If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women’s Prison in Communist Poland by Anna Müller
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 4.7 MB
Overview: The specter of a prison punishment for even slight political offenses became an element of daily life in post-war Poland. In interwar Poland, imprisonment, especially for communists, had served as a rite of passage, endurance training, and a university teaching life skills. The post-war order brought a dramatic shift, as communists all over the region, often veterans of interwar prisons or war-time concentration camps, used incarceration sites as a way to mold the future. The prison system functioned as a tool to subjugate society and silence or destroy enemies- anti-communists as well as committed communists. Arrests, trials, and prison sentences directly and indirectly affected tens of thousands of people and instilled fear and insecurity in many more.
Many of those imprisoned as enemies of the new post-war Communist authorities were women. Some were jailed for their alleged collaboration with the Nazi resistance during the war, some for post-war activities in various civil and quasi-military groups, still others on the basis of their relationships with those already imprisoned. For some, there was evidence of their anti-state activities, while for many others the accusations were contrived.
Genre: Non-Fiction > History
Download Instructions:
https://ouo.io/FUJVDJ
https://ouo.io/DzwvKoD
