Anna Müller. If the Walls Could Speak

In If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women’s Prison in Communist Poland, Anna Müller explores a topic that has received very little attention, either in the academic or popular press: women imprisoned by the new Communist regime in Poland in the decade or so following the Second World War. According to the limited data that she cites, the Polish state imprisoned over 117,000 individuals, both for ordinary and anti-state crimes, in 1952, at the height of the Stalinist period; no information is given on the proportions of common and political prisoners. Without offering a number, she quotes one source estimating that 10 percent of the political prisoners were female—the subjects of this book. Müller reveals the painful journey these women traveled, from wartime activism to arrest, through interrogation, trial, sentencing, long years of imprisonment, release, and then post-prison life. The story of the political prisoners was silenced throughout...

Communism · Criminology · Imprisonment · Political science · Politics · Prison · Sociology · State (computer science) · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies