Piecing Together the Secrets of the Stasi

Salomea was a solitary, rootless child. Her mother had never shown much interest in her—she only got pregnant with Salomea to try to save her marriage, she later admitted—and her mother’s boyfriend showed even less. When Salomea was eleven, she was shipped off to a boarding school for seven months. It wasn’t until the following year, when her sister Renia let her tag along to a Communist-youth-group meeting, that Salomea began to feel at home. The Party was antifascist, pro-union, and radically egalitarian. Its meetings were fired with optimism and a fierce sense of belonging—everything Salomea had been missing at home. Soon, she was handing out leaflets and selling copies of Youth Voice in downtown Melbourne, reading Lenin (“Marx is too complicated,” she was told), and giving speeches on the steps of the Commonwealth Bank.