Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler: With an introduction by Nikolaus Wachsmann

Very happy with delivery. Ordered it from someone else and it never arrived, completely different story here. Very prompt!Don't think it's been read before as quality if near perfect though putter pages are grubby, I'm very happy with everything!Only just started reading it but seems very interesting /good so far

A truly remarkable woman and a marvellous read. So pleased to have finally read it and so incredibly touching about her life in the Soviet gulag and in a nazi concentration camp.

An excellent book for anyone wanting to look at WW2 from all sides. This shows unique insights into both the Soviet and Nazi camps, as well as giving a first hand account of post war Germany.

Written in 1947 by a German married mother who before the war was in the German communist party vying with the Nazis for power in Germany. When Hitler came to power she and her husband, Heinz fled to Moscow. This was an obvious choice for communists who had been working in Germany under Moscow's direction. But the Stalin purges were then in progress. In 1937 her husband was arrested by the NKVD and she was never told what happened to him. Within a year she was also arrested, for no stated reason, and sent to the Gulag by the NKVD and then after two years she was handed to the Nazis as part of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 (it is thought). They put her in Ravensbruch where she remained for five years, until she was suddenly freed as the Soviet army approached from the East.Taking notes during her incarceration was impossible; it was very difficult just retaining your clothes and nic-nacs as fellow prisoners were often thieves. So, in writing this personal biography, she had an amazing recall of all her privations and the people she was enslaved with and under: many of whom are named. The Soviet concentration system was squalid, filthy, full of bed bugs, lice and fleas. Few fellow prisoners were to be trusted. The Ravensbruch system was for the first three years very tidy, highly disciplined and free of infestations but conditions deteriorated as thousands of prisoners were added and the SS became more hard-pressed. The gassings and shootings escalated to match the loadings on the camp. It is not clear why she was often given overseer duties in Ravensbruch - she offers no speculations on this - but it may have helped her to survive. She used these positions to help many other prisoners, at great risk to herself and for which she was sometimes severely punished.It is only when MBN is suddenly released and she makes her way westwards towards the American lines, desperately keeping away from the Soviets that we get some of her thoughts about ideology. She seems to have repented of communism by this time - she knew how vile the Soviet version was - but her thinking is only revealed in her cautious conversations with people who she thinks still believe. She never gives us an analysis of communism and why it went wrong, nor of Nazism and why she did not support that. It's not a philosophical book at all. In that respect it is inferior to Grossman's or Figue's books on these turbulent times which do contain many evaluative comments. I don't think she was an intellectual. In fact the Intro says 'she recalled that what had attracted her was not Marxist theory, of which she was ignorant, but its emotional appeal: the promise that a revolution would bring heaven on earth, putting an end to poverty, exploitation and injustice'. In that respect she is the same as all people who are duped by utopian ideologies.

Almost unsurpassable, this record document stands as one individual's testimony to times now unthinkable, the investment of ideas then, the betrayal of that hope, and the belief that sustained it. An important book.

Great

Very interesting story, a good read well worth the time

Very good read.

Vision fraiche (1949) des camps et nazis et russes a travers l'experience d'une femme "lettree"qui dose son experience sans pathos.

This terrible autobiographical book is the best medicine against any kind of nationalism, demagoguery and ideological dogma. It adds the story of Primo Levi “If this is a man” to the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”.

This book by Margarete Buber-Neumann is a classic. I felt fortunate to be able to order it, and it arrived promptly and in perfect shape.

Buber-Neumann is an excellent writer with a keen observer's eye. The conditions under which she was imprisoned were horrific but her descriptions are not emotionally charged or full of hyperbole. A remarkable feature of her story, to me, is how she found islands of humanity in these man-made hells, and how she and her fellow prisoners found ways to survive against enormous odds. It is also a testament to Buber-Neumann's strength of character that she could sometimes see and enjoy, even in the camps, the few glimpses of the natural world that were allowed. Lastly, the story of the Jehovah's Witnesses, and their conduct in Ravensbruck is a lesson in the value of deep beliefs, in this instance, religious beliefs.

I'm not saying a lot. If I were this woman I would have given up (or gone insane) many times. A true testament to human spirit and endurance. Excellently written and very readable (you'll understand all the words and the sentences are sentences, not paragraphs), it will hold you to the end. I'm ashamed because I get upset if I get a paper cut, or someone looks at me the wrong way. All the characters she writes about are interesting, good or evil. When the end comes you are so enamored with this woman you want to keep reading about her. A book I will never forget and keep in my bookcase until I die.