The Lost World of Communism

Private images from a lost world of communism in Eastern Europe.

The communists claimed they were building a socialist paradise.

Most people think they created hell on earth.

But what was life really like for the people of Eastern Europe?

Effectively imprisoned behind the iron curtain.

The answers are sometimes surprising.

While some cannot forget the abnormality of those times,

others feel that they led perfectly ordinary lives.

This series through rarely seen archive and personal testimony

captures the real lives of those living under communist rule.

It was a way of life that disappeared

when communism collapsed across Eastern Europe two decades ago.

THE LOST WORLD OF COMMUNISM

A SOCIALIST PARADISE

East Germany was socialism's showcase state.

One of its iconic faces was a children's TV puppet called Sandman.

He was designed to send East Germany's children happy to bed

and to win their hearts for socialism.

It simply had to reflect life in East Germany.

It had to transmit class consciousness and feelings of solidarity.

The Sandman was made by people who used to live under socialism.

They had a vision of socialism and communism and were happy to spread that vision.

Namely, the vision of a better world.

A more just world.

And East Germany's role model for that better world

was the Sandman's favorite holiday destination,

the Soviet Union.

East Germany was born out of the ruins of the Second World War.

It would emerge from the Soviet zone of occupation established with the total defeat of Nazi Germany.

Everywhere symbols of the Soviet Union

and images of its leader, Joseph Stalin,

showed where the real power now lay.

In the summer of 1945,

14-year-old school girl, Erika Riemann,

went back to her old school in the company of friends.

A day she would never forget.

We saw that Hitler's portrait had been replaced with Stalin's.

So I drew a bow with some lipstick on Stalin's mustache.

Because when I saw his portrait I thought he looked sad.

That wasn't a good move.

I never wanted to be an artist again in my whole life.

Erika was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Part of which she spent at the former Nazi concentration camp at Sachsenhausen.

Here she was subjected to a mock execution.

We had to go into a shower room.

They told us they would do the same things they had done to the Jews.

That there wouldn't be water coming out of the showers but gas.

That was a very terrifying situation.

There was great panic and then great relief when only warm water came out.

I spent time in the fortress at Torgau,

where many women were raped.

I hadn't been raped yet but the decision had been made that I'd be next.

Still only a child, Erika suffered repeated physical and sexual abuse like this episode in Torgau Prison.

It's affected my whole life.

I hadn't had any sexual experience at the time.

But I had to take all my clothes off.

And to sit on a bowl which was pushed down the stairs amongst all the men's pain.

I can't talk about it.

I felt the repercussions till this day.

I felt ashamed and dirty.

I'm a mother and a grandmother

but after all these years, it still remains and I still feel dirty and degraded.

It's very hard to endure such things when you're that young.

Over a 150 thousand Germans were detained by the communists

in special camps like Sachsenhausen.

Almost a third of them died in captivity.

In August 1952,

80,000 young pioneers were invited to Dresden because we, the children, had to carry on socialism.

At the age of twelve, I was proud to attend the first pioneer meeting in Dresden.

We knew about the Hitler youth during the third Reich.

That they also wore neck ties and played drums and trumpets.

They wore uniforms.

When the pioneer organization was founded,

many adults were opposed because it reminded them of the Hitler regime.

So parents said "that's not going to happen to our children, not again".

But my father was a teacher and so he had the task of recruiting children of the pioneer organizations.

The pioneers served the newly formed workers and peasants state of East Germany.

A one-party dictatorship modeled on the Soviet Union.

Its propaganda stressed the dangers from western imperialism.

Including the bizarre claim that America was dropping plagues of Colorado beetles from the air

to destroy socialist crops.

They would praise us for having collected those beetles.

The very same American aeroplanes that have bombed Dresden, they would tell us, had also unleashed those beetles.

Evil American imperialism.

We made our first pioneer vow in Dresden.

We children vowed that we would do anything to avoid such a terrible and evil war in the future.

80,000 children together said that we promise.

And I made that vow not with my mind but with my heart.

Stalin was the great hero.

He was a god to us.

Stalin, the intelligent. Stalin, the wise.

Stalin was the representative of the free world.

The free world of socialism and he was our role model.

We would follow him unconditionally.

This rally was a high point for Stalinism in East Germany.

Within a year, Stalin was dead

and the Communist Party faced open insurrection on its streets.

On the 17th of June 1953,

the workers rose up against the workers' and peasants' state.

What have begun as a strike amongst construction workers over pay,

soon turned into wider demands for free elections

and the resignation of the government itself.

By late morning, Soviet troops stationed in East Germany had to intervene.

At 11:30, we heard the tanks, the chains of the tanks.

Then we realized the Russians were coming.

The crowd started howling.

And when the people at the end of the demonstration refused to give way,

the soldiers fired in the air.

And when you hear gunfire, you start running automatically.

Horst Krieter, a Berlin petrol pump attendant, was in the thick of the action that day.

We threw stones at the tanks.

Seeing the tanks firing in your direction, the sheer sound of it causes you to piss in your pants.

Someone had died on the Marx-Engels Square that day.

He was run over by a tank.

There was a blanket in a wooden cross which said "murdered by the Soviet Army".

It was a day of glory for me.

We showed them what could be done.

The police could do nothing.

The government could do nothing.

The secret police, the Stasi, could do nothing.

Over 50 civilians were killed that day.

In the clamp down that followed, more than 20,000 were arrested,

scores were executed.

The country's leaders have been caught off guard.

From now on, security and the control of the people would be the government's overriding concern.

The people themselves were concerned about simply getting by.

The 1950s were all steer times

and food and goods were in limited supply.

Families and organizations in West Germany sent aid packages to the east.

We were so happy and surprised as we lived such a frugal life.

When the package arrived, we couldn't believe our eyes.

The wrapping was so attractive and colorful.

We'd never seen anything like this.

Roland, the youngest, couldn't open the presents fast enough,

helping Wolfgang beaming at his discoveries.

In 1954, my father received the 8mm camera AK8.

These are the first films he recorded at Christmas.

I'm the baby, 18 months old.

That's his self-made gramophone.

We lived in Berlin, in Karlshorst, which is under Soviet occupation.

Only state functionaries and those employed in ministries were allowed to live there.

My father worked in television as a cameraman.

He was of course a member of the party but he wasn't totally convinced about it.

My mother's wearing a necklace.

Of course that's only for the film.

Now she's trying out the new vacuum cleaner.

It's called the "Omega".

It was East Germany's people's vacuum cleaner.

In 1960, Khrushchev came to East Germany.

When he passed through Karlshorst on his way to the airport,

my class and I had to wave.

Only much later,

when I developed the film and got it back home,

I realized I'd waved at Erich Mielke, the head of the Stasi,

who was sitting next to a driver.

In the 1950s, people had few creature comforts.

We were happy when we got hold of goods which weren't available every day.

Like bananas which we bought in the west.

Before 1961, it was still possible to drive into West Berlin.

On August the 13th 1961,

construction began on the Berlin Wall.

East Germany called it an anti-fascist protective wall

designed to keep the West out.

In fact, it was built to lock East Germans inside their socialist paradise.

Around 3 million of them had already fled to the West,

threatening the very existence of East Germany.

One of those preventing people from escaping was Hagen Koch,

the young pioneer at Dresden,

who is now a member of the expanding ministry of state security,

known as the Stasi.

In the afternoon, we reached the border crossing at Checkpoint Charlie.

I was ordered to paint a thick white line on the street at that border crossing point.

I stood at one leg in the West and the other in the East.

And my assignment was to show the evil, and I repeat, evil people in the West "so far and no further".

Capitalism is over there and here is socialism.

I painted that line and was still firmly convinced

that that border would avoid a third world war and help to maintain peace.

Many people were against it.

I was not the only person who was for it.

Growing up behind the wall,

with these school children in the village of Golzow,

they were about to become the subject of a long-term television project.

Winfried Jerchel was the youngest child in his class.

They built a new rural school, brand new and impressive.

It was an East German film and an East German film was always a propaganda film.

They obviously wanted to communicate the message that a small village is a brand new school

and all the children are happy.

I remember that the questions at school became more probing such as what does the Sandman look like.

They wanted to see what programs we were watching at home.

During the early years, they imprisoned people when they watched television from the West.

Our antenna was always pointed towards the west.

The teacher tried to find out if people were watching television from the West.

Winfried wanted to be an inventor

and was of a practical inquiring nature.

We learned a lot about the political theories of Marx and Lenin.

Once I asked my teacher "when does the real communism start?"

Real communism without money.

The teacher was obviously as smart as I was

and said that we would succeed in trading without money sometime after the millennium.

As an ignorant child, I thought "that's fantastic".