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Loading... One long night: a global history of concentration camps (2017)| 158 | 2 | 173,623 | 
(4.29) | 1 | A groundbreaking, haunting, and profoundly moving history of modernity's greatest tragedy: concentration camps. For over 100 years, at least one concentration camp has existed somewhere on Earth. First used as battlefield strategy, camps have evolved with each passing decade, in the scope of their effects and the savage practicality with which governments have employed them. Even in the twenty-first century, as we continue to reckon with the magnitude and horror of the Holocaust, history tells us we have broken our own solemn promise of "never again." In this harrowing work based on archival records and interviews during travel to four continents, Andrea Pitzer reveals for the first time the chronological and geopolitical history of concentration camps. Beginning with 1890s Cuba, she pinpoints concentration camps around the world and across decades. From the Philippines and Southern Africa in the early twentieth century to the Soviet Gulag and detention camps in China and North Korea during the Cold War, camp systems have been used as tools for civilian relocation and political repression. Often justified as a measure to protect a nation, or even the interned groups themselves, camps have instead served as brutal and dehumanizing sites that have claimed the lives of millions. Drawing from exclusive testimony, landmark historical scholarship, and stunning research, Andrea Pitzer unearths the roots of this appalling phenomenon, exploring and exposing the staggering toll of the camps: our greatest atrocities, the extraordinary survivors, and even the intimate, quiet moments that have also been part of camp life during the past century. "Masterly"-The New Yorker A Smithsonian Magazine Best History Book of the Year… (more) |
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| Epigraph |
'Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp
that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.'
-Elie Wiesel, 'Night'  'It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.'
-Primo Levi | |
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'To the dead and the dreams of a lost century' | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English
None ▾Book descriptions A groundbreaking, haunting, and profoundly moving history of modernity's greatest tragedy: concentration camps. For over 100 years, at least one concentration camp has existed somewhere on Earth. First used as battlefield strategy, camps have evolved with each passing decade, in the scope of their effects and the savage practicality with which governments have employed them. Even in the twenty-first century, as we continue to reckon with the magnitude and horror of the Holocaust, history tells us we have broken our own solemn promise of "never again." In this harrowing work based on archival records and interviews during travel to four continents, Andrea Pitzer reveals for the first time the chronological and geopolitical history of concentration camps. Beginning with 1890s Cuba, she pinpoints concentration camps around the world and across decades. From the Philippines and Southern Africa in the early twentieth century to the Soviet Gulag and detention camps in China and North Korea during the Cold War, camp systems have been used as tools for civilian relocation and political repression. Often justified as a measure to protect a nation, or even the interned groups themselves, camps have instead served as brutal and dehumanizing sites that have claimed the lives of millions. Drawing from exclusive testimony, landmark historical scholarship, and stunning research, Andrea Pitzer unearths the roots of this appalling phenomenon, exploring and exposing the staggering toll of the camps: our greatest atrocities, the extraordinary survivors, and even the intimate, quiet moments that have also been part of camp life during the past century. "Masterly"-The New Yorker A Smithsonian Magazine Best History Book of the Year ▾Library descriptions No library descriptions found. ▾LibraryThing members' description
| Book description |
For over 100 years, at least one concentration camp has existed somewhere on Earth. First used as battlefield strategy, camps have evolved with each passing decade, in the scope of their effects and the savage practicality with which governments have employed them. Even in the twenty-first century, as we continue to reckon with the magnitude and horror of the Holocaust, history tells us we have broken our own solemn promise of "never again."
In this harrowing work based on archival records and interviews during travel to four continents, Andrea Pitzer reveals for the first time the chronological and geopolitical history of concentration camps. Beginning with 1890s Cuba, she pinpoints concentration camps around the world and across decades. From the Philippines and Southern Africa in the early twentieth century to the Soviet Gulag and detention camps in China and North Korea during the Cold War, camp systems have been used as tools for civilian relocation and political repression. Often justified as a measure to protect a nation, or even the interned groups themselves, camps have instead served as brutal and dehumanizing sites that have claimed the lives of millions.
Drawing from exclusive testimony, landmark historical scholarship, and stunning research, Andrea Pitzer unearths the roots of this appalling phenomenon, exploring and exposing the staggering toll of the camps: our greatest atrocities, the extraordinary survivors, and even the intimate, quiet moments that have also been part of camp life during the past century. [Amazon.co.uk] | |
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Pitzer traces the idea and the institution from its origins through colonialist wars in Africa, enemy alien camps in the two world wars, the horrors of the Nazi camps, America's Japanese internment camps, the gulags, Asian communist reeducation camps, repression of African freedom movements, anticommunist repression in South America, and finally Guantánamo and the other camps of the US "war on terror". She catalogs the gradations and varieties -- simple detention, starvation, disease, torture, labor camps, and extermination camps. Each chapter covers another place, time, and stage in the development of camps. In most chapters, she weaves information from the experiences of one or a few individual camp survivors with the larger sweep of historical information. Some of the events she covers I knew about in detail -- there was relatively little new to me in the chapter on the Nazi camps -- but others I knew only as phrases (the Mau Mau rebellion, for instance), or not at all. It's all riveting and important and the news sounds very different to me now that I have read it.
Highly recommended. (