Blood Relative (33 page)

The scenes set in Hohenschönhausen were hugely influenced by the archived testimony of the following survivors of imprisonment by the Stasi: Sigrid Paul, Mario Röllig, Edda Schönherz, Matthias Bath, Horst Jänichen, Herbert Pfaff and Wolfgang Arndt. The account of the Hohenschönhausen tour (which takes place every day, guided by ex-prisoners) was entirely fictionalized, but the descriptions of the various offices, corridors and cells, and the hellish treatment meted out in them are, I hope, a true reflection of the prison and its terrible history.

Anna Funder’s book
Stasiland
was an enthralling, wonderfully readable, guide to the mindset of the East German state, its agents and its victims: I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.

Many thanks, too, to Agatha Rogers of the Priory Hospital, Southampton, for her explanation of the rules governing patient confidentiality, and Marina Cantacuzino of The Forgiveness Project, whose advice about the ways in which we come to terms with loss was never far from my mind. Bob Colover, a lawyer with decades of experience as a barrister, stipendiary magistrate and lecturer in law, was immensely helpful in taking me through the various legal and procedural issues involved in cases of diminished responsibility. I have knowingly taken liberties with some aspects of what Bob told me. Any legal errors, therefore, are entirely my fault, not his.

I would also like to thank my father, David Churchill Thomas, for two things. In the first place, he explained how a man such as Rainer Wahrmann would signal his availability as an asset to Western intelligence (a much fuller account of his defection was written, but did not survive my editing process). And in the second, through a diplomatic career that took our family to Russia and Cuba, contrasted with three years in Washington DC, he unknowingly instilled in me a fascination for and loathing of totalitarian communism.

As I was writing this book, I mentioned to Dad that I’d been watching
The Lives of Others
(
Das Leben der Anderen
), Florian Henckel von Donnersmark’s Oscar-winning film about East Germany. Much of it is set in a Berlin apartment bugged by the Stasi. ‘You spent the first two years of your life in a flat just like that,’ he replied.

It turned out that the Moscow apartment block in which we lived between 1959–61 during my father’s posting to the British Embassy had been bugged by the KGB. The various international diplomats who lived there were forbidden from going into the attic on the grounds, they presumed, that the agents listening to them were working there. So my earliest years, like Mariana’s, were lived in the shadow of the secret police.

Perhaps all fiction turns out to be autobiography in the end.