Soviet Internment

<p><b>Using a microhistory based on a unique set of life-writing sources, this book provides an unparalleled insight into the Soviet POW experience during the Second World War.</b> It reconstructs key moments in the life of former Italian POW Umberto Montini, who was captured by the Soviet Army in 1942, interned in a prisoners’ hospital in Mordovia, and then repatriated to Italy in 1945.<br><br>Through an analysis of Umberto’s copious life-writings, <i>Soviet Internment </i>examines the testimony of a surviving WWII prisoner, whose memories were haunted by the fury of war and whose body carried deep physical and emotional traces but who nonetheless felt a nostalgic attachment to his place of internment. The book brings theoretical questions about memory, trauma, and European people’s political trajectories into sustained contact with an individual’s specific experience, organically prompting a reconsideration of key 20th-century events in the process.</p>