Milena and Margarete: A Love Story in Ravensbrück by Gwen Strauss; New York: St. Martin’s Publishing Group; © 2025; ISBN 9781259-285744; 266 pages plus appendices; $29.
SAN DIEGO – This is an incisive history of the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp from the perspective of two female prisoners who defied their Nazi captors and became lovers.
Milena Jesenská, a Czech journalist, and Margarete Buber-Neumann, a German whose first husband was the son of famed Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, met each other in the Nazi women’s concentration camp in Germany at the suggestion of Milena in a smuggled note to Margarete.
Before being imprisoned for their political beliefs, both women had worked for the Communist party but had grown disillusioned, and both had proximity to great fame.
Milena had been Franz Kafka’s translator from German to Czech, and she carried on a correspondence with him that was increasingly passionate and yearning.
She was married and divorced twice. Her first husband was Ernst Pollak, a Jewish intellectual, and her second was Czech architect Jaromir Krejcar.
Milena was involved in smuggling Jews and Communists out of Czechoslovakia, which marked her as an enemy of the Nazi Reich. After World War II, Yad Vashem named her as Righteous Among the Nations.
Margarete, who preferred the name Greta, also had been familiarized with the Jewish way of life. Her husband Rafael Buber was Jewish. After her divorce from Buber she took the surname but didn’t marry Heinz Neumann, another Jew from whom she was forcefully separated by Soviet agents prior to Neumann’s murder and her incarceration in the Soviet gulag.
In the wake of the short-lived pact between Hitler and Stalin, she was turned over to the Nazis and imprisoned at Ravensbrück. After her liberation she married and divorced Helmuth Faust. She became a well-regarded author and historian, with the biography of Milena among her notable works.
Following their brief introductory interview, Greta and Milena conspired to meet more often during the short periods when inmates were permitted to walk inside the walled compound. Gradually, they located an area hidden from sight of the guards and held hands, risking an occasional embrace.
Because they were both German speakers who as political prisoners were qualified in the Nazi eyes for positions of relative responsibility, Greta went to work as a block captain in the Polish prisoner section of Ravensbrück. Polish women had requested that she be their overseer. Milena, whose father was a doctor and who, herself, had briefly attended medical school, was assigned to secretarial/ administrative work at the camp hospital (which later became the site of numerous lethal injections as the Nazi doctors fulfilled their orders to eliminate “useless mouths” to feed).
Milena died prior to liberation, but during periods when she was relatively healthy, she and Greta had privileges to walk through the camp. They located a room that guards occupied by day but vacated by night, affording them the opportunity at great risk to sleep together.
Besides their passion, the two ex-communists filled their evenings with intellectual and biographical discussions, providing source material for Greta’s biography published after the war about her remarkable wartime lover. Greta also was famed for publishing a book citing her prison experiences under two dictators.
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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.