Description
Book SynopsisIn 1949, as Cold War tensions in Europe mounted, French intellectual and former Buchenwald inmate David Rousset called upon fellow concentration camp survivors to denounce the Soviet Gulag as a hallucinatory repetition of Nazi Germany''s most terrible crime. In Political Survivors, Emma Kuby tells the riveting story of what followed his appeal, as prominent members of the wartime Resistance from throughout Western Europe united to campaign against the continued existence of inhumane internment systems around the world. The International Commission against the Concentration Camp Regime brought together those originally deported for acts of anti-Nazi political activity who believed that their unlikely survival incurred a duty to bear witness for other victims. Over the course of the next decade, these pioneering activists crusaded to expose political imprisonment, forced labor, and other crimes against humanity in Franco''s Spain, Maoist China, French Algeria, and beyond.
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Trade ReviewA meticulous, nuanced look inside the deeply fraught postwar political theater in France and Europe.
* Kirkus Reviews *
A penetrating look at an arcane subject. Deeply researched and fluently written.
* The Chicago Tribune *
Political Survivors is a first-rate work of intellectual history that offers keen insights into French political history, the memories of World War II, the Resistance, and the Holocaust, and the operation of international organizations.
* H-Diplo *
Quite simply, this book is a tour de force.
* David H. Pinkney Prize citation, Society for French Historical Studies *
[T]he greatest achievement of Kuby's book lies in its masterful analysis of the ethics of who gets to shape the narrative of historical memory... This alone makes it a compelling read for historians of any field and transforms this into a book that will have profound impact on our field for many years to come.
* Journal of Modern History *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Acronyms and Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Survivors as Witnesses in Postwar France
2. David Rousset's Cold War Call to Arms
3. Forging the International Commission
4. Nuremberg Restaged: The Soviet Univers Concentrationnaire on Trial
5. Into the Labyrinth of Franco's Prisons
6. Triumphs and Tensions on the Global Stage
7. From Auschwitz to Algeria: The Limits of Memory
Epilogue
Notes
Index
