About the Author

Margarete Buber-Neumann

Born in Potsdam in 1901, she joined the Communist Youth League in 1921 and the KPD in 1926. After her first marriage to Rafael Buber, son of the renowned Jewish religious philosopher Martin Buber, she met Heinz Neumann in 1929, one of the leading figures of the KPD. In 1937, Heinz Neumann was arrested by the NKVD and disappeared without a trace. A year later, the author was sentenced by the NKVD to five years in a labor camp and in 1940 was exchanged to the Gestapo. She then spent five more years in the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp in Mecklenburg, where she died in 1944.