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)