The Jesenskys lived on the sixth floor of a house in the center of Prague. “The Pfikope’ and Viclavske Namesti [Wenceslaus Square] were right under our windows,” Milena began. “In those days there were still beautiful low buildings around there, dating from the late baroque period. The whole neighborhood looked like a small provincial town with its neat central square.
“The tension between the Czechs and the German-speaking Austrians took many different forms. One of them could be seen from our windows every Sunday morning. The Austrian students with their bright-colored caps would stroll on the right side of the Pfikope and the Czechs in their Sunday best would promenade on the left side. Now and then a crowd would form, people would start singing something or other, and you could feel the exasperation in the air. I saw all that from the window, but I didn’t really know what it was all about.
“Then came a Sunday that I’ll never forget. I saw the Austrian students come marching from the Powder Tower, not as usual on the sidewalk, but in the middle of the street. They were marching in formation and singing. Suddenly a crowd of Czechs appeared from Vaclavske Namestf; they too were marching in the middle of the street, but silently. My mother and I were standing at the window. She held me by the hand, a little more tighdy than necessary. As the Czechs advanced, I saw my father in the front ranks. I recognized him right away, and I was delighted to see him down there, but my mother was pale and tense. Suddenly a detachment of police came rushing out of Havirska ulice and placed themselves between the two hostile armies, cutting off both from the Pfikope. But both sides continued to advance. The Czechs reached the police cordon and were ordered to halt; then a second time they were ordered to halt, then a third time. … I don’t remember exactly what happened then. I only know that I heard shots and saw the peaceful crowd of Czechs transformed into a howling mob. Suddenly the Pfikope was deserted. Only one man stood facing the police rifles—my father. I can still see him standing calmly there with his hands at his sides. But beside him on the cobblestones lay something strange and horrible. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen what someone looks like who has been shot and crumples. He’s not human anymore, he looks like an old rag. My father probably didn’t stand there for more than a minute. It seemed years to my mother and me. Then he bent down and began to bandage the bundle of human flesh. My mother had closed her eyes and two big tears were rolling down her cheeks. I still remember that she took me in her arms and squeezed me as if she had wanted to crush me….”*
Milena’s father played a larger part in her recollections than her mother. All the experiences that marked her most deeply were connected with her father, whom she both loved and hated. And this to the end of her life.
Dr. Jan Jesensky was a professor at the Charles University in Prague and practiced dentistry on Ferdinand Street, one of the most fashionable streets in Prague. He came of an old but impoverished middle-class family, and had grown wealthy by working hard at his profession. He was regarded as an outstanding oral surgeon and founded a school that still bears his name.
Milena looked very much like her father; she had the same dimple on her chin and the same resolute mouth. They were also both strong-willed, unyielding.
Jan Jesensky taught his only child old-fashioned patriarchal manners. She had to kiss his hand in greeting and in speaking to him was not allowed to use the familiar form of address.
Dr. Jesensky was proud of his achievements and determined to play a leading role in the Czech society of Prague. Anything that might interfere with this, especially his family, had to give way.
Undoubtedly Milena’s love-hate for her father had its roots in her early childhood. When she was about three, a son was born to the Jesenskys. Without knowing it, the sensitive little girl must have sensed what this new child meant to her father and mother. It was a boy and she was only a girl. She would stand behind the door and listen anxiously to the sickly baby’s screams. Sensing her parents’ anxiety, she too trembled for the baby’s life. When he died, she thought her parents had loved only him. How much his death had meant to her can be judged by the fact that Franz Kafka in his love letters to Milena speaks of her little brother’s grave, which he visited.
Her father often spanked her when she had been naughty or obstinate. But once he threw her into a big chest full of dirty washing and left the lid closed over the screaming child until she thought she would smother. From then on she lived in terror of her father.
Jan had a ferocious temper; in his frequent fits of rage he shouted threats and obscenities. He did his tyrannical best to break Milena’s spirit and force his opinions on her. In public he posed as an ultraconservative eccentric. He dressed in the old-fashioned style of a provincial nobleman, and never went out without a frock coat and the low-crowned top hat that went with it. He got up at four in the morning and took a cold bath; by half-past five he could be seen in the Kinsky Gardens, wearing his monocle and accompanied by two big dogs. He took his afternoon nap not on a soft couch, but on a hard, old-fashioned sofa. And he never failed to mention his Spartan virtues as a means of impressing, if not seducing, the ladies. In the afternoon he appeared, every inch the Herr Professor, in his elegantly appointed dentist’s office. Jan Jesensky was an unfortunate mixture of great ability and dishonest, brutal egoism. Every evening he went to his club and lost hundreds of crowns at cards.
In Ravensbrück we were allowed to write letters. The writing paper, which we had to buy at the canteen, carried the letterhead—Ravensbrück Concentration Camp—and just below it the regulations governing the inmates’ correspondence with the outside world. There were different kinds of paper for different categories of inmate. The “old” politicals, who had been arrested before the war, were allowed to write sixteen lines twice a month, and on their paper the letterhead and regulations were printed in red. In addition to the usual regulations, the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ paper, printed in green, had the words: “I am still a Jehovah’s Witness”; they were allowed to write only five lines. All those arrested during the war had a black letterhead; they were allowed to write sixteen lines but only once a month, and the replies of their correspondents were limited to sixteen lines.
Once in 1942, the mail distribution brought on an outburst of grief. There were hundreds of Gypsies in Ravensbrück, classified as “asocial” and “racially inferior.” In 1941 a so-called family camp for Gypsies was set up near the Auschwitz death camp. Whole tribes of Gypsies lived there, men, women, and children, deprived of their freedom but living in a relatively mild form of captivity. Later on, the families were torn apart; men, women, and children were transferred to regular concentration camps. The extermination of the Gypsies must have begun at the end of 1942, and this is how we got news of it in Ravensbrück. Soon after the mail was handed out, women came running out of the Gypsies’ barracks, screaming and holding up the letters they had just received. Nearly all contained the same notification, that a husband, a son, or a brother had “died in the hospital.” The women howled with grief, tore their clothes, and beat their faces in an Oriental outburst of despair that swept away all camp discipline. From then on the mail was censored more strictly than ever.
Even so, the inmates waited impatiently for Saturday, when the mail was distributed. The 150 words a month we were allowed to receive in the first years were our only contact with our dear ones outside. The mere sight of a familiar handwriting brought comfort, but despair as well. What tears were shed over these letters!
Milena exchanged one letter a month with her father. Every letter she received from him churned up the whole past and aroused new antagonisms. Still, she tried to be fair to her father.
At Christmas 1941 the camp management had a sudden burst of humanitarian sentiment. For the first time the inmates’ relatives were authorized to send packages, though of specified weight and contents. Most surprisingly, each package could include a woolen jacket.
I ran to Milena with my package. I had opened it, and a golden-yellow knitted jacket lay on top. I was beside myself with pleasure, and I wondered why she was reluctant to show me hers. Her father had sent her a Bavarian costume jacket, and she was ashamed of his bad taste. I did my best to comfort her and asked how she had dressed “before.” But that was another sore point. A severe illness had caused her to put on so much weight that she lost all interest in clothes. But now that she was as slim as she had been as a young girl, she felt quite differently. She forgot the silly costume jacket and we reveled in fantasies about the lovely clothes we would wear “later.” Milena saw herself in a tailored suit; she had always looked well in tailored suits.
An early photo of Milena shows her on the banks of the Vltava, wearing a striped two-piece suit with a long pleated skirt, a tarn, and high laced shoes. She is holding a chic Utile umbrella. Ail very elegant and in the taste of the time. Her soft, childlike profile, her Czech snub nose, and her luxuriant hair stand out against a light background. She must have been about thirteen when the picture was taken. Her mother, who was then still alive, had Milena’s clothes made by a dressmaker.
“When I was about fourteen, I was sent my first flowers, a real bouquet from Dietrich’s flower shop. They came with a visiting card, addressing me as ‘Miss’! There it was for all the world to see. The flowers had been sent by my first admirer, as a result, so to speak, of my first kiss. Shall I tell you about it? It’s a rather sad story, I still can’t think of it without a pang. Councilor Matus was a friend of my father’s, a great skier and sportsman. He suffered from cataract. For months he was in danger of going blind. He was a man of the old school, a bachelor, a famous waltzer, honorable, upright, courageous, and not at all calculating, either in love or in money matters. In short, a gentleman such as you don’t see anymore, When I visited him in the hospital, I brought him a bunch of violets. They took me to his room. I saw that his eyes were bandaged and realized that he had to spend whole days inactive in a darkened room, not knowing whether he would ever see again. I felt ashamed of my thoughtlessness in bringing him violets which he couldn’t even see, and the feel of which would only remind him of his misfortune. I wanted terribly to undo the harm I had done, to make him a present that would give him pleasure even if he couldn’t see it. So I threw my arms around him and kissed him. It was the first kiss of my life and I didn’t like it at all, because he needed a shave and I was so excited that my kiss landed on his nose and slid down to his chin. Once it was done, I tried to explain, but I didn’t know what to say. The best I could do was stammer idiotically, ‘That’s not what I meant,’ though I had no idea what he was thinking or what I might have meant. I was so confused that baby tears came to my eyes. But when I got home, a bouquet of magnificent hothouse lilacs was waiting for me with a visiting card, addressing me as ‘Miss,’ followed by a few words—something about the ‘best possible present’ for a sick man, proving that he knew perfectly well what I had meant. And my father said, ‘You see? Now there’s a gentleman.’”*
Jan Jesensky, who was always dressed fit to kill and looked much younger than his age, once spent a few days with this Councilor Matus in his summer house outside of Prague. Both men were fifty at the time. Matus looked sadly at the landscape and said with a sigh: “For fifty years I’ve been looking at these trees. One year is like another, nothing ages as much as we do. Always the same budding, flowering, and fading …” Such world-weariness was beyond Jesensky. He replied: “These trees. I’ve only been looking at them for fifty years. Every year they look new to me and they always will.”
Milena’s mother had been ill with pernicious anemia for years. If only for educational reasons, Dr. Jesensky thought it advisable that his daughter should help care for the invalid. Though only thirteen, Milena would stay with her mother until her father came home—often after nightfall—and relieved her. Milena’s mother sat up in bed, propped on pillows, while Milena in her chair struggled to keep awake. Every time her mother’s head drooped, Milena would start up guiltily, for she had fallen asleep. She would hurry over to the bed and help her mother up. But a few minutes later the same thing would happen again. At length her father came home from his card game or his lady friends, often in a state of euphoria. He would try to cheer the patient up with jokes and amusing stories, but it seemed to Milena that this only offended her and made her more aware of her pitiful condition. Milena loved her mother dearly, but now her strength failed her, she lost control over her nerves. One day, when nothing she did could satisfy the patient, she lost her temper and threw a tray with a whole meal on it on the floor. These were difficult days for the mother and the little girl. Her mother’s sufferings were such agony to Milena that she was almost relieved when at last death came.
Milena was thirteen when her mother died. Suddenly she found herself independent, free to dispose of her time, abandoned to her own resources. She describes herself as an emotional teenager, at once sentimental and rebellious. Once she took a room in a third-class hotel and stayed there all night by herself. It was an exciting adventure. It gave her a delightful feeling of being grown up, and besides, she hoped to find out what mysterious thing went on in these ill-famed hotels. She spent the night in a whirl of erotic imaginings, but nothing happened.
This was not her only nocturnal adventure. The cemetery had a magical attraction for her. She would sit on the wall, looking at the graves, and bask in tearful weltschmerz.
There were violent scenes when her father learned of her escapades, but the more he fumed, the more liberties she took. She had plenty of opportunity. As no one checked to see if she came home at night, she went right on with her adventures, triumphantly flouting her father’s authority. The painter Scheiner asked her to pose for his illustrations of fairy tales, and through him, while hardly more than a child, she became acquainted with a group of ultraconservative painters that called itself “Jednota.” Her experiences in their studios gave her a profound shock, and she recalled this period with loathing. Speaking of her father, or rather, of all parents, she once said, “Irresponsibly, they bring children into the world and, hardly bothering to get acquainted with them, push them out into life: ‘All right, now you can take care of yourself.’ “
At fifteen Milena seemed an adult to ail who knew her. She had matured; mentally as well as physically, she had lost her girlish qualities and become a young woman. She had the unusual gift of being able to meet adults on their own ground. No doubt her conflict with her father, from whose influence she was determined to free herself, had a good deal to do with her precocity.
At that time Milena was a passionate reader, mainly of novels by Knut Hamsun, Dostoevsky, George Meredith, Tolstoy, J. P. Jacobsen, Thomas Mann, and others. It is hard to say what enabled her at so early an age to find herself and develop a sense of values. In her home she found nothing to guide her; she had only her own burgeoning mind, which led her to reject everything base, sordid, or in bad taste. Her conflict with her father had a profound effect on her that would take her years to surmount. In her rebellion against the conventional pseudomorality she had come to despise, she overshot the mark and lost all sense of proportion. Why should she let others tell her what was right and wrong, true and untrue? She would decide for herself. At that time she was widely regarded as a liar. But her critics failed to see that she, like many young rebels, was in a transitional stage, trying to work out her own standards. Her insecurity expressed itself in a dangerous arrogance, and she went through a period of moral collapse, from which, however, she was to make an admirable recovery.