Salomea genin at Berlin Gorki Theatre:

On 5.11.2015 Salomea Genin spoke to a group of U.S. students completing their business training in Berlin. Here is what one of them wrote to her:  
"I was really inspired by your life story and also very touched and I wanted to thank you for sharing that with us today. Your statement about how you can only love yourself once you’ve realised and accepted who you are, is I think what resonated with me the most and ultimately has changed the way I perceive not only myself, but also others. You have become one of the most inspiring people I have ever met. Thank you very much for speaking with us this evening and being a part of my experience abroad."

 

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.

Salomea Genin tells a Jewish story of exile followed by the anguish and joy of her multi-faceted homecoming; she also sings the Yiddish, German and English-language songs that are part of that story, sometimes together with Karsten Troyke.