One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps

by Andrea Pitzer

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316303583
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	09/19/2017
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
File size:	18 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Andrea Pitzer is the author of The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov. Her writing has appeared in USA Today, Slate, Lapham's Quarterly, and McSweeney's, among other publications. In 2009, she founded Nieman Storyboard, the narrative nonfiction site of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. She lives in Falls Church, Virginia.

Table of Contents

A Note on Sources xiii

Introduction Sailing to Guantánamo 3

Chapter 1 Born of Generals 17

Chapter 2 Death and Genocide in Southern Africa 54

Chapter 3 The First World War and the War on Civilians 88

Chapter 4 Gulag Rising 117

Chapter 5 The Architecture of Auschwitz 161

Chapter 6 Increments of Evil 221

Chapter 7 Stepchildren of the Gulag 256

Chapter 8 Echoes of Empire 294

Chapter 9 Bastard Children of the Camps 324

Chapter 10 Guantánamo Bay and the World 355

Afterword 411

Acknowledgments 419

Notes 421

Index 461

What People are Saying About This

Academy Award winner for Hearts and Minds, and author of the novel Girl of My Dreams - Peter Davis

"Andrea Pitzer's searing One Long Night proceeds like an epic poem charged with the horror of concentration camps on six continents. It is a tale full of sound and fury, unfortunately signifying plenty. 'Old camps reopen, new ones are born,' Pitzer tells us in her clean prose that is cogent, passionate, profound, and profoundly disturbing."

author of Truevine and Factory Man - Beth Macy

"Andrea Pitzer has a poet's grace and a documentarian's breadth, along with the curiosity of a reporter whose shoe leather has long ago frayed. In One Long Night, she also proves her rare ability to translate a century of suffering into a groundbreaking narrative that is fluid, lucid, and throbbing with humanity's ache. It will make you see the past — and the present — anew.

author of The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz-Age New York - Deborah Blum

"One Long Night is a don't-look-away narrative of concentration camps, a fearless and elegant tale of human cruelty but also of human courage. And it's told with such undaunted moral clarity, that the story serves to remind all of us that it is never too late to stand up for what is right."

Editorial Reviews

06/12/2017
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. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

As discussed on "All In with Chris Hayes"

"A disturbing yet important work on a universal calamity of the modern era...consistently fascinating."—Star Tribune

"Drawing on memoirs, histories, and archival sources, [Pitzer] offers a chilling, well-documented history of the camps' development.... A potent, powerful history of cruelty and dehumanization."—Kirkus (starred review)

"One Long Night is a don't-look-away narrative of concentration camps, a fearless and elegant tale of human cruelty but also of human courage. And it's told with such undaunted moral clarity, that the story serves to remind all of us that it is never too late to stand up for what is right."—Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of The Poisoner's Handbook

"Andrea Pitzer has a poet's grace and a documentarian's breadth, along with the curiosity of a reporter whose shoe leather has long ago frayed. In One Long Night, she also proves her rare ability to translate a century of suffering into a groundbreaking narrative that is fluid, lucid, and throbbing with humanity's ache. It will make you see the past - and the present - anew."
—Beth Macy, author of Truevine and Factory Man

"A clear-eyed and powerful exposure of the horrors of concentration camps, not just the ones we know about but the ones we've overlooked or ignored. The lengths Andrea Pitzer went to research and report this book prove revelatory."—Annie Jacobsen, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Pentagon's Brain

"Andrea Pitzer's searing One Long Night proceeds like an epic poem charged with the horror of concentration camps on six continents. It is a tale full of sound and fury, unfortunately signifying plenty. 'Old camps reopen, new ones are born,' Pitzer tells us in her clean prose that is cogent, passionate, profound, and profoundly disturbing."—Peter Davis, Academy Award winner for Hearts and Minds, and author of the novel Girl of My Dreams

"In this engrossing history, Pitzer traces the origins of concentration camps and follows their development over more than a century.... Pitzer excels at focusing this sprawling history on the personal level."—Publishers Weekly

Praise for The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

"A penetrating analysis certain to compel a major reassessment of the Nabokov canon."—Booklist (starred review)

"A brilliant examination that adds to the understanding of an inspiring & enigmatic life."—Kirkus (starred review)

"[Pitzer] has done much exemplary primary research, and this book forces one to consider several fascinating quandaries presented by Lolita and Pale Fire."—The New York Review of Books

"Pitzer, like Nabokov, is a beautiful writer and gimlet-eyed observer, especially about her subject."—The Boston Globe

"An illuminating book for confusing times"—Sarah Rothbard, Zocalo

From the Publisher

★ 2017-05-31
Dispelling the assumption that concentration camps began and ended in Nazi Germany.Pitzer (The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov, 2013), the founder of the Nieman Storyboard at Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism, examines what she deems "the defining atrocity" of the 20th century. Drawing on memoirs, histories, and archival sources, she offers a chilling, well-documented history of the camps' development. The precursor of concentration camps, she contends, arrived with the Spanish Empire, which pursued a policy of relocating and imprisoning native populations in the Americas. Later, in the American Civil War, the Andersonville prisoner-of-war camp was "a harbinger of the civilian concentration camps that were to come." These burgeoned during the Boer War at the end of the 19th century, during which scores of camps held prisoners of war, civilians identified as enemies, and more than 100,000 black Africans. Dysentery, typhoid, and pneumonia coursed through camp populations. That model of incarceration was carried on by Germans in South Africa, who built camps at military posts to contain the despised Herero and use them for forced labor. Every man, woman, and child "wore stamped, numbered metal tags," and some children became the personal slaves of German officers. Characterized by barbed wire, rotting food, and brutal, hierarchical supervision, the first decade of concentration camps presaged the proliferation of camps for enemy aliens during World War I. In 1914, combatant nations herded hundreds of thousands of civilians in networks of camps located far from the battlefield, "a deliberate choice to inject the framework of war into society itself." The perception of civilians as a threat justified genocide such as the persecution of Armenians by Turkey and of Jews, homosexuals, and the disabled by Nazis. In grim detail, Pitzer portrays camps in Cuba, the Philippines, Russia, China, and North Korea as well as the rounding up of Japanese citizens in the U.S. She sees Guantánamo as a contemporary instance of "indefinite detention without trial," which is "the hallmark of a concentration camp system." A potent, powerful history of cruelty and dehumanization.

Kirkus Reviews