No Wall Too High
One Man's Daring Escape from Mao's Darkest Prison
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Narrated by:
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David Shih
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By:
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Xu Hongci
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Erling Hoh
About this listen
Mao Zedong's labor reform camps were notoriously brutal; modeled after the Soviet gulag, their inmates were subject to backbreaking labor, malnutrition, and vindictive wardens. They were thought to be impossible to escape - but one man did.
Xu Hongci, a young medical student, was a loyal member of the Communist Party until he fell victim to Mao Zedong's Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957. After posting a criticism of the party, he spent the next 14 years in the labor camps. Despite horrific conditions and terrible odds, Hongci was determined to escape, failing three times before he succeeded in 1972.
Originally published in Hong Kong, Hongci's remarkable memoir recounts his life from childhood through his prison break. After discovering the book in a Hong Kong library, the journalist Erling Hoh tracked down the original manuscript and compiled this abridged translation of Hongci's memoir, which includes background on this turbulent period and an epilogue following Hongci up to his death in 2008. Almost nobody was able to escape from Mao's labor camps, but No Wall Too High tells the true story of someone who did.
©2008 Sukh Oyunbileg, Oyunbileg Anjir, Oyunbileg Buyant, and Oyunbileg Esenya; translation and condensation copyright 2017 by Erling Hoh (P)2017 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
May 1945: In the aftermath of the Second World War, the first British War Crimes Investigation Team is assembled to hunt down the senior Nazi officials responsible for the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen. One of the lead investigators is Lieutenant Hanns Alexander, a German Jew who is now serving in the British Army. Rudolf Höss is his most elusive target. Hanns and Rudolf reveals for the very first time the full, exhilarating account of Höss' capture, an encounter with repercussions that echo to this day.
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I Read This Marvelous Book...
- By Douglas on 01-04-14
By: Thomas Harding
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Ravensbruck
- Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women
- By: Sarah Helm
- Narrated by: Christa Lewis
- Length: 32 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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On a sunny morning in May 1939, a phalanx of 867 women - housewives, doctors, opera singers, politicians, prostitutes - was marched through the woods 50 miles north of Berlin, driven on past a shining lake, then herded in through giant gates. Whipping and kicking them were scores of German women guards. Their destination was Ravensbrück, a concentration camp designed specifically for women by Heinrich Himmler, prime architect of the Holocaust.
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My mother was a Ravensbruck survivor.
- By Stephen Sean Campbell on 07-06-20
By: Sarah Helm
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The Long Night
- A True Story
- By: Ernst Israel Bornstein
- Narrated by: Ric Jerrom
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The Long Night is Ernst Israel Bornstein's first-hand account of what he witnessed in seven concentration camps. Written with remarkable insight and raw emotion, The Long Night paints a portrait of human psychology in the darkest of times. Bornstein tells the stories of those who did all they could do to withstand physical and psychological torture, starvation, and sickness, and openly describes those who were forced to inflict suffering on others.
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Feelings, having listened to The Long Night
- By Lisa H on 05-31-18
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The Railway Man
- By: Eric Lomax
- Narrated by: Bill Paterson
- Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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A naive young man, a railway enthusiast and radio buff, was caught up in the fall of the British Empire at Singapore in 1942. He was put to work on the 'Railway of Death' - the Japanese line from Thailand to Burma. Exhaustively and brutally tortured by the Japanese for making a crude radio, Lomax was emotionally ruined by his experiences.
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From hatred to forgiveness
- By 9S on 05-04-12
By: Eric Lomax
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The Assassination of Heydrich
- Hitler's Hangman and the Czech Resistance
- By: Jan G. Wiener
- Narrated by: Mark Kamish
- Length: 5 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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If you only listen to one book about what it felt like to be present during the worst time in modern human history, a time when your life could be snuffed out for having the mere thought of opposition against the Nazi regime, this should be the book. It is told by survivors and by one of the greatest survivors of them all, Jan Wiener.
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Hard to listen to
- By Amazon Customer on 01-26-23
By: Jan G. Wiener
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Escape from Sobibor
- By: Richard Rashke
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 14 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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On October 14, 1943, 600 Jews imprisoned in Sobibor, a secret Nazi death camp in eastern Poland, revolted. They killed a dozen SS officers and guards, trampled the barbed wire fences, and raced across an open field filled with anti-tank mines. Against all odds, more than three hundred made it safely into the woods. Fifty of those men and women managed to survive the rest of the war. In this edition of Escape from Sobibor, fully updated in 2012, Richard Rashke tells their stories
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Rashke put a face to the good and the bad!
- By As happy as a monkey with two bananas in his hands on 06-23-14
By: Richard Rashke
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Behind Enemy Lines
- The True Story of a French Jewish Spy in Nazi Germany
- By: Marthe Cohn, Wendy Holden
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Marthe Cohn was a young Jewish woman living just across the German border in France when Hitler rose to power. Her family sheltered Jews fleeing the Nazis, including Jewish children sent away by their terrified parents. But soon her homeland was also under Nazi rule. As the Nazi occupation escalated, Marthe's sister was arrested and sent to Auschwitz and the rest of her family was forced to flee to the south of France. Always a fighter, Marthe joined the French Army and became a member of the intelligence service of the French First Army.
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Amazing story of a fighter and survivor
- By Magalie Busch on 05-06-19
By: Marthe Cohn, and others
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The Boys Who Challenged Hitler
- Knud Pedersen and the Churchill Club
- By: Phillip Hoose
- Narrated by: Phillip Hoose, Michael Braun
- Length: 4 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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At the outset of World War II, Denmark did not resist German occupation. Deeply ashamed of his nation's leaders, 15-year-old Knud Pedersen resolved with his brother and a handful of schoolmates to take action against the Nazis if the adults would not. Naming their secret club after the fiery British leader, the young patriots in the Churchill Club committed countless acts of sabotage, infuriating the Germans, who eventually had the boys tracked down and arrested. But their efforts were not in vain.
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What courage and determination...
- By Lorraine on 04-02-16
By: Phillip Hoose
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Story of a Secret State
- Penguin Modern Classics
- By: Jan Karski
- Narrated by: Janusz Guttner
- Length: 18 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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I do not pretend to have given an exhaustive picture of the Polish Underground, its organisation and its activities. Because of our methods, I believe that there is no one today who could give an all-embracing recital...This book is a purely personal story, my story. Jan Karski's Second World War memoir is a heroic act of witness: the courageous testimony of a man who risked everything for his country. First published in 1944, the book became an instant bestseller in the US while the war still raged in Europe.
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Outstanding
- By David on 10-20-11
By: Jan Karski
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The Escape Artists
- A Band of Daredevil Pilots and the Greatest Prison Break of the Great War
- By: Neal Bascomb
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Neal Bascomb, a New York Times best-selling author, delivers the spellbinding story of the downed Allied airmen who masterminded the remarkably courageous - and ingenious - breakout from Germany's most devilish POW camp.
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Excellent!
- By Kathleen Wadworth on 04-08-24
By: Neal Bascomb
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The Hundred-Year Walk
- An Armenian Odyssey
- By: Dawn Anahid MacKeen
- Narrated by: Neil Shah, Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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In the heart of the Ottoman Empire as World War I rages, Stepan Miskjian's world becomes undone. He is separated from his family as they are swept up in the government's mass deportation of Armenians into internment camps. Gradually realizing the unthinkable - that they are all being driven to their deaths - he fights, through starvation and thirst, not to lose hope.
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Everything a memoir should be. You will enjoy it!
- By Jakk on 02-19-18
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A Promise at Sobibor
- A Jewish Boy's Story of Revolt and Survival in Nazi-Occupied Poland
- By: Philip "Fiszel" Bialowitz, Joseph Bialowitz
- Narrated by: Jim Tedder
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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A Promise at Sobibór is the story of Fiszel Bialowitz, a teenaged Polish Jew who escaped the Nazi gas chambers. Between April 1942 and October 1943, about 250,000 Jews from European countries and the Soviet Union were sent to the Nazi death camp at Sobibór in occupied Poland. Sobibór was not a transit camp or work camp: Its sole purpose was efficient mass murder. On October 14, 1943, approximately half of the 650 or so prisoners still alive at Sobibór undertook a daring and precisely planned revolt, killing SS officers and fleeing through minefields and machine-gun fire.
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Another Prisoner's Insight of Nazi Death Camp Sobibor
- By Polar Bear on 06-01-24
By: Philip "Fiszel" Bialowitz, and others
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A Lucky Child
- A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy
- By: Thomas Buergenthal
- Narrated by: Thomas Buergenthal, Don Hagen
- Length: 5 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Thomas Buergenthal, now a Judge in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, tells his astonishing experiences as a young boy in his memoir, A Lucky Child. He arrived at Auschwitz at age 10 after surviving two ghettos and a labor camp. Separated first from his mother and then his father, Buergenthal managed by his wits and some remarkable strokes of luck to survive on his own. Almost two years after his liberation, Buergenthal was miraculously reunited with his mother and in 1951 arrived in the U.S. to start a new life.
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Compelling Account
- By Simone on 04-23-15
What listeners say about No Wall Too High
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- John Keating
- 10-01-19
Cannot Recommend This Enough!
Despite my knowledge of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, I had to admit that I did not have a good view of these horrific events or of the Laogai (Chinese gulags). I picked this audiobook up because I wanted to learn more about these topics from someone who experienced this firsthand. I was FAR from disappointed.
David Shih's narration was stellar and gives an excellent voice to the words of the author, Xu Hongci. The tone with which he speaks conveys perfectly Hongci's reactions of perplexity and disbelief as he was slammed with one absurd charge after another during his self-criticisms and struggle sessions.
As for the story itself: it is nothing short of a story of survival and struggle. Based on my knowledge of the communes and collectives, I went into this knowing that the experience must have been terrible. I came out of this feeling that "terrible" is woefully inadequate, and a more fitting description would be something along the lines of "profoundly nightmarish." This man was stripped of almost everything and everyone he held near and dear to him, and the constant humiliations, degradation, and outright betrayals would be more than enough to shatter most men and women in his situation. This is a story about survival, yes, but also of perseverance as he managed to stay true to himself and his beliefs.
For those who might be interested in the historical aspect of this book, each part has a preface that informs the reader about what was going on throughout China at large. For example, during the years of the Great Leap Forward, the author takes a step back and reviews what it was, how long it went on for, and how it impacted China. Hongci's experience, as jaw-dropping as it is, serves as a microcosm to what others experienced under Mao's tyranny.
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