It has become the proverbial best seller that had trouble finding a publisher. One U.S. editor after the next rejected it, assuming that Americans would not be interested in a political prisoner born in Morocco-never mind that the book had already been a best seller in France and England. How wrong they were. “She transcends the political and national,” says Jonathan Burnham, editor in chief of Talk Miramax Books, which bought the American rights. “She speaks about suffering.”

In a year of “Survivor” mania, Oufkir is the true survivor. Though she appears shy and frail today, she was the relentless force that rallied her family’s spirits and kept them alive in jail-with their table manners intact, too, thank you very much. Oprah Winfrey, who featured “Stolen Lives” on her book club in June, called Oufkir’s memoir “one of the most phenomenal stories of triumph I have ever read.”

Oufkir’s tormented tale is all the more striking because it opens like a story of enchantment out of “The Arabian Nights.” In 1958, when Oufkir was just 5 years old, King Muhammad V saw her at court with her parents and asked to adopt her as a companion to his own daughter, Princess Amina. To refuse would have brought disgrace on the family. Oufkir entered a rare world behind closed doors, where she took up residence alongside the princess, the king’s two wives and 40 concubines-and painfully relinquished regular contact with her own kin. At times it’s hard to believe that this is the memoir of a 48-year-old woman rather than a medieval princess. “I lived in the harem, surrounded by slaves,” she writes. When the king rode outside the palace, his subjects “would scramble to pick up the dung from his horses.” Muhammad V’s heir, King Hassan II, kept Oufkir at court when he ascended to the throne in 1961 and became like a second father to her. But her life collapsed in 1972 when her real father, Gen. Muhammad Oufkir, helped stage an unsuccessful coup against the king-and perished in the attempt. Police seized the general’s widow and six children. “I was living a fairy tale in reverse,” writes Oufkir. “I had been brought up as a princess and now I had turned into Cinderella.”

Or worse. Oufkir describes their various prisons as different circles of Hell. The cells were dark, squalid and infested with horned asps, scorpions and rats, which they killed with clubs. The prisoners ate bread moist with mouse urine. Medical care was nonexistent. Oufkir tried to bolster her family’s spirits by organizing plays, devising a homemade Monopoly set and inventing an ongoing tale that she told night after night for 10 years, like Scheherazade-the sultan’s bride in “The Arabian Nights” who thwarted her husband’s plan to murder her by spinning enchanting tales for 1,001 nights. But storytelling-and denial-could only get the Oufkirs so far. Over the years, everything they owned was gradually stripped away by guards who seemed to vie with one another for gratuitous cruelty. When the family had little left but its cherished pet pigeons, the guards forced them to eat two of the birds a night for dinner. When the guards later found out that the prisoners were devouring ripe figs that dropped off the trees in their prison compound, the guards made sure to shake the figs off the trees first-and eat the fruits in front of their emaciated captives.

In the end, Oufkir’s defiant spirit proved stronger than her captors’ powers to torment. Using nothing but a knife handle, a spoon, an iron bar and the lid of a sardine can, she dug a tunnel out of prison and escaped with three of her siblings, setting authorities off on a nationwide manhunt. It’s an extraordinary climax to a book that’s utterly unique in the annals of prison literature-think Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s grim depictions of the Soviet Gulag, but beginning with a childhood at the tsar’s court and ending with a daring escape across Siberia. In Oufkir’s case, the fugitives were recaptured five days later, but not before they had managed to give an interview to a French journalist, initiating the international publicity that would lead to their release four years later, in 1991.

But what about the happy ending? After all the years of unrelenting pain, did freedom bring the rewards it was supposed to? In a postscript to the book, Oufkir notes that the entire family fled to France in 1996 and that she herself married an architect named Eric Bordreuil in Paris. But in interviews she confesses that freedom has not been easy. “In prison, when we dreamed of freedom, it meant an end to suffering,” she says today. But the suffering hasn’t stopped, as the family tries to shut out its nightmares and exorcise its demons. One sister has attempted suicide, and a brother has sought escape in alcohol. As for Oufkir herself, she still remains strangely aloof from the world that surrounds her, recoiling from crowds and noise, refusing to eat in front of other people, and switching on lights everywhere in defiance of the years she spent in dark cells. Her husband, she says, lives with her craziness and has “saved” her. But for all his support and understanding, Oufkir knows she will never be like other people. As she puts it, “I still have bars on my soul.”