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Heinrich George | Helmut Kind | Karl Heinrich | Ewald Ernst | Kurt Müller | Alfred Weiland | Arno Wend | Helmut Brandt | Georg Dertinger | Max Fechner | Karl Wilhelm Fricke | Wolfgang Harich | Walter Janka | Walter Linse | Paul Merker | Sigrid Paul | Rudolf Bahro | Heinz Brandt | Jürgen Fuchs | Gerulf Pannach | Michael Sallmann | Hans-Joachim Helwig-Wilson | Bärbel Bohley | Freya Klier | Stephan Krawczyk | Vera Lengsfeld | Ulrike Poppe
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 Sigrid Paul belongs to those people who were particularly affected by the construction of the wall. She was born in 1934 in Dommitzsch / Elbe and was trained as a dental technician for prosthetics. In 1957 she married Hartmut Rührdanz and moved to East Berlin to be with him. In January 1961 their son Thorsten was born. Thorsten became seriously ill and was dependent on medication from the western part of the city. As on August 13rd, 1961, the Wall was built and the child was suddenly cut off from his treatment in the West. After a life-threatening disease relapse, Thorsten was transferred to a West Berlin hospital. The parents were denied permission to visit him regularly. With forged passports, they tried to escape from East Germany through Scandinavia. In February 1963, Sigrid Paul was arrested on the street after three students she had met during the attempted escape, stayed with her for a night. The students tried to flee through a tunnel at Brunnenstraße, which had been betrayed to the Ministry for State Security (Stasi). After her arrest she was interrogated by the Stasi for 22 hours continuously. After six months of preventive detention, an East German court convicted her of aiding and abetting illegal emigration and sentenced her to four years in prison. As a prisoner she had to work until August 1964, at the remand prison in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. After her ransom was paid by the federal government of West Germany, she was not released in to the BRD but rather in the GDR. She still did not receive permission to travel to the West. When her son finally was able to return in summer 1965 back home, he was almost five years old and called his mother "Sie". Until the fall of the Berlin Wall, they lived together in East Berlin. Since 1991 Sigrid Paul has led groups of visitors through the former detention center. Their fate was shown in the award-winning documentary Zersetzung der Seele by Nina Toussaint and Massimo Iannetta (Belgium / Germany 2002). Sigrid Paul died on June 19th, 2011 at the age of 77. |
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