Book Description:
On May 3, 1944, Guglielmo Petroni was arrested in Rome together with three companions. During the next thirty three days, he was beaten and interrogated relentlessly by Fascist police and the Gestapo while being transferred from one prison or cell block to another. Along the way, he met many other men in the same situation enduring bug infested jail cells with little light and little food, unsure of what their futures would be and if their futures would last only minutes more, as they waited to be called by yet another examiner who would decide their fate. Finally, on June 4, Petroni escaped in the confusion of the Allied liberation of the city. 'The World Is a Prison' is Petroni's story of survival and growth, an account of his experiences and a meditation on their meaning for himself, for his compatriots, and for an entire country. Terror, uncertainty, the fear of death, and the brutality he encounters at nearly every turn are all described in concrete terms, but the author's restrained tone, informed by a sense of paradox and the absurd, conveys a depth of feeling that makes this prison memoir all the more remarkable. 'Already at that moment I was feeling what in the months to come would seem to me the simplest truth: that the immense cycle of wars and social tragedies around us was not only around us but in the most secret part of our lives, amid our most private interests,' writes Petroni. In its illumination of the conflict between the inner and outer turmoil that existed in that time, tempered by personal experience of the war and its aftermath, 'The World Is a Prison' is a classic of World War II literature.
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