It seems like a dream that in July I was lying on the floor of a punishment cell in a work camp called Bautzen in the Communist half of Germany (G.D.R.), where I was (I thought at the time) slowly starving and dying of thirst. Yet now I am in the academic world of Cambridge finishing my Ph.D. dissertation in linguistics at MIT after being a guest of the East German state for two years--fourteen months at the top secret security interrogation prison MFS Hohenschonhausen (East Berlin) and eight months a la Solzhenitsyn at the work camp Bautzen near the Czech border.

When I got out America had reached the moon, Jimi Hendrix, Nassar, De Gaulle, and Janis Joplin were all dead. I had seen only one newspaper in the fourteen months at the interrogation prison; otherwise I only heard whatever the Secret Police decided to tell me--which didn't include a Harvard Satirical troupe performing nude on stage or that Encounter and Marathon were now American rages. In fact for me and most of the other political prisoners the only way for us to "relate to our environment" were not Encounter sessions but by rapping out morse code messages on walls, ceilings, and heater pipes until our knuckles were raw.

The nightmare began on the morning of Sept.21, 1969, when my East German fiancee Elizabeth Neumann woke me. I was still drowsy and remember only saying I would meet her Monday as she kissed me and walked out the door. But I never saw her again and at this moment she is said to be working in the kitchen of a work camp in East Germany where she has been for more than two years. Around noon I and my American friend Jack Strickland left Elizabeth's apartment in a VW camper bus to return to West Berlin via the crossing Checkpoint Charlie. We were run off the road by two carloads of eight plainclothesmen, presumably Secret Police, although they never identified themselves as they poured into the doors and windows of the camper and hustled us off.

The next day and night were like a whirlwind--twenty-four hours of interrogations without sleep, after which I was handcuffed and put into a black upright coffin in the back of a van and sped over to Secret Police Headquarters (MFS) for an examination of my body including up my rear end, under my tongue, between my toes, and in my hair. I reeled half-asleep into the office of the interrogation judge, Traute, who asked me if I had any wishes before he turned me back over to the Secret Police. He told me they had no bail here for the rich as in America, but when I requested famous East German lawyer, Professor Kaul, he asked me where I would get the money for him. Nevertheless he put down my request for Professor Kaul in writing to the State's attorney. Needless to say, I never heard anything more concerning Kaul.

A month later, however, following pressure from the West, I was allowed to sign a power of attorney for no less a person than Wolfgang Vogel, the lawyer who arranged the trade of U-2 pilot Gary Powers for Soviet master spy Abel, and who had defended many notorious Nazi concentration camp butchers and the like. But even then the Secret Service lieutenant waited until the end of eight hours of interrogation, called the guard to take me away, and then at the last second rushed around the desk to have me sign lawyer Vogel's power of attorney: "Don't bother reading it," he said, "just sign here, it's not important!" After I read it anyway, the lieutenant angrily told me that unless they got all the information they wanted (involving everything from MIT's missile research to the Black Panthers and including personal and political opinion reports on scholars and scientists at MIT and Harvard), "I'll personally see to it that it's two years before you see a lawyer, Jenkins." He kept his promise. It was six months, after their interrogations had closed before I saw Vogel, and then for only ten minutes.

It soon became evident that the Secret Police's real hope in obtaining information from me about American student groups and about MIT lay in the fact that they had me in the same prison with Elizabeth. She was on the second floor and I on the third, but we were safely out of Morse code range. Each of us was living, eating, and sleeping with a police spy informer, so that we were in effect being interrogated every waking hour for months on end. Every moment of sorrow, pain, and humiliation for me I knew was one for her as well. The spy holes on the door opened every ten minutes, the lights clicked on and off all night in a mad psychedelic light show. We were subjected to the "hot and cold water treatment" of having a roommate (usually a spy) and then enduring the anguish of solitary confinement (five months of it)--all this I knew to be the daily lot of the woman that I had decided to marry, in spite of war, in spite of barbed wire and hate, and in spite of the Secret Police who told me: "It is totally within our power whether you ever see Elizabeth Neumann again.

The lieutenant added, "There are two types of prisoners here--the ones who tell the truth and whom we treat well and then those like you, Jenkins. Shall I order the 'special treatment' for you?" The "special treatment" involved sleeping on a board bed (Pritsche) with a special board pillow, having your breakfast and supper cut down to bread and margarine with a bit of cheese for supper, and losing "lying-down priveleges," which meant you had to sit or stand for sixteen hours a day in your cell with nobody to speak to or anything to read. No matter how strong I might remain, the screams, the crying-fits, and the muffled shrieks of people shouting "Hold out a little longer (Aushalten)!" as they beat their fists against the iron doors and hurled chairs against the iron doors and hurled chairs against the walls before being led off to the rubber room--all of this made me wonder how Elizabeth was surviving.

We had made numerous legal attempts to get married before ending up convicts in our yellow-striped uniforms in work camp. I had studied East German marriage documents with members of the East Berlin Academy of Sciences where I was working on my MIT dissertation, had even poured over the legal text on Marriage Law (Ehegesetzbuch). Elizabeth and I had gone to the socialist marriage bureau in the East, tried to get a proxy marriage in this country, and investigated getting married in the American embassy in Poland and having it validated by East Germany. But the biggest blow came to us when Elizabeth and I visited the office of Kaul, famous East attorney, to ask him to take our difficult legal case. His representative refused to help us, saying our prospects were hopeless.

Then came the sensational and daring escape of Elizabeth's friend and Jack Strickland's fiancee Brigitte Heider, who escaped through the Berlin Wall in May, 1969, in the bottom of a VW bus with her pet turtle and another East Citizen. Brigitte had escaped under the very nose of her step-father, a top East German Secret Police official, credited as being the man responsible for the security measures involved in the building of the Wall in 1961, and who was quoted as having said of the intervention of the Russians in Prague in 1968, "each and every one of them (Czech insurgents) should be hung up on the lampposts of Prague."

Brigitte's escape, the reverberations of which were felt all the way to the Kremlin, unleashed a Secret Police manhunt which ended with the arrest, imprisonment, or interrogations of dozens of us. During this time Elizabeth was under constant surveillance so that when I arrived in June, 1969, she told me that she was on the point of suicide, that she had made a vain attempt to change the lock on her door to keep the police from searching her apartment and tapping her telephone. It was clear that Brigitte's escape had closed the final avenues open to us to get married. We had to talk in whispers in her apartment about our future. I had warned Elizabeth against escaping with Brigitte because I thought it was too dangerous, and I still thought we could be married legally in the East.

But now Brigitte's father and the Secret Police were going to have their day and do us all in. For a brief five minutes I discussed with Elizabeth various possible illegal avenues of escape. Little did I suspect then that the State's entire case against Elizabeth and myself would rest on that five minutes.

Proceeding on the assumption that "all MIT students must report to a special 'foreign office' (Auslandsabteilung) to receive their espionage instructions before being permitted to travel abroad in East Europe or else they will not be readmitted," the Secret Police conducted the early part of the interrogations with open terror. I was told by the boss of the investigation prison that every reprisal would be used against me unless I gave them their information, that they would "sell intelligence information to the West," that they would prevent me from finishing my dissertation (through an organization to which they belonged), that they could put me into a work camp for two years for trying to leave East Germany with Elizabeth and then take me out and interrogate me and put me away again in a work camp on espionage charges, and that if that wasn't enough they would destroy my personal existence (Existenz) after I was released. But what caused me the most moral anguish was their constant reminder that they had the sole power to determine whether or not Elizabeth would be released to go to the West to marry me.

But in spite of the daily barbing that I was flag-waving the American stars and stripes (den Sternenbanner hochtragen) when they didn't get their information, despite the threats to put me in a mental institution, despite their calling me a 'Schweinehund" (and Elizabeth even worse) I did not ever insult or use any improper language or raise my voice towards any member of the East German government, Secret Police or otherwise, as tape recordings would show if they dared produce them. Western press reports would one day quote East lawyer Vogel as saying that at the trial I had been "well-liked" and "co-operative."

But the reward for it all was an indictment on Paragraph 105 Slave Trade Hostile to the State--for enticing citizens of the German Democratic Republic to the West for Western imperialist organizations. I didn't see the indictment until eleven months after I was arrested--one week before the trial. A Secret Police Major told me as I read it: "Hurry up and finish reading it. What are you doing, memorizing it?" Elizabeth was convicted on charges of "Deserting the Republic" and on "Connection" with a Western agent, yours truly. Back in the cell some of the letters Elizabeth had written me ran through my mind:

"On television last Friday we saw the return of your three heroes from the moon flight, it was beautiful to see Americans, but simply because of you. You personify America for me and when I see or hear something of America, then you appear...I believe I live only for you, but I am happy that way...I love you and will forever be--your wife, Elizabeth" and, thinking of her prison cell.