page numbers refer to the 1.ed. G. Müller, München (1963)

Milena Jesenská and Margarete Buber-Neumann met October 1940 in the concentration camp Ravensbrück. M. B.-N.’s husband, a German communist, was executed in Stalin’s purges, she herself imprisoned in Siberia, then in 1940 handed over to the Gestapo. They became friends. Only Margarete survived to write the book they planned together: to document what they experienced and saw in Ravensbrück.

Thus Margarete Buber tells of the life of Milena so that her friend will be remembered, this extraordinary woman, who had been 20 years earlier for brief intense months, the friend of Kafka (she had been his Czech translator and later became a journalist). But their passionate relationship broke on Kafka’s tragic inner strife.

So this book is both, the life-story of Milena and a report of life and death in the Ravensbrück concentration camp; but she gives also long citations from Milena’s political journalism that describe the 1938 dismembering of Czechoslovakia, betrayed by Britain and France, and the largely forgotten inhuman and human reactions of the German, Hungarian, Polish population to their Jewish neighbours in all the border regions (p. 167-199).

M. B.-N. describes forms of adjustment to the life in the camp: after the first chock new inmates start to change, to resign, all too often becoming callous and indifferent, loosing their resistance becoming submissive or, given a little bit of power, start to identify with the SS becoming presumptuous and tyrannical (p.254). She describes similarities in narrow behaviour shared by fervent believers: communists and members of religious sects. She also describes diverse reactions of newly recruited personnel, ordinary ‘normal’ women, who when hired, were given a false picture what they would face (p.277-78): Trained to see inmates as subhumans and to use violence against them most loose their humanity. But there are also exceptions.

A truly extraordinary scene stands out when Milena risks her life by daring to challenge the feared ‘SS-Bestie’ Ramdor (tried and executed in 1947: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Ramdohr) to prove that Margarete is still alive after 3 weeks of being thrown into the camp prison, the „Bunker“, there kept in total darkness, no food for days, forced to sleep without blanket on the cold floor (292, 295-298).

Essential reading for anybody interested in human nature under extreme conditions – I should say more precisely: how humans, who grew up in and were formed by 20th-century Western culture, react when faced with extreme imprisonment conditions. (XI-11) ( )

Très beau livre sur une amitié et sur les derniers jours de Milena, l'amie de coeur de Kafka, dans un camp de concentration.

I saw references to Milena in Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, and bought a second-hand copy on the web. It is an interesting book. Buber-Neumann met Milena Jesenska in the Ravensbruck concentration camp. Milena, a well-known Czech journalist, was there as an outspoken political opponent of Nazism; Buber-Neumann, who spent three decades in Soviet concentration camps, had been sent to Ravensbruck after she was turned over to the Germans by the Soviets. The two became very close friends and talked about writing about their experiences after the war, pledging that if one died, the other would carry through. This book is Buber-Neumann's fulfillment of that loving commitment.

The biography traces Milena's unhappy childhood in Prague (her father was a well-known physician and teacher, but a personal tyrant; when she gave birth to a daughter but was uncertain whether she could care for her, Milena told her father that she would rather throw the child in the river than give her into his care), through a failed marriage in Vienna, a love affair with Franz Kafka (a largely epistolary relationship that Kafka ended, partly because he could not respond to Milena's passion, nor give her the physical love that he dreaded), her flirtation with Communism which did not last long as she was one who came to see the Soviet Union for what it was, and her return to Prague where she became a very active and well-known journalist writing for various papers.

Milena was not necessarily an easy person to get along with:

"Even after the hard years in Vienna, during which she had learned to work regularly and submit to discipline, Milena was not exactly a well-balanced character. With her ideas about honour and chivalry she was a kind of feminine Don Quixote. She made high moral demands on herself and others and was unwilling to compromise. Living in constant conflict, she was vulnerable and often impatient. With her violent temper, her sharp tongue, and her ever-readiness to step in where she suspected an injustice, she was bound to make enemies".

But, at the same time, she was a person, "...distinguished by a remarkable gift of observation, by unusual quickness, and, perhaps most important of all, by [a] love of humankind and ...passionate sense of justice. And last, not least, ...a fine sense of humour".

Throughout her life, Milena gave freely of herself towards friends and strangers, becoming known for her generosity with no thought to consequences for herself.. Before the war she was openly critical of treatment of refugees, Jewish and others, along the Sudeten/Czech border; when the Germans marched into Prague in March, 1939, she immediately became involved in rescue programs for Jews; in Ravensbruck she was notable for her dedication to others and her constant efforts to provide assistance. She rejected labels and categories of any kind and treated people, "as neither more nor less than human beings in need of help".

Milena died three days before the invasion of Normandy

Gross numbers of people murdered under the Nazis, or other tyrannical regimes, always obscure the fact that these were individuals, with individual lives and hopes and dreams and connections to life and other people. Books such as this one remind one of those individualities.
(Feb/06)