"Surviving the Gulag is the first-person account of a complex woman who survived five horrifying years in Russian prison camps: starved, beaten, and worked nearly to death. A story like Ilse Johansen's is rarely told--of a woman caught in the web of fascism and communism at the end of the Second World War and beginning of the Cold War. Her candid account of her time as a prisoner, written soon after her release, provides startling insight into the trials of a German female prisoner under Soviet rule. Readers of memoir and history, and students of feminism and war studies, will learn more about women's experience of the Soviet gulag through the eyes of Ilse Johansen."--