Inside East Germany’s Most Notorious Women’s Prison

https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/544634/broken-womens-prison-hoheneck/

This story appeared alongside another similar story about how the state of Oklahoma has the highest rate of imprisonment for women in the U.S. On the other side of the world, this documentary takes a look into a women’s prison filled with political prisoners in East Germany. Women in the video describe holding cells filled with dozens of women and bunk beds stacked three-high. They talk about the greyness of the place–grey faces, grey walls, grey food–and how they’d use matches to paint their lips red to gain some semblance of beauty or femininity. Solitary confinement cells had nothing in them, not even toilets. Women worked sewing clothes and knew what time it was by the way the pain set in from working all day.

The video ends with a woman telling her child she’ll be back to pick her up as she’s being arrested. Of course, she never gets the chance to do that.