Anna

Guide

Meet Anna – our authentic contemporary witness and passionate tour guide in Berlin. Standing at 1.60m tall, with gray-white hair and a distinctive black scarf, she immediately stands out when she leads school classes through the former Marienfelde refugee camp – now an impressive memorial site where 1.35 million GDR refugees once found their first hope in the West.

With a touch of emotion, Anna tells the moving story of the four million people who left their homeland in the GDR behind. Her own path to the West was anything but easy. As a clothing engineer and Russian interpreter, she managed to rise to the position of department head at the GDR Fashion Institute – despite years of harassment and constant surveillance by the Stasi, whose goal was to “disintegrate” her and render her useless.

In 1989, when she was finally forced to leave the GDR – after tirelessly applying for exit visas – a new chapter began for Anna. The initial years after her escape were marked by challenges: First, she lived in an asylum seekers’ center, later she found a position at the former tourist office, where colleagues from the East were often treated as second-class citizens. When the office was privatized shortly thereafter and she lost her job, she finally found her true calling: as a freelance tour guide. Her second love is the barrel organ, which she likes to play herself as a welcome – upon request.

Today, Anna enriches every tour with her incomparable life story and dry humor – be it the Ostalgie Tour, city tours, walking tours, tours of the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial, or even Marienfelde.

She has developed a number of crazy tours, such as the quirky “Tour of the Toilet.” Her tours emphasize the importance of experiencing and understanding history firsthand.

Be sure to take one of her tours—it’s a vivid example of how personal experiences make history authentic and tangible.