Schlegel, who is standing in a former prison cell that was identical in construction, whether that happened at night or how the man came up with it is the one in which Schlegel was imprisoned here, in the middle of Chemnitz, 40 years ago. The bus with her left at ten in the morning, says Schlegel, and she remembers it clearly. Around noon they passed Jena, their hometown, and at 4 p.m. the bus arrived in Giessen, the emergency camp for GDR refugees. “I knew it,” says the senior citizen, once again outraged at the man who denied it. “That’s not possible, it makes me angry.” She puts on her glasses and storms out.
Schlegel and her son Tony remain behind, looking back on their former lives in the cell. Photos show both of them with their husband and father in the GDR in the early 1980s and then in the Federal Republic a few years later. Tony on his dad’s shoulders on a trip, Elke Schlegel in her husband’s arms at the wedding in Koblenz. The time in between was the worst of her life, says Schlegel.
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