Out of the night

Jan Valtin’s life is an intimate insider’s account of the dramatic events of the 1920s and 1930s, where he rose both within the ranks of the Communist Party, and on the Gestapo hit list. As eventual head of the Party’s maritime organizing, he crossed Europe, and the globe—professional revolutionary, agitator, spy,and assassin—including America, where a botched “hit” on Party orders landed him three years in San Quentin. Captured by the Gestapo, he endured years in a concentration camp, engineering his release by convincing his captors he could work as a double agent. Narrowly escaping the murderous clutches of Stalin’s thugs, who brooked no deviation from the Party line, he eventually washed up in America, where he wrote this memoir—an unlikely bestseller that sold over a million copies in 1941. A brilliant, humble account of a young life filled with idealism and devotion, disillusionment and loss, in a world full of revolutionary promise and totalitarian reaction.