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Jonny
Huttner, a young Jewish communist and the former member of the most famous
agitprop theatre company in Germany, spent the years from 1936 to 1945 in
the Nazi prison and concentration camp system: this is his graphic and moving
account of those terrible years as told to Len Crome. In Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz
and Buchenwald he was, like all prisoners, involved in the gruelling day-to-day
struggle for survival, and also took an active part in the highly perilous
resistance movement inside the camps.
Communists, socialists and others worked together to occupy positions of influence in sick-bays, kitchens and elsewhere, and led a constant struggle to protect the weakest and most vulnerable prisoners while also trying to maintain the morale and dignity of all camp inmates. Contact was established with the world outside, escapes occasionally organised and war work sabotaged, most dramatically in the factory for the manufacture of flying bombs tunnelled into the Hasrz Mountains where both resistance and SS reprisals reached unparalleled levels.
Before the Nazi seizure of power Huttner had been a member of the most influential and innovative of the agitprop theatre groups attached to the German Communist party, Das Rote Sprachrohr - Red Megaphone - directed by Maxim Vallentin. The company's history is sketched here, and the dramatic, often harrowing, tale of the other members' lives during and after the Third Reich also told
Len Crome is a doctor who served with the International Brigades in Spain and then with the Royal Army Medical Corps during the Second World War. A pathologist, he has written numerous articles and books on medical subjects, and also contributed to History Workshop.