Around one million Chileans were forced into exile
by the military coup on 11 September 1973.
We tried to stage plays in Chile, we put on plays.
We naively thought that if we produced theatre for children
it would not be so dangerous and subversive.
But some of us were arrested and even disappeared, killed.
At the time, my wife and I were members of the Communist Party of Chile.
It was very dangerous.
Not only for communists, but for anyone who was politically organized.
One weekend, I was visiting my parents, who didn’t live in Santiago,
and a woman who knew us came and told us to leave the country immediately.
She told us they had information that we were going to be arrested.
Many people had to leave the country, it didn’t matter where to.
Anywhere they would be taken in.
But our small group, we definitely wanted to go to the GDR.
We wanted to see what real socialism was with our own eyes.
We wanted to experience the difference between the idea that we had
and really existing socialism.
The second reason was artistic. We were a theatre group and
the Berliner Ensemble, Brecht’s theatre, was an inspiration for us.
We wanted to discover it for ourselves.