Before

What else was there to say? He had grown up with ash underneath his fingernails and dust on his breath, but so had everyone else in Bezirk Dresden. Dolph's mother had been a Trümmerfrau, working tirelessly to support others even while others were crushed with despair, trying her best to raise him well despite being refused aid from the government and looked down on by her neighbors for her bastard child, thus fuelling the respect for women that would last Dolph's entire life. From a young age he harbored a rampant hatred of both the Communist government and the Capitalist society which had divided his country, and a similar antipathy mixed with repressed almost-curiosity of his Russian heritage. He was a promising athlete, singled out for attention at school, and was quickly enrolled in the government boxing program, where he surpassed all of his fellow trainees. After five years in the ring he had to drop out due to medical issues; unfazed, Dolph joined and became active in a anti-government and anti-police gang made out of kids who wouldn't or couldn't join the Free German Youth. Despite himself, he fell in love with a good woman from one of the houses that opened their doors to them — he loved her familially, then romantically, when she caught him by the wrist as he turned to leave and kissed him on the steps.

They were eventually caught when someone informed on them, or a spy got in; he never learned how, or who. Everyone who had been at the meeting was arrested and brought to Hohenschönhausen prison to be questioned by the Stasi police. Dolph told the police he had been the leader, though this wasn’t exactly true, and back in their shared cell he made the members promises he wouldn’t be able to keep. He had been a rousing figure for the kids in the gang, many bright-eyed and rangy and fatherless, and they believed him. The police did too, and escorted him alone for extensive interrogation - he spat and kicked and capitulated convincingly at times, but he'd always known to some extent that the police would kill him in the end, had been resigned to it from the moment they'd dragged him out of the cell. Still... around the rapidly numbing pain of his cracked ribs, the lightheadedness of hemorrhage, Dolph thought wistfully and briefly of the woman he had loved. Ah, he would have said to her if he could have, you were the only bright thing I had in my life. You inspired me to change. Thank you.

(In retrospect, waking up was the nightmare.)