Spandau The Secret Diaries [antikvár]

PREFACEMore than twenty thousand pages lay before me when I opened the trunk in which my family had stored all the writings that I had sent to them from Nuremberg and Spandau in the course of more than twenty years. There were countless pages of diary notes, authorized letters, and smuggled letters, written in the smallest script I could manage, on leaves of calendars, scraps of notepaper, cardboard lids, toilet paper. Some of the journal was continuous for periods of months, with notations for every day; other sections were written fitfully, with constant gropings for fresh starts and with many gaps where I had broken off in resignation or depression.What confrontation with these pages after so many years gave to me was a chronicle of prison's daily routinewhich was never the routine alone. Throughout the everyday life of imprisonment was reflected the past that had brought me there. If I read the whole thing rightly, these thousands of notes are one concentrated effort to survive, an endeavor not only to endure life in a cell physically and intellectually, but also to arrive at some sort of moral reckoning with what lay behind it all.The printed pages to which I ultimately reduced thexiii