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Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628723601 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Arcade |
| Publication date: | 11/11/2011 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Sales rank: | 745,431 |
| File size: | 525 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
MEETING AT THE WAILING WALL
I received Milena's first letter on October 21, 1940; someone slipped it into my hand while I was walking on the camp street. We had known each other for only a few days. But what can days mean when time is counted not in hours and minutes, but in heartbeats?
We met in the women's concentration camp at Ravensbrück. Milena had heard about me from a German woman who had arrived at the camp in the same shipment as herself. The journalist Milena Jesenska wanted to talk to me; she wished to know if it was true that the Soviet Union had really handed over antifascist refugees to Hitler. Milena approached me during the newcomers' exercise period on the narrow path between the backs of the barracks and the high wall topped with electrified barbed wire. "Milena from Prague," she said by way of introduction. Her native city meant more to her than her surname. I shall never forget the strength and grace of the gesture with which she gave me her hand. When her hand was in mine, she said with a tinge of irony, "Please don't give me one of your German handshakes. My fingers are sore." Her face was prison-gray, marked with suffering. But my impression of illness was dissipated by the light in her eyes and the force of her movements. Milena was a tall woman with broad, straight shoulders and fine features. Her eyes and chin revealed energy and her beautifully curved lips a superabundance of emotion. Her delicately feminine nose suggested fragility, and the earnestness of her rather prominent forehead was attenuated by its frame of small curls.
The path was narrow and we were in the way, obstructing the other prisoners in their movements to and fro, Muttering angrily, they kept trying to push us forward. I wanted nothing more than to get our greetings over with as quickly as possible and fall back into the prescribed "exercise" rhythm. In years of imprisonment I had adapted to these herd movements. Of this, Milena was utterly incapable. Here in the concentration camp she behaved exactly as if we had been introduced on a boulevard in some peaceful city. Carried away by the pleasure of making a new acquaintance or perhaps by the curiosity of the born reporter, she ignored the grumbling all around us and prolonged our amenities as much as possible. At first her insouciance infuriated me. But soon I was fascinated and delighted. Here was an unbroken spirit, a free woman in the midst of the insulted and injured.
After that we walked along with the others, back and forth at the foot of the "Wailing Wall" (as Milena called it), while the dust raised by our wooden clogs swirled all around us. When you meet someone under normal conditions, the way he is dressed usually tells you something about him. "Milena from Prague" was wearing the same long, striped, bulky dress as I, the same blue apron and regulation headscarf. I knew nothing about her except that she was a Czech journalist. She spoke with a slight Czech accent, but her German was otherwise perfect; even in the first few minutes of our acquaintance I was enormously impressed by her vocabulary and gift of expression.
After a few parting words and the usual Auf Wiedersehen I went back to my barracks. All the rest of the day I was blind and deaf to everything. I was full of the name "Milena," drunk on the sound of it.
My feelings can only be appreciated by one who has been lonely in the midst of a great crowd. I had been shipped to Ravensbrück early in August 1940. Behind me I had years of terror in the Soviet Union. Arrested in Moscow by the NKVD and sentenced to five years at forced labor, I was taken to Karaganda, a concentration camp in Kazakhstan. Then in 1940 the Russian state police handed me over to the Gestapo, who questioned me for months before sending me to Ravensbrück. On the third day of my stay in Ravensbrück, my Communist fellow prisoners subjected me to a third degree. They knew that I was Heinz Neumann's companion and that I had made no secret of our bitter experience in the Soviet Union. When they were through, they claimed I had been spreading lies about the Soviet Union and branded me a traitor. As the Communist women enjoyed considerable prestige among the inmates, their ostracism had the desired effect; from then on, my fellow politicals made a point of avoiding me.
Milena Jesenska" was the first among the political prisoners who not only spoke to me but showed that she trusted me. I was thankful for having been sent to Ravensbrück, because it was there I had met Milena.
Ravensbrück is in Mecklenburg, fifty miles north of Berlin. In 1940 the Gestapo interned five thousand women there, political offenders, Jews, members of proscribed religious groups, Gypsies, criminals, and so-called asocials. By the end of the war there were roughly twenty- five thousand women in the camp. At first there were sixteen ground- level barracks. Others were built little by little, and in the end there were thirty-two. Apart from the criminals and asocials, the prisoners were from all walks of life. They differed widely from one another, but all in all they were very much like women at freedom. With the exception of the German, Polish, and Czech politicals and the Jehovah's Witnesses, there were relatively few conscious political oppositionists at the start. Later on, their numbers were swelled by members of the resistance movements in all the countries occupied by Hitler.
The politicals found it easier than others to adapt to conditions in the camp. Their being sent to a camp proved they were regarded as a threat to National Socialism, and that increased their self-respect. But most of the inmates were harmless innocents who had no idea why they had been sent to that ghastly place or for how long.
Every one of these women lived in thoughts of the life she had been wrenched away from, of her children, her husband, her parents. And now they were drilled like recruits and hadn't a minute of the day or night to themselves. At every step they were surrounded by others as unhappy as themselves. In every barracks an individual might be attracted to one or two others, but she was sure to find the vast majority unbearable in every way. The SS members, of both sexes, who ran the camp saw to it that the inmates were permanently cold and hungry, worked them like dogs, and even beat them.
The loss of liberty alone can bring about drastic character changes. But when the constant fear of death is added to the daily torments of prison life, the shock is so great that most prisoners cease to react normally. Some, in self-defense, become appallingly aggressive; others cringe and crawl, and still others give way to a despondency that undermines their defenses against sickness or death.
In the course of his or her confinement, every prisoner must go through different stages. One of the gravest dangers is inability to surmount the first shock of arrival at the camp. To survive, the prisoner had somehow to adapt to this extreme situation and give meaning to the new life, terrible as it was. Only a few succeeded by a great effort of the will in finding a new balance. Though ill on her arrival, Milena was one of these. Even in the first bewildering days of her stay, she took a keen interest in her fellow prisoners. In other words, she kept her grip on life.
The new arrivals were housed in special barracks and took their daily "exercise" separately from the others. Though this was strictly forbidden, I was able to join them every day, because, as Blockalteste of the Jehovah's Witnesses barracks, I wore a green armband, which gave me a certain freedom of movement in the camp. Every day Milena waited for me by the Wailing Wall. I knew what the newcomers went through during their first weeks, when the horrors were still new. But Milena never wasted a single word on her own suffering. As a journalist she was interested first and foremost in what others said and did. I have never met another reporter so utterly devoted to her calling. She was wonderfully skilled at asking questions; with her opening words, a rapport was established. In her interviews she never played a role or hid behind a mask. In every interview she created an atmosphere of intimacy, because she invariably identified with the person she was questioning. She had a remarkable gift of empathy.
When questioning me about my experience in Soviet Russia, she no longer seemed to be living in the present. Her imagination threw her back into the past, and she was able to flesh out my memory of things I had long forgotten. She was not content to hear about events; she wanted to see the people I had met on my long march through the Soviet prisons, to know all about them, their idiosyncrasies, their way of speaking; she even wanted to hear the songs they had sung in those faraway camps. Her manner of questioning was a creative act; it enabled me for the first time to give form to my recollections.
Day after day, in installments, I supplied her with a chronological record of my experiences in the Soviet Union. But that wasn't enough for her. She also questioned me about my political past. Once she interrupted me with the question: "Tell me, how long did you believe in the Communist party? How long did you believe that the party and the Comintern were really trying to bring about a political and economic order that would guarantee work, bread, and freedom to all?" Searching my memory, I soon recalled the days of my first occasional doubts, which my craving for political certainty had always repressed. We agreed (for Milena, too, had been taken in for a time by the Communist message) that Communists are extraordinarily fruitful in inventing excuses for the obvious failings of their party, for its betrayals of its original program. We agreed that it takes an enormous shock to open their eyes to the party's opportunism and hypocrisy and give them the strength to break with it. Together we began to examine the roots of the Communist evil.
Milena herself had never been in the Soviet Union. But the events of 1936 and the first of the Moscow show trials had led her to tear up her party card. From then on, as a journalist, she followed the horrors of the Great Purge behind the Iron Curtain attentively. In an article about the lies broadcast by Radio Moscow, she had addressed the following questions to the leadership of the Russian party: "... We would like to know what has become of the many Czech Communists and plain workers who went to Soviet Russia years ago ... Is it not true that the greater part of them are in your prisons? For," she went on, "that is how the Soviets treat the people who were foolish enough to believe that they, as Communists, were under Soviet protection...." And taking up the sad fate of the German Communist refugees in Czechoslovakia, she concluded her article with the sentence: "Among them [the Communist refugees] are people whom I greatly esteem and others whom I utterly despise. But whatever my personal dislike, I would never go so far as to wish any of them to be 'welcomed' into the workers' fatherland."
Still, her knowledge of the inhuman conditions prevailing in the "workers' fatherland" was purely theoretical, and I well understood the excitement with which she listened to my report. That was in 1940. In those days hardly anything was known in the West about the mass arrests and the slave camps in Russia. Milena was quick to understand the importance of my testimony. I believe we had known each other for just a week when she announced, "When we are free again, let's write a book together." She had in mind a book about the concentration camps of both dictatorships, the roll calls, the marching uniformed columns, the millions of human beings reduced to slavery; in the one, dictatorship in the name of socialism; in the other, for the profit and glory of the master race.
The title was to be "The Age of the Concentration Camps." Her suggestion left me stunned. What! Me collaborate on a book? What could she be thinking? I was incapable of writing a single line. But Milena was too full of our project to notice my distress. Then and there she told me how she pictured our collaboration. "You'll write the first part, everything you've been telling me; the second part will be about our life in Rav-ensbriick; we'll write that together ... When I got my voice back and objected feebly that I was incapable of writing, she gently took hold of my nose as if I were a puppy, and said, "But, Gretushka, anyone who can tell a story as well as you can write. It's much worse for me. I can hardly describe someone coming into a room. Besides, you ought to know that anyone who's not totally illiterate can write. Your Prussian schooling has ruined you. Those essays they make you write."
For someone born and bred in Potsdam like me, it's not easy to speak of feelings, of love and grief and great happiness. Milena had no such inhibitions. She laughed at me, her "little Prussian." She often spoke of herself as a "little Czech," sometimes adding a few hard words about the national character of her people, whom she loved with a painful tenderness. She never showed the slightest trace of the nationalism and xenophobia so common among the inmates of all nationalities.
Milena, who never hesitated to ask questions, soon learned of my deep sorrow. She began to talk about Heinz Neumann and wanted to know what sort of man he was. When she asked me, "Did you love him very much?" I was too choked with tears to answer. Three years had passed since Heinz was taken away by the NKVD in Moscow. I had been tortured by nightmares ever since. I was sure he was dead and had given up hope of ever seeing him again. Now Milena reopened the wound. I was overwhelmed by the despair I had fought so hard to overcome. To comfort someone, one must be able to experience his suffering, and that is a rare gift. In helping me to recover, Milena found the way to my heart.
Every time we met I was horrified by Milena's pallor and her swollen hands. I knew she was in pain, I knew how she suffered from the cold during the interminable daily roll calls, and under the thin blankets at night. But if ever I mentioned her sufferings, she laughed and changed the subject. In 1940 she still seemed totally unbroken, full of courage and energy. Her great spirit still triumphed over her weak body.
It was plain to me that she suffered from hunger, though she never said a word about it. I knew only too well what it was to be hungry, so one day, unable to bear it any longer, I brought her my bread ration. She pushed it away with an air of annoyance, which puzzled me at the time. She explained much later. The mere thought of accepting bread from me made her miserable, because in our friendship she always wanted to be the giver. She wanted to help me and care for me. When I told her I had a family, a mother and brothers and sisters, she seemed disappointed. She wanted me to be all alone in the world, wholly dependent on her care and help. To her, friendship meant doing everything, sacrificing everything for another.
Everything Milena did was a protest against the camp regime. She didn't march right in rows of five, she didn't stand right at roll call, she didn't hurry when ordered to, she didn't toady to those in command. Every word Milena said was an infringement of the regulations. While, surprisingly enough, the SS personnel were intimidated by her intellectual superiority, her behavior infuriated the other political prisoners, most of all the Communists with their mania for discipline. I remember a roll call one spring evening. The trees behind the camp wall were just beginning to turn green. A soft, fragrant breeze was blowing from that direction. There wasn't a sound to be heard. Milena must have forgotten all about camps and roll calls; perhaps she was dreaming of some park in the suburbs of Prague, where the crocuses were coming up through the grass. She began to whistle a tune. The Communists who were standing all around her exploded with indignation. "It's easy for them," said Milena in telling me about it, "they were born to be prisoners; they have discipline in their bones."
Another time she was marching along the camp street with a detail on the way to work. I was standing by the side of the street, waiting to nod to her. Catching sight of me, she tore off her regulation headscarf and waved to me over the heads of the horrified prisoners and the amazed SS guards.
But the Communist women's hatred of Milena had still other causes. The Czech Communists had frowned on our friendship from the start of our brief meetings. I had told Milena about the third degree the German Communists had put me through, and I was afraid something of the kind would happen to her. I was very much surprised when she told me that in spite of her break with the party the Czech Communists, far from treating her as a traitor, curried favor with and even found her light work in the camp infirmary. This they were able to do, because the SS management of the camp made things easy for themselves by entrusting the internal administration to the inmates. In most other camps, this internal administration was dominated by the criminal element, but here in Ravensbrück the politicals were put in charge. The SS appointed messengers, Blockalteste, assignment clerks, orderly room clerks, nurses, later even doctors, and of course the camp police. Inmates holding these "posts," as they were called, became a class by themselves, intermediate between the SS authorities and the mass of slave laborers. In such positions they were able to help their fellow inmates very considerably, and many did all they could to mitigate the hardships of camp life, but others made common cause with the SS oppressors, and I am sorry to say that this was not unusual. Since the number of inmates increased steadily, the SS were always having to appoint more prisoners to administrative posts, and were open to suggestions from the inmates, who of course knew a lot more than the SS did about the qualifications of their fellow prisoners. It goes without saying that the Communist women reserved the good jobs almost exclusively for their comrades. Which makes it all the more surprising that they should help a political enemy — one more proof of the power of Milena's personality.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Milena: The Tragic Story of Kafka's Great Love"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Albert Langen-Georg Müller Verlag.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
MEETING AT THE WAILING WALL,
STRONGER THAN ANY BARBARISM,
JAN JESENSKY,
THE MINERVANS COME OF AGE,
THE LOVING ONE,
THE LOWEST DEPTHS,
FRANZ KAFKA AND MILENA,
THE WAY TO SIMPLICITY,
MARRIAGE AND ILLNESS,
A BLIND ALLEY,
NEW TASKS,
POLITICAL JOURNALIST,
MATER MISERICORDIAE,
LET US NOT PERISH...,
THE CATASTROPHE,
A FREE WOMAN,
"A TIME OF SADNESS IS RISING OVER THE HORIZON",
PROTÉGÉES,
THE ZEALOTS,
FRIENDSHIP TO THE DEATH,
HER LAST BIRTHDAY,
MILENA'S END,
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES,
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