An astonishing account (and the only one we have) of a woman’s experience of labour camps under Stalin and Hitler.

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, Heinz Neumann was arrested by the secret police and executed by year’s end. She herself was arrested in 1938. In the book, she describes the two years of suffering she endured in the Soviet prisons and in the huge central-Asian 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.

Under Two Dictators is harrowing in its depiction of life under the rule of two of the most brutal regimes the western world has ever seen. It is also an inspiring story of survival, of ideology and of strength, and a clarion call for the protection of democracy.