Yet another heartbreaking story from the Cold War. I just took a guided tour of the Hohenschoenhausen prison, now a museum, a few weeks ago. Our guide: a former inmate. Ass she told stories that echo this article - about sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, beatings, hours and hours of interrogation - it was easy to see by her demeanor that it left her traumatized. She twirled her scarf, looked away in the distance, and shifted back and forth on her feet.

What stunned me even more was when she told the group how someone - apparently former prison guards or adherents of the former East German regime - leave notes on her car windshield regularly claiming "We'll get you someday!" and similar threats. So believers in this system are still around, incredibly.

When I told her I admired her courage for doing the tours, she said she initially declined when the Hohenschoenhausen museum contacted her and asked her to be a guide, as she found it too traumatizing.

That changed with the arrival of the pandemic and she observed people protesting about having to wear masks and obey other restrictions while claiming that the country was turning into a "dictatorship."

I'll show you want a dictatorship looks like, she thought, and immediately signed up to be a tour guide.