Milena and Margarete: A Love Story in Ravensbrück

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. (Aug.)