Milena and Margarete
A Love Story in Ravensbrück
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
New from the beloved New York Times bestselling author of The Nine, a "narrative of unfathomable courage" (Wall Street Journal)
From the moment they met in 1940 in Ravensbrück concentration camp, Milena Jesenska and Margarete Buber-Neumann were inseparable. Czech Milena was Kafka’s first translator and epistolary lover, and a journalist opposed to fascism. A non-conformist, bi-sexual feminist, she was way ahead of her time. With the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, her home became a central meeting place for Jewish refugees. German Margarete, born to a middle-class family, married the son of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. But soon swept up in the fervor of the Bolshevik Revolution, she met her second partner, the Communist Heinz Neumann. Called to Moscow for his “political deviations,” he fell victim to Stalin’s purges while Margarete was exiled to the hell of the Soviet gulag. Two years later, traded by Stalin to Hitler, she ended up outside Berlin in Ravensbrück, the only concentration camp built for women.
Milena and Margarete loved each other at the risk of their lives. But in the post-war survivors’ accounts, lesbians were stigmatized, and survivors kept silent. This book explores those silences, and finally celebrates two strong women who never gave up and continue to inspire. As Margaret wrote: “I was thankful for having been sent to Ravensbrück, because it was there I met Milena.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Strauss (The Nine) offers a striking biography of two political dissidents who developed an intimate relationship while interned at the Ravensbrück concentration camp during WWII. Czech writer Milena Jesenská had been Kafka's lover (in letters only) and translator before marrying an architect and becoming an antifascist journalist. German communist Margarete Buber-Neumann had been married to the son of philosopher Martin Buber and later to far-left politician Heinz Neumann, with whom she moved to the Soviet Union; the couple were punished during Stalin's purges—Neumann was executed, Margarete was sent to a gulag until a prisoner exchange landed her in Ravensbrück. Immediately drawn to each other, Milena and Margarete were "passionate friends," filling "the vital need... for human touch." Milena became recordkeeper at the infirmary; Margarete, secretary to the head guard. In these roles they saved fellow prisoners from death and committed sabotage—at one point, Margarete was held in solitary confinement for months after being caught tampering with guards' reports to help fellow inmates evade punishment. The duo also gathered evidence of Nazi crimes, intending to write a book and imagining a postwar life together, a dream dashed when Milena died in 1944. Strauss vividly conveys the moral quandary of the couple's roles as assistants to their jailers, and emphasizes how their relationship provided them the motivation to endure. It's a propulsive recounting of a powerful love.
