Her eyes … reveal not so much the past as the future struggle….
—FRANZ KAFKA, DAS SCHLOSS (THE CASTLE)
One might have thought that Milena would be persecuted by her fellow prisoners, because most of them, in their eagerness to adapt to their new life, played into the hands of the slave drivers. As a rule, strong characters who refused to submit were ostracized if not actually maltreated. Not so Milena. She was a surprising exception. She was persecuted only by the leading Communists, and that for political reasons. Yet there was something positively provocative in Milena’s manner. Her way of speaking, of moving, of holding her head; with every gesture, she said, “I am a free woman.” Though she wore exactly the same striped uniform as all the others, she stood out from among them; it was she who attracted all eyes. This might have antagonized her fellow inmates. The fact is that it did not. Here I am speaking not of Milena’s many friends, but of the camp consensus. Her fellow inmates found flattering nicknames for her. Since the serial number she wore on her sleeve was 4714, they called her 4711 after the famous eau de cologne. As her married name was Krejcarova, her companions in Barracks No. 1 called her Carevna, or Empress. These little examples show how her companions felt about her. In captivity, for some strange reason, one is drawn to some people and repelled by others from the very start. There is no doubt that in such a situation of hopelessness the weak are attracted to those who, like Milena, radiate strength.
Once Milena was late for roll call. This was a serious offense. The authorities might have turned a blind eye if she had hurried, which would at least have suggested a sense of guilt. But nothing of the kind, she blatantly took her time. An elderly SS overseer was so infuriated that she rushed at Milena, prepared to hit her in the face. Milena stood her ground and looked her straight in the eye. The woman dropped her arm and stood there open-mouthed.
Whether a prisoner was beaten or not often depended on her bearing. It can be said without exaggeration that a frightened, cringing look seemed to invite blows. “The funny thing about fear,” said Milena, “is that it won’t let you stand still…. When I stand still, it means that I’m calmly anticipating the unknown, I’m prepared for it.” For that you have to be strong, and if you want to be strong, “you mustn’t dissociate yourself from others, you mustn’t forget that you’re a member of a community. Once you feel alone, you start looking for a pretext to run away. Being alone is probably the world’s greatest curse.”*
Dr. Sonntag, the SS medical officer in charge of the infirmary, took an obvious interest in Milena as a woman. He treated her with marked politeness, tried to draw her into conversations, and once even offered her what was left of his breakfast, which she declined without thanks. He always carried a bamboo cane. When he wasn’t posing with it, he used it to beat the prisoners. One day he stopped her in the corridor of the infirmary and tickled her under the chin with it. What followed took him totally by surprise. Milena grabbed the cane and flung it to one side along with the arm that was holding it. Her face, as she told me later, must have been flushed with anger and loathing. He didn’t say a word, but from then on he made her feel his cold hatred. Yet surprisingly enough, he did not send her to the camp prison, as he might well have done.
Many of the criminals and asocials, even some of the political prisoners, were born toadies, glad to do anything that would please the SS. There was a German Communist woman, for instance, who worked in the tailor shop; she was responsible for shipping the finished SS uniforms and procuring the necessary material and equipment. She supervised a crew of prisoners, enforced strict discipline, and made such a good impression that the SS man in charge of the tailor shop once declared, “If I didn’t have Wiedmaier, the whole shop would fall to pieces.” We once asked her if she wasn’t ashamed of herself, and she gave the astonishing answer: “I can’t help it. That’s the way I am. I’m conscientious, I have to work.” It’s true that in addition to satisfying her sense of duty, her conscientiousness brought her various privileges. She flatly rejected any idea of sabotaging the tailor shop. What did she care who the uniforms were for?
Olga Korner, a handsome white-haired old woman, worked at the assembly table, where parts of uniforms were fitted together before stitching. She too was a Communist and had been in custody for years. Unlike Maria Wiedmaier, she derived no advantage from her exhausting work, yet she too threw herself into it body and soul. Throughout the eleven-hour shift, she never sat still. She would run into the cutting room and argue endlessly with the overseers or SS men about matters concerning the cut of SS uniforms.
During my time in the tailor shop, at first I thought it was just by chance that I never heard her talking about anything but her work at the assembly table. But I soon realized that this was her whole world: pieces that didn’t fit properly, mistakes in the matching of camouflage colors, the careless work of the cutters, the praise or blame of SS men, her own tireless work and excellent results. Many of the Communists seemed to have been made for slave labor.
Milena had the same experience. The Communists working in the infirmary were always accusing her of laziness or—and this really showed how far they had sunk—malingering. “You’re not sick,” they said, “you just don’t want to work.”
The windows of Milena’s office in the infirmary looked out on the compound. From her desk she could see the big iron gate that stood between us and freedom. Several women worked in that room. But the corner where she sat showed her personal touch. On her desk there was a flower in a container that looked something like a vase. Not to mention the glass button in the cardboard box where she kept her pencils. When the sun was shining, the colors of the rainbow appeared in it as though by enchantment. It didn’t take much to delight us. On the wall by the window she had pinned a photograph of Prague and beside it a color print, undoubtedly taken from some SS calendar, showing a mountain landscape seen through an open window. What attracted us about this otherwise uninteresting picture was a white curtain billowing in the breeze. When you are yearning for freedom, a bit of curtain in a silly picture can make your heart overflow.
What images of freedom we carried with us into our captivity! Memories of books, of good music, films, popular songs, “tear-jerkers” which, as Milena confessed to me, she loved dearly. I had left Western Europe in 1935, and the more recent popular songs were unknown to me. I heard them for the first time in the camp. One of them had a special appeal for us: “The wind sang me a song, a song of unspeakable happiness …” Even now, forty years later, the tune carries me back to the first years of my friendship with Milena, to those unreal days when, prisoners among prisoners, we lived in a rich world of our own. Every gesture, every word, every smile, had its meaning. Constantly being separated and yet so close together, living always in anticipation of a brief meeting, even the bell of the little railway train running along the camp wall while we—Milena a few hundred yards away from me—were lined up for roll call seemed like a loving message from one to the other. In that existence without a future, we lived entirely for the present.
In a magazine that an SS man had left in the infirmary, Milena found a reproduction of Brueghel’s Return from the Hunt, She cut it out and I pinned it to the wall of the orderly room in my barracks. Brueghel started us talking about the paintings we remembered.
“On my desk,” Milena had written in one of her articles, “is a reproduction of a painting by Gauguin. It’s in the corner, leaning against the wall. An enormous, boundless sky, below it the sea, and in the foreground three nude men on horses, two black and one white. They are riding through tall grass on their way to a water hole. It’s a simple, economical picture, only a few lines, three human backs, three horses’ backs with rippling muscles; it makes your heart ache. It tells of foreign lands, of an unknown sun, and a man who saw this world in such sweet colors: the sky a delicate pink, the sea azure blue, in the foreground three horses and three men, a sorrowful melody of colors.
“I love this picture not only because it is beautiful, not only because it tells me of the wide world and unknown countries, but also because it is a part of our world that I love so, a marvelous display of color, a cry of joy, a perfect expression of the universe. I found this picture in a small stationery shop, covered with dust in the showcase, and it only cost me ten crowns. But it has given me more pleasure than an expensive gift, a picture in a gilded frame. When I cease to take pleasure in it, I shall lock it up in my desk. If I come across it again after a few months, it will awaken a feeling of past love, a sentimental memory of the day we spent together.
“At the bottom of my desk drawer there is a similar picture that I cut out of an illustrated magazine. It shows a man and a woman walking hand in hand on the seashore, into the sun and the wind. This picture is neither beautiful nor valuable; it’s trash. Nevertheless, I shall never bring myself to throw it in the wastepaper basket. It brings back to me all the yearnings of a thirteen-year-old, all a little girl’s wild ideas about life, and when I smile at it, I am smiling across the years of my adulthood at my own young girlhood.”*
As I was physically stronger than Milena, it was only natural that I should try to take care of her. That sounds so simple, but with the strict camp regulations it involved considerable risk. All of us were tortured by hunger. But as those who like Milena were in poor physical condition suffered the most, I had no hesitation about stealing food for her from the kitchen, Actually I did the same for the women in my barracks. With the complicity of the young Polish woman who handed out the bread, I managed, thanks to a complicated system of miscounting, to filch several loaves of bread under the eyes of the SS overseer. Of course, considering that there were more than three hundred women in the barracks, this was a mere drop in the bucket. For Milena I managed to steal margarine from the kitchen in spite of the overseer who was standing right next to it. Milena, however, far surpassed me in daring. One morning during working hours, when the camp street was deserted, she carried a bowlful of coffee with milk and sugar—the gift of a Polish woman who worked in the kitchen—all the way from the infirmary to my barracks, taking care not to spill a single drop. If she had been caught, she would have been beaten and locked up in the camp prison, the dreaded Bunker.
The combination of monotony and constant terror favored strong friendships among the inmates. Our prospects were as uncertain as if we had been shipwrecked on the high seas. The SS had absolute power over us, and every day could be our last. In this situation, we developed mental as well as physical faculties which tend to remain untapped in normal life. Under These circumstances the feeling that one was necessary to another human being was a source of supreme happiness, made life worth living, and gave one the strength to survive.
In October 1941, Anicka Kvapilová, the young Czech woman who had formerly directed the music section of the Prague municipal library was brought to Ravensbrück. Like everyone else, she had heard of Milena, but it was in the camp that they met for the first time. She was later to describe her first impression of Milena: “I was standing outside the infirmary with a group of newly arrived Czechs,” she wrote. “We had been sent there for our medical examination. Depressed and bewildered by our first terrible impressions of the camp, we were anxiously awaiting the next torment. And then Milena stepped through the door stopped on the stairs, smiled at us, and called out with a friendly gesture, ‘Welcome, girls!’ It came from the heart, as if, like a hostess receiving her friends, she was inviting every single one of us into her home. I was flabbergasted, I looked up at her and saw her shimmering red hair that surrounded her head like a halo. I’ll never forget that impression. It was the first really human touch amid all that inhumanity.”