Salomea Genin was born in 1932 in Berlin to Polish-Jewish parents and fled the Nazis with her family to Australia in 1939. In 1944 she joined the Eureka Youth (Young Communist) League and in 1949 the beginning of the Cold War the Australian Communist Party just as the government was planning to ban it.
In 1951, as a delegate to the "3rd World Youth Festival" in East Berlin, she wanted to help build an anti-fascist state in the newly-founded German Democratic Republic (East Germany). In 1963, after a nine-year struggle, they finally allowed her in. Twenty years later, she realized that she was living in a police state, one in which she had willingly participated and became suicidal. By 1985, psychotherapy and writing a book about her family enabled her to find the strength to go into political opposition and build a new life, even before the Berlin Wall and East Germany itself were dismantled in 1989.
