One Who Survived

UNDER Two DICTATORS (331 pp.)--Margarete Buber--Dodd, Meac/ ($4).

At dawn on April 26, 1945, a ruddy, round-faced young G.I., standing guard in front of the Allied lines at Bad Kleinen, Germany, watched two ragged figures approaching him. His orders were to turn back the civilians and defeated Nazi troops who were trying to escape the Russians, but these two were women, and he listened while one of them stated her case in broken English. She had just been released after five years in Ravensbrueck concentration camp; before that she had spent two years in a Russian concentration camp. If the Russians caught her, she was through. Would he allow her and her fellow Ravensbrikk inmate to pass?

The G.I. shifted his wad of chewing gum, announced his decision: "O.K., sister. Go through." After they had gone a little way, the G.I. shouted at them to wait. He disappeared behind a farmhouse for a moment and came back on a cart pulled by a team of horses. "Get in," he said to the two frightened women. "You've walked enough by the look of you. You're going to ride now."

Deadly Parallel. "I could have flung my arms round his neck and kissed him," writes Author Buber. Under Two Dictators is her story of the seven brutal years behind barbed wire that led up to that first moment of freedom. Taken separately, Part I ("Soviet Concentration Camp, Karaganda") and Part II ("Nazi Concentration Camp, Ravensbrueck") will be familiar reading to those who have conscientiously suffered through the tales of terror told by other survivors of NKVD or Gestapo imprisonment. Taken together, the two parts balance the scales in a deadly parallel never before made by a victim of both regimes. Author Buber's conclusion: there was little to choose between them.

Margarete Buber, once a Communist who could point to an eleven-year record of toeing the party line, began to get into trouble with the U.S.S.R. in 1931. That year, her common-law husband, top-ranking German Communist Leader Heinz Neumann, dared to say no when Stalin asked: "Don't you think that if [Naziism] came to power in Germany it would be so much taken up in the West that the Soviet Union could develop in peace and build up Socialism?" Booted out of his high party post, Neumann was assigned to a round of minor party chores. So was his wife. Both wound up working as translators in Moscow, and there, one day in 1937, the NKVD arrested Comrade Neumann. His wife never saw him again.* A year later, the NKVD came for her.

Solidarity Symbol. Her persecutors charged her vaguely with "counterrevolutionary organization and agitation against the Soviet State," and refused to give her a trial, but demanded that she sign a confession anyhow. Not knowing what to confess, she refused--and drew a five-year sentence in Siberia as a "socially dangerous element." Among the starved, louse-bitten, work-weary inmates of Karaganda concentration camp, Comrade Buber lost her last illusions about the Kremlin dictatorship. One early incident was enlightening: when she asked for a "reopening" of her case, she was tossed into a punishment compound.

Women & children were shipped to Siberia's labor camps merely because their husbands and fathers had been sentenced. Like thousands of her fellow countrymen, one idiot girl was there because she had wandered beyond the limits of her home town without official permission. Most of the political prisoners were less enlightened about their offenses than the idiot girl. Five laconic charges accounted for all of them: "counterrevolutionary agitation," "counterrevolutionary organization," "preparation for armed insurrection," "preparation for terrorism," and "espionage." One Russian girl was there because she had suggested taking Stalin's picture down from the wall of a furnished apartment that she and her husband had rented. Her sentence: eight years.

There was method in the sentences, concludes Author Buber. "Apart from security measures against. .. elements which are supposed to be socially unreliable, the GPU [NKVD] is a great slave trust. Wherever labor is needed, the GPU sends its prisoners . . . Clearly, under such circumstances the GPU is not sparing in its arrests."

While Comrade Buber worked at shoveling dung or weeding fields, her fellow inmates died around her in droves--by suicide, or of malnutrition or disease. Then one day in 1940, Stalin played his final joker on his German Communist prisoners: as a symbol of solidarity under the Nazi-Soviet pact, he turned scores of them over to Hitler, who lost no time in throwing them into concentration camps. Hardly a handful was still alive by April 1945.

Guinea Pigs. In the beginning, Author Buber found Ravensbrueck easier than Siberia. "The Gestapo men . . . were still bound, if ever so loosely, to the judicial traditions of a civilized country, in which . . . an offender had to be formally charged and brought up for trial." If camp discipline was more fanatical, at least the food was better, the huts were cleaner, and the working day was shorter. But Nazi savagery soon showed its mad face. Periodically, groups of the sick, the aged, and such "racial inferiors" as Poles, Jews and gypsies, were marched off to the gas chambers. Young Polish girls were isolated in the camp hospital and used as guinea pigs for experimental transfers of bone and muscle. Later, hobbling on sticklike legs, they returned to their huts--only to be put on the gas-chamber list because they could no longer do a full day's work.

For persuading a female SS supervisor to spare the lives of two crippled "guinea pigs," Author Buber was thrown into freezing solitary confinement for more than two months; the first week she was without light or food. But Margarete Buber survived. Siberia had made her tough.

* Author Buber gives no details of Heinz Neumann's role in the German Communist party (and in the Comintern) before his fall from grace. Other ex-Communists, writing books of their own, have told more. In Out of the Night (1941), the late Jan Valtin described him as "the ruthless Heinz Neumann," chief of the anti-Nazi division of the German Communist party, who once, in ordering a strong-arm demonstration, told Valtin: "Ich will Leichen sehen" (I want to see corpses).

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