Licht um Mitternacht. Fünf Jahre in der Welt der Verfemten

In this autobiographical book, Erica Wallach gives us a deep and personal insight into the experience of her five-year imprisonment. She was suspected of espionage and was sent to prisons in 1950 in the GDR and the Soviet Union as well as to the Workuta Soviet labor camp.

Her husband, Robert R. Wallach, a soldier in the U.S. Army, and the their two children, waited in vain for her return to Paris, the Wallach family's place of residence at that time. They had no information about the reasons for her sudden disappearance and about Erica's whereabouts.

The author describes the methods of totalitarian systems that are used to break prisoners in solitary confinement in order to obtain the desired confession from them. And she tells how she still managed to survive those years.

This new, expanded edition has a German-English bilingual epilogue, written by Erica Wallach in the late 1970s and appearing here for the first time.