Karlo Štajner

Karlo Štajner (born January 15, 1902 in Vienna as Karl Steiner , † March 1, 1992 in Zagreb ) was a Yugoslav communist of Austrian origin.

Life

As a young apprentice printer , Štajner joined the communist movement in 1919; two years later he went to Yugoslavia to work in the illegal Communist Party . In 1931, pursued by the police, he had to flee from Yugoslavia, which had become his second home.

Stays in Paris , Vienna and Berlin followed . Because of his revolutionary activity, he came into conflict with the police everywhere. In 1932 he finally sought refuge in the Soviet Union , the country in which he believed his ideals to be realized. The Communist International entrusted him with the management of a large printing and publishing company in Moscow . It was there that he met his Russian wife, whom he married soon after and who remained loyal to him during the long years of his imprisonment.

When Stalin's Great Terror began in 1936 , Štajner was also arrested one night. He was initially imprisoned in the Lubyanka and was then transported via the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea to Norilsk beyond the Arctic Circle , where he stayed for ten years and only narrowly escaped death. From there he was sent to the Taichet camp in eastern Siberia and, after his release from seventeen years in prison, was exiled in a village on the lower reaches of the Yenisei . Until 1956 Štajner was rehabilitated and returned to using the Yugoslav Embassy in Moscow Yugoslavia back.

Štajner wrote the book 7000 days in Siberia shortly after he had regained his freedom, with which he caused a great stir.

plant

• 7000 days in Siberia , European publishing house, Vienna 1975. ISBN 3-203-50534-7 .
  • Wolfgang Leonhard : Review. In: Die Zeit , No. 39/1975
• The return from the Gulag , Naprijed, Zagreb 1982
• Ruka iz groba , Zagreb 1985

Web links

• Literature by and about Karlo Štajner in the catalog of the German National Library