Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler

"I had to choose between her book and The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn . Some people will disagree, and I can totally get their argument for including that instead of this. But, for me, this was so instructive because it’s about the two most influential and far-reaching camp systems. The Soviet camps, while they didn’t have the death toll of the Nazi camps, really became a model, influencing so many other camp systems around the world: in China , Vietnam, North Korea. Margarete Buber-Neumann was a German communist who fled Hitler, not long after he came to power, into the arms of what she thought would be a welcoming Soviet Union . But it turned out that she got there right at the time of the worst of Stalin’s purges. Foreign elements were seen as one of the dangerous things that were going to undo the Revolution . She and her husband had fled together and they were immediately suspect, but they managed to make it for a surprisingly long time—I think it was between two and three years—and then he was arrested. He was then killed, though she didn’t know it at the time. She had a pretty good idea that that’s what had happened to him. His arrest gave her some time to prepare—she writes in the book that they always came for the husbands first, so the wives always had time to prepare—but she knew it was coming any day. She had gotten rid of a bunch of her belongings so she had a bag ready that she could grab to take with her. Then they came for her and she ended up spending months in detention. The Soviet system was weird in that you were held while your case was being ‘investigated.’ You didn’t get a real defence and, in reality, whole groups of people were arrested, given the same sentence, and sent to the same place, but they needed to maintain this illusion that they were investigating your case, that they weren’t like the Nazis. So she’s in this detention centre for months. Then she is sent across the Ural Mountains to Karaganda in Kazakhstan and she spends more than a year there. “The concentration camp system was such a flexible tool that it allowed them to do worse and worse things” What’s wonderful about her book is that there are so many poignant moments about her experience there. She’s so foolish in some ways, so idealistic. She’s still that young communist idealist. The prisoners take these two ducks under their wing. They have no extra food at all, but they still save a little bread to feed these two ducks. There is just something about life insisting on itself that speaks to them. Then, one day, the commandant comes out and shoots the ducks. She’s so upset about it that she decides that she’s going to file a complaint to the Supreme Court about her detention, that it’s unjust. All of the people that are in her detention area are like, ‘No! don’t do it. It’s a horrible idea’, but she goes ahead. The commandant takes everything down very seriously. Immediately afterward, she is sent to the punishment compound which is just hell, there’s no order or structure and everybody’s fighting daily with each other over their food. It is just this monstrous place. So, Margarete Buber-Neumann is both in Moscow—she’s held at the infamous Lubyanka at one point—and she’s out in these rural areas, both in administrative jobs and in the punishment compound. So you really get—even though it’s only a little over a year, that portion of her story—a good overview of what the Soviet system is like, as she writes about her whole trip through the system. Then, in 1939, the Soviets and the Nazis are allied briefly at the beginning of World War II and the Germans ask for her back. She is taken and walked over the bridge at Brest-Litovsk and she spends from then until the end of the war, five years, in Nazi camps: she is sent to the women’s camp at Ravensbrück. This is the most intellectually interesting part of her memoir, I think, the difference between the two camp systems, because when she gets to Ravensbrück, she is issued a clean uniform and utensils to eat with. The first day she’s given porridge and sausage and butter and fresh fruit to eat and the walkways at the camp are all swept and some of it’s even landscaped. She comes to what seems like this land of plenty, these horrifying Nazi camps that she had been so afraid of. But she soon finds out that there is this fascist obsession with order and that the tiniest infractions result in tremendous violence and oppression. She’s also ostracized by the communists in the camp because she tries to tell them what it’s really like in the Soviet Union. They decide that she’s a traitor and a class enemy. She can’t seem to get a break anywhere. But we see these two systems in sharp relief from each other. Both are incredibly cruel, both are warping society as a whole, both are killing more than a million people and locking up millions and millions more, but they’re actually quite different. Both are very destructive and yet the way they function is quite different. People are monsters inside both, but they have different outlets because of the ways the camps are culturally. And, of course, Ravensbrück descends into squalor and the horrors become more like the gulag system as the war continues. The Nazis lose the daily order and control that they had so prided themselves on. They segregate the Jewish women and at one point she sees them carried off. She hears the shots of their execution, so she is there when the camp begins to turn toward the Final Solution. Ravensbrück was not an extermination camp but, as with most camps, exterminations began happening. She is not privy to that in a direct way, she doesn’t witness it, but she sees the edges of it and she knows part of what is happening."