The man who stopped Salomea Genin on the street in West Berlin, on that August morning in , smiled as if he knew her. He brought her greetings from East Berlin, from a woman whom Genin had met on a recent visit thereโa secretary in one of the Arab embassies.
He wondered if Genin would like to join him for coffee the next day. Genin was quite sure that she had never seen the man before in her life. Given her history, there was a good chance that he was an East German spy. She agreed to the meeting without hesitation. Genin longed to live in East Berlin. She was born in Berlin in , before the city was divided, but was forced to flee with her family at the age of six.
The Genins were Jewish. One night in , a boarder who was living with Salomea and her two sisters and her motherโher parents were divorcedโdenounced them to the local police. Franziska left for Australia two weeks later, but the rest of the family had to stay back. The rest of the family made their way to Melbourne in May of , four months before the war began. Salomea was a solitary, rootless child. When Salomea was eleven, she was shipped off to a boarding school for seven months.
The Party was antifascist, pro-union, and radically egalitarian. Its meetings were fired with optimism and a fierce sense of belongingโeverything Salomea had been missing at home. It was the first entry in what grew to be a voluminous file. This was where she belonged, she thought: at the forefront of the Communist struggle, fighting to keep her birthplace free from fascism.
On April 15, , she boarded the passenger ship Otranto in Melbourne and returned to the country that had nearly killed her. Or so she hoped. When Genin arrived in West Berlin and applied for residency in the German Democratic Republic her request was ignored.
