Angela Vode

Angela Vode (; 5 January 1892 – 5 May 1985) was a Slovenian pedagogue, feminist author and human rights activist. An early member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, she was expelled from the Party in 1939 because of criticism against the Hitler-Stalin Pact. During World War II, she joined the Liberation Front of the Slovenian People, but was expelled in 1942 because of disagreements with the Communist Party of Slovenia. In 1944, she was interned in a Nazi concentration camp. After the war, she was arrested by the Yugoslav communist authorities, trialed at the Nagode Trial and imprisoned for several years. After her release from prison, she was excluded from public life for the rest of her life.

Early life Angela Vode was born in Ljubljana, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After graduating from the teachers college in Ljubljana in 1912, she worked as a teacher in several schools.

In 1921, she undertook specialization in teaching mentally disabled children. For the next 25 years, she worked as a teacher-defectologist.

Vode was one of the first women's rights activists in Slovenia, and one of the first organizers of human rights groups. In the interwar period, she was elected president of the Women's Movement of Yugoslavia and president of Female Teachers' Society of Slovenia.

In 1922, she joined the illegal Communist Party of Yugoslavia.

The conflict with the Communist Party and World War II

In 1939, Vode sharply criticized the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which led to her exclusion from the Communist Party.

The book is divided into three parts. In the first part, Vode describes the time of war from her personal viewpoint. She depicts her clashes with the Slovenian Communists, who treated her war efforts to help Slovene women as an act of collaboration with the occupying forces. In the second part, she depicts her imprisonment including interrogations and torture. She then describes her life without the basic human rights, which she defines as "a life of an alleviated and diluted variant". In the third part, Vode evaluates the Yugoslav Communist system. She analyzes the Slovene and Yugoslav Communist regime as a semi-totalitarian society, where a ruling elite misleads the people with lies, promising them a better future, but in fact only satisfying their own greed.