Comments on: What are some good books about life in captivity?

Question: What are some good books about life in captivity?

Telf — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:00:19 -0800

Help me find literature written about life in prisons, work camps, concentration camps etc.

Can you guys please suggest some interesting works of fiction or nonfiction focusing mostly on life in prisons, prison camps, concentration camps, DP camps, refugee camps or any similar settings. Stories that take place in war ravaged occupied areas also fit the bill, think postwar Berlin etc. I'm finding myself very interested in this sort of thing recently.

I'm particularly interested in how people survive these situations. Profiles of people who managed to make it to the top of the ad hoc hierarchies of camp life are especially interesting to me. I'm also deeply interested in the bartering and general economies of camp life.

In no particular order, here are some works that I have read and either enjoyed have been deeply affected by:

King Rat by James Clavell. Historical Fiction. Story about life in Japanese-run POW camp in South East Asia. Profiles one low ranking American soldier who claws his way to the top.

Empire of the Sun by JG Ballard Semi autobiographical. Recounts the experiences of a wealthy British child living in a Japanese prison camp during WWII. Reveals lots deal making and bartering.

Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi. Autobiographical memoir about life in Auschwitz. Extremely honest, shows competition between prisoners.

Night by Elie Wiesel. Holocaust memoir. Perhaps more inspiring than many of the Holocaust memoirs.

The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz. Has less emphasis on prison/camp life than other listed books, but does profile survivors of the camps and how they lived.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Fiction but semi autobiographical. Account of life in Stalinist prison camp.

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski. Collection memories about concentration camp life.

Maus by Art Speigelman. Graphic Novel. Extremely powerful for a graphic novel. Depicts and contrasts the behavior of the author's father during and after life in a concentration camp.

If anyone could suggest more works in this vein, I'd really appreciate this. Bonus for providing a brief synopsis. Double bonus if you can provided some varied time periods/locations of such life.

Thanks.

By: that girl

that girl — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:05:58 -0800

Not a book, but did you see this link from MetaFilter on Tuesday?

By: Effigy2000

Effigy2000 — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:06:47 -0800

Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, the novella on which the movie was based.

By: Telf

Telf — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:07:14 -0800

Forgot to list Papillon by Henri Charriere. Supposedly autobiographical account of prisoner held in French prison in South America. Plenty of detail regarding day to day life and eventual escape.

By: nitsuj

nitsuj — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:07:23 -0800

Also Moments of Reprieve by Levi.

"They are the moments that helped him overcome his circumstances, either physically (through actual salvation from death, or helping him avoid it, e.g. by obtaining extra food) or more spiritually, through human interaction restoring his faith in his fellow man."

By: scody

scody — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:07:40 -0800

Have you read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago?

By: that girl

that girl — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:07:43 -0800

Also, a book: When the Emperor was Divine. About US internment camps for Japanese.

By: rtha

rtha — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:17:15 -0800

In the Belly of the Beast.

By: that possible maker of pork sausages

that possible maker of pork sausages — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:20:46 -0800

Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago also treats his time in a gulag.

Kantor's Andersonville is about, well, Andersonville the POW camp during the Civil War. It shows life in the camp through the eyes of several different people.

Memoir of Hungary, 1944-1948, by Sandor Marai. Memoir of life in Hungary between the end of WWII and the solidification of Soviet power in Hungary.

By: nicwolff

nicwolff — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:24:38 -0800

Protective Pairing for Punks.

By: thinman

thinman — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:26:22 -0800

Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.

By: fearfulsymmetry

fearfulsymmetry — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:27:23 -0800

Erwin James wrote a fairly long running series of columns in The Guardian about being a 'lifer' in British prisons up to and slightly beyond the end of his sentence. They were later published in two books A Life Inside: A Prisoner's Notebook and The Home Stretch: From Prison to Parole

By: anansi

anansi — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:33:25 -0800

Soledad Brother: the Prison Letters of George Jackson

By: otio

otio — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:34:11 -0800

Dostoevsky's The House of the Dead is excellent. It's based on his own experiences in a Siberian prison camp.

If your interest turn theoretical, Erving Goffman's Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates is a classic study of "total institutions" and the way they operate. Academic but very readable.

By: selton

selton — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:49:57 -0800

All about the USSR Gulag camps and in addition to the Solzhenitsyn's mentioned above.

Man is wolf to Man

Kolyma Tales

A world Apart

and almost as a synopsis...
Gulag

By: box

box — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:50:50 -0800

Bad Girl, by Abigail Vona (though there was some controversy about that), is about her time spent confined against her will in teen rehab.

Julia Scheeres' Jesus Land is largely about time spent in a Christian reform school.

Jack Gantos' Hole in My Life is largely about his time in prison.

By: ibmcginty

ibmcginty — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:52:23 -0800

Aquariums of Pyongyang, about life in a North Korean gulag.

Was also going to mention Man's Search for Meaning.

By: Acari

Acari — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:04:53 -0800

For ease of reading and anthropomorphic characterizations of races [while still being touching and informative], try Maus.

By: Acari

Acari — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:05:50 -0800

Dammit dammit dammit.
I could have sworn I read your whole question twice!

[sorry]

By: peep

peep — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:07:45 -0800

I highly recommend Committing Journalism: The Prison Writings of Red Hog.

By: Detuned Radio

Detuned Radio — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:13:26 -0800

I'd offer up " One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I know he's been suggested already, but I found this "snapshot" of Ivan Denisovich's experience truly chilling, in both its frankness and lack of emotion. One part that really stays with me is when the prisoners of the gulag, though already starving, stuff bread in their ears at night because the sounds of other prisoners suffering is too much to bear.

By: hydrophonic

hydrophonic — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:16:38 -0800

Prisoner's Inventions. There's also a website.

By: chihiro

chihiro — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:30:07 -0800

The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom. The first half of the book is about her and her family's efforts to hide Jewish people in Holland, but she and her elderly father and sister were taken to the concentration camps. Very moving and completely true. Note: their family were all devout Catholics so faith does come up alot in the book.

By: Rumple

Rumple — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:32:38 -0800

Go Boy!, by Roger Caron, is a fantastic prison memoir.

LibraryThing: imprisonment, prison, political prisoner.

Darkness at Noon, of course.

Prisoner without a name, cell without a number.

Also, prior post on the blue

By: Rumple

Rumple — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:44:28 -0800

Also: wikpedia, political prisoner memoirs

Prison literature in the United States
Memoirs of an Anarchist
After the Madness (memoirs of a judge who ends up in prison)

By: Rumple

Rumple — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:46:29 -0800

One more! this list might have some good leads.

By: dilettante

dilettante — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 17:40:31 -0800

Several of Jean Genet's novels might (technically) fit the bill.

By: mmascolino

mmascolino — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 17:42:42 -0800

How about a tale told from the other side of the bars: Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing which features a journalist getting a job at the infamous Sing Sing prison and documenting his one year stint there.

By: phliar

phliar — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 17:57:28 -0800

The infamous wartime broadcasts that P. G. Wodehouse made were about his life in a German prison camp.

http://www.wodehouse.org/pgw-broadcast1.html
http://www.wodehouse.org/pgw-broadcast2.html
http://www.wodehouse.org/pgw-broadcast3.html
http://www.wodehouse.org/pgw-broadcast4.html
http://www.wodehouse.org/pgw-broadcast5.html

By: shothotbot

shothotbot — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 18:16:59 -0800

On the Yard - the only prison book you can give your aunt. We are All Doing Time is a spiritual workbook for prisoners published by the fine folks who bring us the prison ashram project:

By: dmd

dmd — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 18:40:22 -0800

Kind of a different sort of thing, but Plowing the Dark by Richard Powers.

By: brundlefly

brundlefly — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:04:56 -0800

Camp Concentration

By: garfy3

garfy3 — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:25:56 -0800

well, as for the effects of persisting in a prison camp, i might suggest a look at the tractatus logico philosophicus, written by Ludwig Wittgenstein whilst soldiering in the trenches of WWI as well as time in a prisoner-of-war camp.

for the backstory on this amazing text, you might start with Ray Monk's Ludwig Wittgenstein, the duty of genius

By: dreamyshade

dreamyshade — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:38:58 -0800

I recently read "The Economic Organization of a P.O.W. Camp" by R. A. Radford, published in 1945, and it's a rather interesting article.

By: sacre_bleu

sacre_bleu — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 07:30:36 -0800

From the ingenious scrounging Allied POW genre:

The Great Escape, Paul Brickhill
Colditz
The Wooden Horse - where POWs use a wooden vaulting horse and practice held inder the eyes of Nazi guards to din an escape tunne.

By: WCityMike

WCityMike — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 11:02:19 -0800

My grandfather, grandmother, and their children were held under house arrest in the Second Sino-Japanese War; they were over there as medical missionaries. She wrote about it in one of her books, The Chinese Ginger Jars, which entered the public domain and so is now housed on the Internet Archive. It's not precisely responsive to your question, but it may be in the general ballpark.

By: Catch

Catch — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 18:46:38 -0800

My Happy Days In Hell by György Faludy - autobiographical novel based on Author's time in Hungarian labour camp. Great title. On my to re-read list.

By: nuclear_soup

nuclear_soup — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 07:04:13 -0800

I recently took a class on Holocaust Literature and one of the best things I read was Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered by Ruth Kluger. I highly recommend it.

By: librarina

librarina — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 19:58:01 -0800

This was my undergrad advisor's topic: captivity narratives. And this is her book: Captured: The Japanese Internment of American Civilians in the Philippines, 1941-1945.

By: fidelity

fidelity — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 06:49:55 -0800

On the Yard by Malcolm Braley is one of the classics of the genre. Great book, written while Braley was in prison. Inter-prisoner relations, hierarchies, etc.