Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.

What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. This is the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service.

And all this week to mark 60 years since the building of the Berlin Wall,

we've been bringing you programs from our archives about the divided city of Berlin and the lives of East Germans under communism.

Throughout the decades of division, East Germany's much feared secret police force, the Stasi, kept tabs on everyone who raised their voices against the regime.

In 2009 Lucy Williamson spoke to Vera Langsfeld, who was put in solitary confinement in one of East Germany's

most notorious jails, not that long before the wall came down.

It's 1988, a cold January morning in East Berlin, and within the stark walls

of Hoenschenhausen prison, Vera Lengsfeld is waking up.

I realize that it was indeed a complete isolation,

that I didn't hear anything from the outside,

that it was an almost complete silence banging of the cell doors and the knocking of the cell doors and the knocking of the cell door bolts and that nobody no person spoke to me and that I had no contact with other

human beings. Vera had been arrested at a peace march in Berlin. She'd been carrying a poster quoting a line

from the East German constitution. Every citizen has the right to express his opinion freely and

openly, it said. But the prison warders disagreed.

When I first realized that I was in complete isolation I can still remember the panic which arose in my guts and that I tried hard to cover up those panic that I concentrated on this on the

sort is they should never learn how big my panic is, how much I fear to be here.

And your reaction to that, was it to try and talk to the wardens was it to talk to

...