Dancing on Ice star Katarina Witt reveals East German secret police spied on her since the age of 8

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2119797/Dancing-Ice-star-Katarina-Witt-reveals-East-German-secret-police-spied-age-8.html

As a competitive figure skater, there was always one tiny moment just before the music began and I hit my pose, one second of absolute silence. I knew there were thousands of people in the arena, millions, maybe billions, watching on television.

But for that brief pause, I was completely on my own, rather lonely, rather vulnerable.

It turned out to be good practice, thanks to events well away from my life of rinks and rehearsals, events I could never have predicted. After the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989, I was accused not just of collaborating with the government of East Germany, the Deutsche Demo-kratische Republik (DDR), but of spying on my friends.

It was an astonishing claim, deeply hurtful and untrue, which is why in 1992 I found myself in an airless room somewhere in the heart of an ugly concrete building in the eastern half of Berlin, feeling lonely and vulner-able once again. It turned out that all my life, I had been watched more thoroughly than I could ever have imagined – by a very different, uninvited audience.

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Written by Witt herself, this is fascinating stuff and a scary insight into the worst security apparatus of the cold war - by miles. Anyone who´s seen the film "The lives of others" will understand what i mean.