"From Over There"

On a drizzly afternoon last week, a train from Oranienburg rolled into Gesund-brunnen Station in Berlin's French sector. Haggard men in tattered clothes and bony, hollow-eyed women straggled onto the platform. Last to get out was a white-faced, white-haired old man with a frayed velvet-collared overcoat. He leaned gasping against a wall. "Yes, yes, from over there," he muttered. "I must be dreaming. Please don't ask me any questions."

Which Day Was Worst? The gaunt men & women were survivors of Eastern Germany's concentration camps. Released by the Russians as a propaganda gesture, they were the last of some 200,000 political prisoners whom the Russians had interned since the end of the war in the infamous Nazi camps at Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Muehlberg, Torgau, Bautzen and elsewhere. About half of the prisoners died of cold, hunger, disease or beatings. Another 70,000 were shipped off to Russia as slave laborers. Last week, with the air of a man conferring a great and generous boon, Soviet General Vasily Chuikov announced that 15,038 of the remaining 29,632 internees would be freed, and the camps closed. Of the others, 13,945 would go into regular East German prisons. The Russians are keeping 649 "criminals."

Once they were sure that they were beyond Russian reach, the refugees at the Gesundbrunnen station began to tell their stories. "I was arrested with my husband when we were trying to escape to Western Germany," said one woman. "We were accused of espionage for the Americans. My husband was sentenced to ten years and sent to Russia. The most terrible time I had was in the NKVD cellar at Hohen-schoenhausen. One woman slashed her wrists and a man hanged himself."

"The blackest day at Sachsenhausen," said a broken, middle-aged man, "was a Sunday in November 1946. The Russians reduced our rations by 50%. After that the dead were taken away by the dozens."

Said one woman: "The most awful thing was the Steinhaus, where the Russians questioned us. Then there was the Karzer [dungeon]. If you took a carrot into the barracks, you got eight days Karzer. There you slept without a blanket and got food every other day."

Which Dictatorship Was Worse? One wreck of a man slowly unfolded a story of seven years' suffering under two dictatorships. The Nazis had thrown him into Sachsenhausen in 1943 for listening to foreign broadcasts. Released in 1945, he headed for home in Schleswig-Holstein. Somewhere along the road, the Russians seized him again, sent him back to Sachsenhausen. In nine years of marriage, he had lived with his wife for only eight months. "God only knows if I'll find her," he said, "or what I'll find if I do."

The Communist press praised Russia's "generous gesture" in releasing the prisoners. Gerhart Eisler, Eastern Germany's propaganda chief, said: "We are now strong enough to accept all those who have been released as full citizens."

Almost to a man the new citizens headed for Western Germany.

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