Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a team of archivists has been tirelessly sorting, pasting and reassembling documents that were destroyed by the Stasi, the East German secret police. Nicknamed the "Puzzle Women", these heroines of collective memory face the Herculean task of piecing together these files: the paper fragments are tiny, and the number of archivists is only a fraction of what would be required to complete the job without recourse to new technology. Meanwhile, the Stasi's victims are getting older, and time is running out. Niagara Tonolli reports.
In 1989, East Germany's Communist regime collapsed with the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the Berlin headquarters of the Stasi, the all-powerful secret police, panicked orders were given to immediately destroy the millions of cards and files that documented decades of police surveillance. When the crowd finally entered the Stasi headquarters, 111 kilometres of archives and 16,000 sacks full of paper strips – the remains of millions of shredded or ripped-up files – were saved by East German citizens.
