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'One Long Night' Tells Harrowing History Of Concentration Camps

"People have to be coached to do this," author Andrea Pitzer says. "This is not something that arises sort of independently out of nowhere."
Entry to the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland, with snow covered railtracks leading to the camp in February/March 1945. (Stanislaw Mucha/AP)

For more than 100 years, at least one concentration camp has existed somewhere on earth. A new book documents that harrowing history, beginning with 1890s Cuba and ending, its author says, with Guantanamo Bay today.

Here & Now‘s Lisa Mullins speaks with Andrea Pitzer (@andreapitzer), author of “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.”

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Book Excerpt: ‘One Long Night’

By Andrea Pitzer

By the time she was loaded into a cattle car bound for Auschwitz, Krystyna Żywulska had endured multiple traumas in the destruction of her native Poland. Born Sonia Landau to a Jewish family in the city of Łódź, she had been forced out of law school by the Nazi invasion in 1939.

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