Lina Haag

Lina Haag (born January 18, 1907) was a member of the Youth movement of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in the small Württemberg town of Schwäbisch Gmünd the 1920s, she married another Communist; Alfred Haag in 1927. He became a member of the regional Parliament for the KPD until Hitler's rise to power in 1933. Both Lina and Alfred were soon arrested, and both spent many years in Prisons and Concentration Camps.

Both the Haags showed extraodinary strength of spirit in their incarceration. Lina spent many years in Remand Prison, during which time she met other promenant prisoners such as Liselotte Herrmann, in fact she spoke to Herrmann shortly after she was sentenced, and pushed a 'gift' of eight painkillers she had stashed under her cell door. Lina was eventually freed in 1938 after managing to set her camp commandant at Lichtenburg against the Stuttgart Gestapo - who had resisted her release, she achieved this by appealing to his vanity by claiming that their power was superior, he set out to prove her wrong and secured her release by appealing to Berlin.

Once released, having been reunited with her Daughter, she moved to Berlin and obtained work. She visited the HQ of the SS almost daily to petition for her husband's release until 1940, when she finally, and incredibly, obtained permission for an audience with Heinrich Himmler and he secured Alfred's release from the Mauthausen concentration camp. He had survived the most horrendous physical torture whilst detained there and at the Dachau concentration camp.

Alfred was soon afterwards drafted into the Army and sent to the Eastern Front, and Lina and their daughter were bombed out of their home in Berlin, and Lina was transferred to work in a hospital in Garmisch Whilst there she wrote a memoir of he experiences in the form of an extended letter to Alfred, not knowing if she would see him again. It was eventually published in 1947 as 'A Handful of Dust' or 'How Long the Night' in English.

Alfred was taken prisoner by the Red Army and eventually released in 1948, when they were reunited once again and lived together in Munich until Alfred's death in 1982. Lina Haag still lives in Munich, in 2007 she was given the Dachau Award for Courage. [Lina Haag; A Handful of Dust; one woman's struggle 1933-1945, ISBN N/A ]

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