East Germans lived in constant fear of the Stasi, the state’s secret police, which recruited informants and compiled dossiers on almost every citizen to crush any potential opposition to the state. Even so much as an anti-Communist cartoon or joke was sufficient grounds for jail. One East Berliner who escaped to West Germany discovered decades later, after communism’s collapse, that one of her best friends had informed on her to the Stasi. Everywhere in the Iron Curtain countries (as they were labeled by Winston Churchill in 1946), the state spied on average citizens. Even children were tricked into informing on parents. Bulgarians knew that people simply disappeared—but they did not know that a secret prison island, kept off official maps, was their ultimate destination.
