One Long Night

June 12, 2017
In this engrossing history, Pitzer (The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov) traces the origins of concentration camps and follows their development over more than a century. In the 1890s, the Spanish military in Cuba rounded up indigenous civilians to separate them from the rebels who insisted on Cuban independence. Atrocities—rape, murder, starvation—ensued. Americans recoiled at Spain’s treatment of the reconcentrados, one of the reasons that the U.S. declared war against Spain in 1898. Yet by 1901, the U.S. military implemented a similar system in the Philippines to subdue anti-American rebels. Pitzer excels at focusing this sprawling history on the personal level. The suffering of Boer families and their African servants is told from the perspective of British welfare activist Emily Hobhouse, who tirelessly worked to help the detainees. The most astonishing story belongs to Margarete Buber-Neumann, a German-born Communist living in Moscow when she was arrested and imprisoned in one of Stalin’s Gulags in 1938. A little more than a year later, as part of a prisoner exchange between Germany and Russia, she ended up at Ravensbrück, one of the Nazi concentration camps. The end of WWII didn’t bring an end to these camps and Pitzer ends where she began—in Cuba, at Guantánamo Bay. “Like a cunning virus,” Pitzer chillingly observes, “they evolve to survive.” Agent: Katherine Boyle, Veritas Literary.