… and this is another instance of your life-giving power, Mother Milena …
—FRANZ KAFKA, BRIEFE AN MILENA
Deep friendship is always a great gift. But if such good fortune is experienced in the desolation of a concentration camp, it can become the content of a life. During our time together Milena and I succeeded in defeating the unbearable reality. And because it was so strong, because it filled our whole beings, our friendship became something more, an open protest against the humiliations imposed on us. The SS could prohibit everything, they could treat us like disembodied numbers, threaten us with death, enslave us—in our feeling for each other we remained free and unassailable. It was toward the end of November, during our evening exercise, that we dared for the first time to walk arm in arm. This was strictly forbidden in Ravensbrück. It was dark, and we walked in silence, with strangely long steps as though dancing, peering into the milky moonlight. Not a breath of wind. Somewhere far away, far from our world, the wooden clogs of the other inmates shuffled and crunched. For me nothing existed but Milena’s hand on my arm and the wish that this walk might never end. And then the siren howled: Time to turn in. All the others ran to their barracks. But we hesitated, holding each other tight, unwilling to part. The bellowing voice of an overseer came closer. Milena whispered, “Come to the Wailing Wall later. So we can be alone for just a few minutes.” Then we parted. Someone shouted, “Damn bitches!” That was us.
At the appointed time I slipped away from the bustling crowd in the barracks. It didn’t even occur to me that this meeting might end with a flogging or solitary confinement or even death. It didn’t cross my mind that someone might see me. I ran past the lighted windows, came to the path beside the Wailing Wall. It was pitch-dark and I couldn’t see a thing. To muffle the sound of my wooden clogs, I groped my way to the edge of the path and continued on the grass. I saw something bright behind the leafless bushes that bordered the windowless wall of the second barracks. In my haste and excitement I tripped over a stump and fell into Milena’s arms.
Next morning, as usual, the roll call was interminable. Sometimes, because of her work at the infirmary, Milena was exempted. The three hundred occupants of my barracks were standing motionless and silent on the camp street, across from the infirmary, waiting for the SS duty officer to come and call the roll. I saw Milena in the corridor of the infirmary. She stepped up to a closed window, looked at me, laid one hand on the windowpane and moved it slowly back and forth in a silent, affectionate greeting. I was overjoyed. I nodded to her. Suddenly I felt terribly afraid for her. Hundreds of eyes must have seen what I saw. An SS guard might turn up at any moment. The long corridor had six or seven windows, and at each one Milena calmly repeated her loving gesture.
Because of her work in the infirmary, Milena was automatically assigned to No. 1 Barracks, the best in the camp, that of the “old” politicals, interned for their “subversive opinions.” One of its main advantages was that it was less crowded than the other barracks. At that time, as I’ve already said, I was Blockalteste of Barracks No. 3, that of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Each barracks had an orderly room for the SS overseer, to which the Blockalteste also had access. It was the only room in which a certain privacy was possible. The SS overseer spent a few hours a day there, but at night the room was empty.
Sometimes Milena risked coming to see me, when she knew the SS overseer wouldn’t be there. As she was employed in the infirmary, she was able to enter the barracks during working hours on various errands. When that happened, I took her to the orderly room, and we were able to talk for a few minutes undisturbed. But that too was dangerous; the overseer was a permanent threat.
Our longing to spend more time together became more and more imperious. One evening during exercise period—it was autumn by then, and the nights were dark and stormy—Milena informed me of her plan. Half an hour after the SS guards made their night round, she would climb out of her barracks window and cross the camp street—where trained wolfhounds were let loose at night—to mine. I was to open the window for her. At the thought of the terrible danger she would be incurring, my heart skipped a beat. But her determination shamed me, and I agreed. Half an hour after the night round, I opened my barracks door and listened. I couldn’t see my hand before my face and it was pouring rain. As I listened for footsteps, my tense nerves made me hear menacing sounds on all sides: SS boots crunching on gravel, shots on the camp street. But this was a time of great activity in the barracks, and I had to avoid being seen. Every few minutes one of the three hundred occupants would go to the toilet, and then I had to hurry away from my listening post.
Suddenly the door was opened from the outside, and in stepped Milena, whistling softly It’s a long way to Tipperary, it’s a long way to go … I seized her by the arm and pulled her into the orderly room.
Her hair was dripping, the slippers she had put on to avoid making noise were soaked through. But what did it matter? She had made it. We sat down by the warm stove, which I had lit beforehand, and felt as if we had escaped from jail. We would be free for a whole night.
The dark, warm room gave us a sheltered feeling. Milena crept close to the stove to dry. “Your hair smells like a baby’s,” I whispered, laughing. And a little later: “Please, Milena, won’t you tell me about your home in Prague, when you were little. What you looked like….” Up until then Milena had told me very little about her life. But that November night, all by ourselves, as though safe on an island, I got her to talk.
Milena was born in Prague in 1896, and her earliest memories took her back before the turn of the century. Her mother was a beautiful woman with wavy chestnut-brown hair. In the morning, she often sat at the mirror in a long, soft dressing gown, combing her hair. “This is where she always kissed me.” Milena took my hand and put it on her hair. “Here, on this cowlick. I’ll never forget it. …” Until she was three, she was the only child in the family. She spent her days in the large apartment with the dark furniture. She wasn’t taken out very often. Mornings she sat in the dining room, and afternoons in the living room. She sat on high chairs at the high table, with her favorite toys spread out in front of her. “Were you, too, as a child, so fascinated by glass marbles with colored veins?” Milena asked me. “Did you think they were something absolutely magical?” We got to talking about bright-colored Bohemian glass beads, about the miracle of swift mountain streams, and I had difficulty in bringing her back to her childhood. “What did you look like when you were three? Are there any pictures of you at that age?” “Very pale and delicate, with precocious, defiant eyes in a little round face and a tousled mop of hair. I was neither a beautiful child nor a good one. In fact, I behaved very badly. My mother was the only one who really understood me….”
Milena’s mother, who died young, came of a well-to-do Czech family, the owners of Bad Beloves, a spa near Nachod. Milena was often taken there as a child. Her mother’s family did not, like her father’s, belong to the old, established bourgeoisie, but had gradually worked their way up the social ladder. Czech families like hers were distinguished by their enormous respect for every branch of culture, for science, art, the theater, and music, and they played a large part in the recent awakening of the Czech national consciousness.
Milena’s mother was thought to be “artistic.” In keeping with the taste of the day, she did peasant-style wood carvings, poker work, and furniture with rustic ornaments. Milena remembered that in her parents’ apartment which, like most homes of the wealthy Prague bourgeoisie, was full of imitation-Renaissance furniture, there was a chair that her mother herself had turned and carved, an extraordinary piece, with a triangular, leather-upholstered seat and a knob at the front, which the child could hold on to while sitting there. Her mother also favored colored peasant headscarves, and later on, when Milena began to travel on her own, there would always be a few of these scarves in her luggage. She would spread them out to give her hotel rooms a personal touch.
But even as a little girl Milena had had entirely different tastes from her mother’s. She remembered an incident that had made her weep. “That was when my mother took away the little pink-and-blue combs I had brought home from some parish fair and given me one made of genuine tortoiseshell, that I didn’t like at all. I also remember that my sailor’s blouse drove me crazy; I wanted one with lace and ribbons like the one Fanda, who lived next door, had….”*
“But I want you to know one thing,” said Milena sadly. “My mother never spanked me when I was little. She never even scolded me. Only my father did that…,”
She was shivering. She was cold and tired. The stove had gone out and the sounds of a new day in camp came in to us. Our time together was drawing to an end.
* Mikna Jesenska, The Way to Simplicity (Prague, 1926}.