The Wednesday that Sabine was arrested was a cold but sunny day. It would be a long time before she would see sunshine again.
Her first stop was the Polizeigefängnis, a police prison on the Amstelveenseweg in Amsterdam, where she would stay in between interrogations at the feared headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst (the Security Service of the SS) on the Euterpe Street.
There, in between interrogations, some of them lasting hours, she would have to wait in a small, dark cell downstairs for her next turn. The cell contained only a straw mattress on the floor, and a small barred window high up provided the only light. There was nothing to do but listen to the rattle of the cell keys, the slamming of doors and the screams of the guards and prisoners alike. During the first “interview,” she was forced to admit she had no idea what had happened to her address book. On the whole, women were treated less harshly than men, but her silence infuriated the Germans, and they beat her several times, but she kept repeating she knew no names and otherwise stayed silent, despite new interrogations and beatings every few days.
The feelings of fear and oppression never left her, with the constant anticipation of the door being wrenched open and being dragged out for yet another interrogation upstairs. The dread of what they might already know and of what they might do to get information out of her made her very scared. On top of that, boredom breeds anxiety, and there was plenty of boredom. She could not shake off the fear of the unknown, the insecurity.
At the end of each interrogation day, she was returned to cell D-27 in the jail on the Amstelveenseweg. The regime there was harsh. Her single cell, when she arrived, already contained six other women.