Synopsis:
An astonishing account (and the only we have) of one woman's experience of labour camps under Stalin and Hitler

This book is a unique account by a survivor of both the Soviet and Nazi concentration camps: its author, Margarete Buber-Neumann, was a loyal member of the German Communist party. From 1935 she and her second husband, Heinz Neumann, were political refugees in Moscow. In April 1937 Neumann was arrested by the secret police, and executed by the end of the year. She herself was arrested in 1938. Here Buber-Neumann describes the two years of suffering she endured in the Soviet prisons and in the huge Central-Asian concentration and slave labor camp of Karaganda; her extradition to the Gestapo in 1940 at the time of the Stalin-Hitler Friendship Pact; and her five years of suffering in the Nazi concentration and death camp for women, Ravensbrück. Her story displays extraordinary powers of observation and of memory as she describes her own fate, as well as those of hundreds of fellow prisoners. She explores the behavior of the guards, supervisors, police, and secret police and compares and contrasts Stalin and Hitler’s methods of dictatorship and terror. First published in Swedish, German, and English and subsequently translated and published in a further nine languages, this harrowing in its depiction of life under the rule of two of the most brutal regimes the western world has ever seen is also an inspiring story of survival, of ideology, and of strength, and a clarion call for the protection of democracy.