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.)

A "passionate friendship" shared by two women imprisoned in a concentration camp. Grete Buber-Neumann, a German communist, was sent to Ravensbrück, the concentration camp for women, in 1940. Milena Jesenská, from a wealthy family in Prague, arrived two months later. The camp's inmates were organized in a caste system, with so-called "asocials"--prostitutes, lesbians, Roma--at the bottom. But as relatively privileged prisoners--Grete a "block elder," Milena an office secretary--both had a "clear view of the sinister Nazi machinations" afoot. Strauss knows that her subjects would not have identified as lesbians, but their loving relationship was nonetheless instrumental in "defeating the unbearable reality" of a wretched life in a slave-labor turned death camp. Their lives are well explored. Milena, a political journalist who played an important part in the Czech resistance to Nazi occupation, was an intimate of and correspondent with Franz Kafka and is now acknowledged as his first translator. Grete, a survivor of the Soviet gulag, wrote the postwar memoirUnder Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler (1948), "compelled by her promise to Milena to 'bear witness to the tragedy of my generation.'" Milena died at Ravensbrück in 1944; Greta was released in 1945 and died in 1989. All of the camp's records were burned up before its liberation by the Red Army, so the lives of these two brave women have been all but "erased from history." But Strauss' research into and reimagining of their four years together amount to an essential rediscovery of this history. Her work is as alert to the tenderness of their connection as to the immense evil of their surroundings. Queer history and Holocaust history converge in this remarkable account. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.