An Australian woman who turned to communism as a child and spied for the feared East German Stasi has taken to the stage to tell her story.

At age 87, Salomea Genin - originally from Melbourne - now looks back on her time in East Germany's secret police with regret.

As a young woman she had been a believer in communism and was desperate to move to communist East Germany.

The Stasi, whose extensive network controlled life in the former Eastern Bloc country, gave Salomea a flat around 1962, and she built a career as a translator and interpreter.

Every time she saw shortages in the shops she would make excuses for the regime, and every time she heard about people whose lives were ruined by the hideous state apparatus she would find a reason to explain it away.

'I didn't want to know because this ideology and this great idea of socialism, it was my life,' she told ABC Radio National.

'It was the basis of everything I had lived for.'

Salomea Genin (pictured left) spied for the Stasi so she could move to East Germany at the height of communism. Decades later she realised she was wrong and now stars in a play about how the totalitarian East German regime affected people's lives

East German police and workers seal up the Berlin Wall in 1961. Overnight the barrier went up dividing Berlin and preventing millions of people from fleeing to the West. A year after this picture was taken, Salomea Genin got her wish - to live inside repressive East Germany

Jubilant crowds dance on the Berlin Wall on November 11, 1989 as they tear it down. Salomea Genin realised seven years before that she had been wrong - but it was too late

Delegates march at the 1951 World Festival of Youth and Students in East Berlin. ASIO sent a spy along with Salomea and Australia's Communist Party contingent. Salomea was later shocked to find ASIO described her as 'bad', 'bitter' and 'unscrupulous'

The penny finally dropped one night in 1982 as she watched a newsreader on television announce a retrospective on Hitler's rise to power.

She realised that by refusing to see the awful things that East Germany's communists were doing, she was just as bad as the Germans who refused to see what the Nazis were doing all those years before.

'I realised I was living in a police state, and what's more I had helped make it so, because I had cooperated with the Stasi,' she said.

The realisation was a particularly poignant one for Salomea.

She herself was a Polish Jew whose family had lived in Berlin before World War II but had fled the rise of Germany's National Socialists, the Nazi Party.

In 1939, when Salomea was just seven years old, they set sail for Australia and came to live in Melbourne.

At the tender age of 12, Salomea joined the youth wing of the Communist Party of Australia just as it was achieving its greatest political strength in the 1940s.

The move had a profound impact on the neglected and fatherless girl as the Communist Party became her surrogate family.

She threw herself into the ideology just as the Cold War began.

Soldiers building the Berlin Wall in 1961. After the barrier went up those who wanted to escape from communism had to take daring and dangerous escapes which included hiding inside false bottoms in car boots, or making their own home-made hot air balloons

Germany, conquered in World War II, was quickly divided into east and west by the allied powers.

Communist Russia took control of East Germany while America and its capitalist, democratic allies began rebuilding West Germany.

Berlin was a city divided in two.

Australia viewed East Germany as an enemy in the unfolding tensions between communist east and capitalist west - but Salomea saw it as a communist utopia.

Naturally, it wasn't long before the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) began spying on her.

West Berliners wave across the wall to those trapped in the East in October 1961. East Germany became a totalitarian police state where the Stasi spied on every aspect of citizens' lives

Salomea was only 19 when she went to East Berlin in 1951 for the Soviet-backed World Festival of Youth and Students.

After the festival she tried many times to move to East Germany which she was convinced was a utopia that had overcome anti-semitism.

All her applications were rejected so she did the next best thing - in 1954 she moved to West Berlin so she could be as close to her dream as possible.

After she spent years crossing over to East Germany as often as she could, she realised that working for the Stasi would be her way in.

In 1962 they finally let her in and she began working for the Stasi as an informant.

It was her dream come true.

Salomea described herself as a 'fanatical' communist for whom the only thing in the world was acting for socialism.

The Stasi was a repressive and vast intelligence agency that funneled information to the communists, allowing them to imprison, torture, occasionally kill and frequently ruin the lives of dissidents - or anyone who stood up to them.

Informants would spy on their colleagues, friends and family. Nobody knew who to trust. Someone was always watching.

An page from communist Fred Rose's ASIO file. ASIO spied on both Salomea Genin and Fred Rose, an anthropologist originally from Britain who became embroiled in the Petrov Affair. ASIO was especially worried about communists in the 1950s

Her move was astonishing as between 1945 and 1988 about 4 million East Germans fled communism in the other direction, desperately seeking freedom in the West.

Just over 3.4 million left by walking over the border to West Berlin before the Berlin Wall sprouting up overnight, blocking them on August 13, 1961.

After that, the escapes became increasingly desperate and dangerous, including a daring escape in a home-made hot-air balloon in September 1979 when two families made it to safety, which inspired the 1982 film Night Crossing.

It wasn't until that same year, 1982, that Salomea admitted to herself how wrong she had been about the communists.

She couldn't undo her past but she helped her 17-year-old son Andy to avoid being conscripted into the East German army.

The communists let them out of the country to go to a family gathering in Melbourne.

When they returned, Andy stayed behind in West Berlin.

It was still seven years before the Berlin wall was to come down in 1989 unifying Germany - but at the time this was unthinkable, and nobody imagined anything would change.

But although Salomea could have escaped into the West also, she took her younger son back to East Germany.

She said at age 50 without western money or a job she didn't want to start life over again - but she said she did decide to give up working as a Stasi informant.

Years later, Salomea applied to ASIO to see her file.

It is extensive, fascinating, detailed and contains references to a number of Australians who lived in East Germany including Stasi collaborators Edith and Fred Rose.

Fred Rose studied anthropology at Cambridge before conducting field studies with the Anindilyakwa people of the Northern Territory on Groote Eylandt, now the site of one of Australia's biggest manganese mines.

Disgusted by the poverty of Indigenous communities, Rose became a communist in 1942 before moving to Canberra as a public servant.

Famously, he was tarnished by the Petrov Affair in 1954 after Soviet diplomat Vladimir Petrov defected to Australia and offered evidence of Russian spy rings in Australia.

Rose was accused of passing secrets to the Soviet embassy and was a witness in the royal commission.

Salomea's ASIO file revealed a secret agent had gone along with her Communist Party contingent to the 1951 East Berlin world youth festival.

Her file describes her unflatteringly as 'very bitter', 'bad' and 'unscrupulous' and said she blamed all the evils of the world on capitalism.

While Salomea told the ABC it was true that she had blamed capitalism, but she was not bad or unscrupulous.

Salomea now regrets her years as a communist but has done her best to make amends.

She still lives in the same East German apartment she was in when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and gives public talks about what it was like to be in the Stasi.

She also takes to the stage in Berlin every month to tell her life story on stage in an ensemble theatre production called Atlas of Communism.

The play reveals the fragments of people's lives under communism together with her own story - and she is the oldest member of the cast.

Salomea told the ABC that she had learnt a painful lesson but no longer suffers from the guilt.