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.