Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler

An astonishing account (and the only we have) of one womans 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 Ravensbrck. 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 Hitlers 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. Sales Points - A highly important testimony of a harrowing wartime experience and a hugely important social document - the only account we have of life in both Soviet and Nazi concentration camps.- Bears comparison to Those Who Trespass Against Us another Pimlico Original about a Polish Countesss experience in Ravensbruck which sold well and received terrific reviews- Will contain 80 new pages of never before published material pertaining to the book translated by the authors daughter- With an introduction by Nikolaus Wachsmann