Wednesday and Thursday as usual, rattling plugs, sniffing sour air and having good conversations with the boys.

Today I'm isolated during the yard walk and taken to another part of the building with a gag chain.

A gag chain is a short iron shackle that is wrapped around your wrist like a bracelet.

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It has no lock, but two T-ends that are hooked together and held between two fingers by a guard.

With the slightest twist, he can make me do whatever he wants. If he wants, he can break my wrist without the slightest effort.

He pushed me into a visitors' room. There was an elderly man sitting there who, at first glance, looked like my grandfather Alfred, my father's father.

I had only faint but very pleasant memories of him. For a brief moment I felt hopeful. But he scowled at me.

His name is Prosecutor Nobody. In a fraction of a second, Jürgen's words hit me like a punch in the gut...

If he's a fox, he'll accuse me of faking a crime. Then I would be a common criminal who could thwart my 'escape plan'. If he's a concrete head, he'll get me for fleeing the Republic. That would be half the battle for freedom.

He launched into an academic harangue about the achievements of socialism, which I'd betrayed.

He rants and raves while I imagine a 'bright' future in my parents' chemical company.

In the practical lessons we had to go through as schoolchildren in Buna, I had already got to know the rest of my life:

Working in the dirt until lung cancer took me. And living as a good country bumpkin, just like Grandma Charlotte and Grandpa Alfred next door, and dying shortly before retirement so that the Fatherland could save on welfare.

Or how Grandma Frieda and Grandpa Hans, after many decades of hard work, are finally allowed to travel to the West - and preferably stay there, so that the capitalists can pay their pensions.

Writing 'Let's go West' on a piece of paper and just wanting to travel to the West is a crime under paragraph 213, which he will charge me with.

Attempted illegal border crossing' is punishable by imprisonment. That was the end of the investigation for him.

I will think about what he said until the trial and long after. So he took the bait.

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