In 1949, as Cold War tensions in Europe mounted, French intellectual and former Buchenwald inmate David Rousset called upon fellow concentration camp survivors to denounce the Soviet Gulag as a "hallucinatory repetition" of Nazi Germany's most terrible crime. In Political Survivors, Emma Kuby tells the riveting story of what followed his appeal, as prominent members of the wartime Resistance from throughout Western Europe united to campaign against the continued existence of inhumane internment systems around the world. The International Commission against the Concentration Camp Regime brought together those originally deported for acts of anti-Nazi political activity who believed that their unlikely survival incurred a duty to bear witness for other victims. Over the course of the next decade, these pioneering activists crusaded to expose political imprisonment, forced labor, and other crimes against humanity in Franco's Spain, Maoist China, French Algeria, and beyond.

AcknowledgmentsAcronyms and AbbreviationsIntroduction1. Survivors as Witnesses in Postwar France2. David Rousset's Cold War Call to Arms3. Forging the International Commission4. Nuremberg Restaged: The Soviet Univers Concentrationnaire on Trial5. Into the Labyrinth of Franco's Prisons6. Triumphs and Tensions on the Global Stage7. From Auschwitz to Algeria: The Limits of MemoryEpilogueNotesIndex