1936. Seven prisoners escape from a concentration camp. For the fugitives, it is their last chance to survive an inhuman captivity, the only fate for political dissidents in Hitler's Germany. For the Nazi officers, it is a personal affront. One by one, six of the seven prisoners are arrested and crucified. The Seventh Cross masterfully narrates the relentless pursuit of the last fugitive. During seven days of frenetic action, the communist Georg Heisler - an anti-hero turned symbol of hope - will try to escape and find a glimmer of humanity in the growing moral degradation of German society. Seghers offers us a polyphonic portrait of a society given over to a suffocating regime in which neighbours spy on each other, friends are careful not to say what they think, the Hitler Youth - barely children - are forced to flee. The Seventh Cross celebrates the humiliation of traitors, the concentration camps become the embodiment of pain, silence and death. Who, in this sinister plot of informants and fearful citizens, will dare to reach out to a fugitive? First published in 1942, during Anna Seghers' exile in Mexico, The Seventh Cross quickly became a symbol of anti-fascist resistance and was the first literary work to build a faithful picture of Nazism, entrenched in all social and institutional levels of pre-war Germany. Dedicated to all German anti-fascists, living or dead, we offer our readers a new translation of The Seventh Cross, an indisputable classic.