From Publishers Weekly
An astonishing mosaic of acts of courage and moral strength, Langbein's moving, invaluable history is the fullest account to date of resistance to Nazi terror by prisoners within the concentration camps. Laying to rest the notion that Jews generally went to their deaths unresistingly or apathetically, he documents camp inmates' armed uprisings, widespread sabotage, escapes, organized underground resistance activities and spontaneous acts of defiance. Fighting against an all-powerful machinery of terror, prisoners shared bread, kept imperiled fellow inmates out of the clutches of the Nazi SS, killed stool pigeons and smuggled information to the outside world. Langbein, an Austrian veteran of the Spanish Civil War, spent four years in Nazi death camps and led the underground movement in Auschwitz. His myth-dispelling book systemically details the resistance activities of Germans, Poles, Austrians, Russians, French, Czechs, Gypsies and others.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This detailed and well-documented book provides the first systematic treatment of resistance by prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps. Langbein, himself a former prisoner and resistance leader at Auschwitz, describes a camp "self-government" system that often played one group of prisoners against another, and the conflict that often existed between the Greens (prisoners with a criminal past) and the Reds (opponents of the Nazi regime). The author also describes how groups of prisoners (Germans, Austrians, Poles, Communists, Social Democrats, Jews, and Gypsies) organized themselves to carry out acts of resistance and the various forms that resistance could take. Not surprisingly, according to Langbein, the discipline of Party life made the Communists especially effective at organizing resistance networks. This serious study belongs in larger popular collections.
Mark Weber, Kent State Univ., Lib., OhioCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
