This book is the story of Jewish Egyptian communists who were detained by Nasser at the Al Kharga camp in Egypt’s Western desert in the 1950s and 1960s. I tell the story of the detainees, based on interviews I made of the ex-prisoners in the 80s and 90s and the archives of the Institute for Social Studies in Amsterdam. One of the prisoners managed to escape through the Sudanese desert in 1959 and arrived in Paris a day after Kennedy’s assassination. I met him and interviewed him in 1989.The historical facts in the book are accurate but, since the hero of the story gave me no information on that period of his life, I imagined the part about his childhood and youth.

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