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Milena and Margarete: A Love Story in Ravensbrück
A profoundly moving celebration of love under the darkest of circumstances
From the moment they met in 1940 in Ravensbrück concentration camp, Milena Jesenska and Margarete Buber-Neumann were inseparable. Czech Milena was Kafka’s first translator and epistolary lover, and a journalist opposed to fascism. A non-conformist, bi-sexual feminist, she was way ahead of her time. With the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, her home became a central meeting place for Jewish refugees. German Margarete, born to a middle-class family, married the son of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. But soon swept up in the fervor of the Bolshevik Revolution, she met her second partner, the Communist Heinz Neumann. Called to Moscow for his “political deviations,” he fell victim to Stalin’s purges while Margarete was exiled to the hell of the Soviet gulag. Two years later, traded by Stalin to Hitler, she ended up outside Berlin in Ravensbrück, the only concentration camp built for women.
Milena and Margarete loved each other at the risk of their lives. But in the post-war survivors’ accounts, lesbians were stigmatized, and survivors kept silent. This book explores those silences, and finally celebrates two strong women who never gave up and continue to inspire. As Margaret wrote: “I was thankful for having been sent to Ravensbrück, because it was there I met Milena.”
From the moment they met in 1940 in Ravensbrück concentration camp, Milena Jesenska and Margarete Buber-Neumann were inseparable. Czech Milena was Kafka’s first translator and epistolary lover, and a journalist opposed to fascism. A non-conformist, bi-sexual feminist, she was way ahead of her time. With the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, her home became a central meeting place for Jewish refugees. German Margarete, born to a middle-class family, married the son of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. But soon swept up in the fervor of the Bolshevik Revolution, she met her second partner, the Communist Heinz Neumann. Called to Moscow for his “political deviations,” he fell victim to Stalin’s purges while Margarete was exiled to the hell of the Soviet gulag. Two years later, traded by Stalin to Hitler, she ended up outside Berlin in Ravensbrück, the only concentration camp built for women.
Milena and Margarete loved each other at the risk of their lives. But in the post-war survivors’ accounts, lesbians were stigmatized, and survivors kept silent. This book explores those silences, and finally celebrates two strong women who never gave up and continue to inspire. As Margaret wrote: “I was thankful for having been sent to Ravensbrück, because it was there I met Milena.”
304 pages, Hardcover
Published August 19, 2025
34 people are currently reading
4628 people want to read
About the author
Gwen Strauss
11 books164 followersGwen Strauss is an award-winning children’s book author and poet, whose titles include Trail of Stones, The Night Shimmy, Ruth and the Green Book, and The Hiding Game. Her poetry, short stories and essays have appeared in numerous places including The New Republic, New England Review, Kenyon Review, London Sunday Times and Catapult. Her forthcoming adult non-fiction book, The Nine will be released in eight countries in 2021 and is currently in development for a TV series. She lives in Southern France where she works as the Director of the Dora Maar House, an artist residency program.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 53 reviews
December 20, 2025
5 "sensitively interpreted and extraordinarily respectful" stars !!!
Thank you to Netgalley, the author and St. Martin's Press for an ecopy. This was released August 2025. I am providing an honest review.
A historical biographical re-enactment of a love story. Two interesting, compassionate and intelligent women meet in Nazi Germany's Ravensbruck and fall deeply in love amidst a disintegrating, depraved increasingly hellish environment. The contrast of a selfless romantic love against a never ending fiendeshly sadistic regime that is both inexplicable and unimaginable. A narrative that is profoundly heartbreaking and so very deep.
The author skillfully weaves history, sociology and an interpersonal acuteness that took this readers' breath away over and over and over again. Gretushka and Milena found each other and carved out a small sliver of paradise in the deepest recesses of hell. The macro, the mezzo and the micro are explored here to a most satisfying degree.
Exquisite and tragic..... Thank you Ms. Strauss for helping bring this to the light....
May all the women here have peace in their Elysian fields....
Thank you to Netgalley, the author and St. Martin's Press for an ecopy. This was released August 2025. I am providing an honest review.
A historical biographical re-enactment of a love story. Two interesting, compassionate and intelligent women meet in Nazi Germany's Ravensbruck and fall deeply in love amidst a disintegrating, depraved increasingly hellish environment. The contrast of a selfless romantic love against a never ending fiendeshly sadistic regime that is both inexplicable and unimaginable. A narrative that is profoundly heartbreaking and so very deep.
The author skillfully weaves history, sociology and an interpersonal acuteness that took this readers' breath away over and over and over again. Gretushka and Milena found each other and carved out a small sliver of paradise in the deepest recesses of hell. The macro, the mezzo and the micro are explored here to a most satisfying degree.
Exquisite and tragic..... Thank you Ms. Strauss for helping bring this to the light....
May all the women here have peace in their Elysian fields....
August 4, 2025
Pre-Read Notes:
I don't quite remember why I requested this one! But I think it will be a good story!
Final Review
(thoughts & recs) I love the story of these two women who defied almost certain death for their love for each other. They represent humanity's capacity for resilience in the face of great danger and difficulty. But I didn't love the organization. It was challenging to track the primary narrative because so many other little segues keep veering me off course. I believe that these details are an important part of the story and should remain therein, but some more structure and organization wouldn't hurt any.
I recommend this book to readers of queer history, Jewish history and the history of the Holocaust and concentration camps. Relatively little has been written about Ravensbrück, where women and children were inprisoned.
My Favorite Things:
✔️ "Prison societies, it has been noted, are especially keen to control and police status . Perhaps when one is living in an extreme environment , when survival is precarious, it becomes important to have someone beneath you, the other, the one who is even worse off than you. Perhaps there is comfort in knowing that your situation is not as bad as the other." p11 Very dark. Prison stories often are.
✔️ This is actually the last sentence in the book, and for me, it came way too late. "I am using their beautiful love story to shine a light on sexuality in the camps and how it was seen, hidden, and the important role it played in survival, because to have found love in a concentration camp is extraordinary." p236 I wish she had been clearer about her purpose throughout the text.
Notes: SA, gr*pe, genocide, concentration camps, the Holocaust, murder, torture, medical experimentation, starvation
1. content notes: prison, imprisonment, lice, beatings, humiliation, violence against women, death ot a child, forced abortion,
Thank you to the author Gwen Strauss, publishers St. Martins Press, and NetGalley for an accessible digital arc of MILENA AND MARGARETE. All views are mine.
I don't quite remember why I requested this one! But I think it will be a good story!
Final Review
(thoughts & recs) I love the story of these two women who defied almost certain death for their love for each other. They represent humanity's capacity for resilience in the face of great danger and difficulty. But I didn't love the organization. It was challenging to track the primary narrative because so many other little segues keep veering me off course. I believe that these details are an important part of the story and should remain therein, but some more structure and organization wouldn't hurt any.
I recommend this book to readers of queer history, Jewish history and the history of the Holocaust and concentration camps. Relatively little has been written about Ravensbrück, where women and children were inprisoned.
My Favorite Things:
✔️ "Prison societies, it has been noted, are especially keen to control and police status . Perhaps when one is living in an extreme environment , when survival is precarious, it becomes important to have someone beneath you, the other, the one who is even worse off than you. Perhaps there is comfort in knowing that your situation is not as bad as the other." p11 Very dark. Prison stories often are.
✔️ This is actually the last sentence in the book, and for me, it came way too late. "I am using their beautiful love story to shine a light on sexuality in the camps and how it was seen, hidden, and the important role it played in survival, because to have found love in a concentration camp is extraordinary." p236 I wish she had been clearer about her purpose throughout the text.
Notes: SA, gr*pe, genocide, concentration camps, the Holocaust, murder, torture, medical experimentation, starvation
1. content notes: prison, imprisonment, lice, beatings, humiliation, violence against women, death ot a child, forced abortion,
Thank you to the author Gwen Strauss, publishers St. Martins Press, and NetGalley for an accessible digital arc of MILENA AND MARGARETE. All views are mine.
August 16, 2025
This Holocaust memoir is now one of my favorites. It is certainly one of the most 💔 heartbreaking recountings of the all-female prisoners in the Ravensbruck Concentration Camp.
The way the author, Gwen Strauss, structures the unfolding of the events at the camp, she makes it incredibly painful as the tension and atrocities grow and rip apart every act of human decency. It features two friends who realize they’re in love with each other. You feel their individual pain, fear and anger, as well as how it affects their loved one from both viewpoints.
I listened to it on audiobook and the female narrator, Julie Teal, reads it almost like a newscaster. This gives it even more of a desperate feel with the reality of the situation. Although it took a little while, once I settled into her voice and style, I grew to appreciate it.
What sets this apart from other Holocaust fiction books is that you keep remembering that’s it’s not fiction and that makes it even more despicable and eye opening. Each time I read any book from this time period, I surprise myself by being surprised at even more horrific tactics and actions.
It is a love story and beautiful tribute to these brave and strong women whose story was hidden away until a historian brought it to the author’s attention.
My note:
This concentration camp, Ravensbrück, was specifically made for women and children in northern Germany. If that isn't enough to make you ill, there's more from Wikipedia:
Conditions at the camp were brutal, characterized by overcrowding, malnutrition, forced labor, and poor sanitation that led to the spread of diseases like typhus. Ravensbrück performed horrific medical experiments on women, including using: sulfonamide drugs, sterilization procedures, and bone-grafting experiments. Mass killings occurred via: shooting, lethal injection, starvation, and in early 1945, gassing. Thousands of women were also forced on death marches in the final months of the war, to prevent them from being liberated, by the advancing Soviet forces. And eventually the USA.
Thank you to the publisher McMillan Audio, NetGalley, and the author for this advanced copy. I would’ve hated to have missed this one.
The way the author, Gwen Strauss, structures the unfolding of the events at the camp, she makes it incredibly painful as the tension and atrocities grow and rip apart every act of human decency. It features two friends who realize they’re in love with each other. You feel their individual pain, fear and anger, as well as how it affects their loved one from both viewpoints.
I listened to it on audiobook and the female narrator, Julie Teal, reads it almost like a newscaster. This gives it even more of a desperate feel with the reality of the situation. Although it took a little while, once I settled into her voice and style, I grew to appreciate it.
What sets this apart from other Holocaust fiction books is that you keep remembering that’s it’s not fiction and that makes it even more despicable and eye opening. Each time I read any book from this time period, I surprise myself by being surprised at even more horrific tactics and actions.
It is a love story and beautiful tribute to these brave and strong women whose story was hidden away until a historian brought it to the author’s attention.
My note:
This concentration camp, Ravensbrück, was specifically made for women and children in northern Germany. If that isn't enough to make you ill, there's more from Wikipedia:
Conditions at the camp were brutal, characterized by overcrowding, malnutrition, forced labor, and poor sanitation that led to the spread of diseases like typhus. Ravensbrück performed horrific medical experiments on women, including using: sulfonamide drugs, sterilization procedures, and bone-grafting experiments. Mass killings occurred via: shooting, lethal injection, starvation, and in early 1945, gassing. Thousands of women were also forced on death marches in the final months of the war, to prevent them from being liberated, by the advancing Soviet forces. And eventually the USA.
Thank you to the publisher McMillan Audio, NetGalley, and the author for this advanced copy. I would’ve hated to have missed this one.
August 17, 2025
An exceptionally well-written, well-researched book on the story of these two incredible women and their "passionate friendship," proving that love can endure all things under all conditions. Highly recommend this book. I feel so lucky to be able to read this before most everyone.
Thank you, #Netgalley and #MacmillanAudio, for this ARC
Thank you, #Netgalley and #MacmillanAudio, for this ARC
December 3, 2024
Well-researched and beautifully written, this book tells of the relationship of Milena Jesenska, a Czech writer, and Margarete Buber-Neumann while they were prisoners in Ravensbruck. We learn of their pasts and what everyday life was like in Ravensbruck. However, it is their relationship that is so moving to read about. To be able to find love in such a bleak place of death and hopelessness shows the strength of the human spirit.
October 6, 2025
"I am thankful for having been sent to Ravensbrück, because it was there I met Milena." - Grete Buber-Neumann
Milena and Margarete by Gwen Strauss was a bit disjointed and sometimes it was all over the place. Often the writing would go off on a tangent and I wish that this book had been organized differently to reduce the jumping back and forth between time periods and subjects. The chapter titles make it look like it will be chronological order however each chapter dives into different, but related, subjects as the story of Milena and Grete in Ravensbrück unfolds.
I was a little disappointed reading the author's note at the end where Strauss explains she had to infer a lot about the protagonists' relationship given the biased homophobic research material she had access to. For a book that is advertised as being largely about this relationship, it's frustrating to read a lot of it was invented. Granted she did a hefty amount of research and this was educated speculation.
Before reading Milena and Margarete, I read Sarah Helm's authoritative account of the history of Ravensbrück and atrocities committed there (If This Is a Woman, 2015) so a lot of the information relayed in this book was not new to me. I found the the dissemination of facts easy to follow because of this previous knowledge. However, if you know nothing about this women-only concentration camp, the book could be very confusing and difficult to follow.
I did like the focus on how skewed and homophobic post-war accounts of lesbianism in the camp were. It is so unfortunate that the love that blossomed amongst the prisoners would be ignored and relegated to minor mentions in history of "degenerate" behaviour. Strauss shares the beauty of such relationships eloquently and describes the tenderness and deep friendship between women without bias.
Of the two women, I found myself drawn to Milena in particular much in the same way the people in her life must have been. I identified with her view on life and the struggles she faced because she wasn't always conventional or accepted by her contemporaries. I also appreciated that Strauss didn't look at either women with an unrealistic, overly positive eye. She shared their flaws and mistakes just as she shared their triumphs and love.
If I had no previous knowledge of the Ravensbrück concentration camp, this book would have been very informative (if a little disjointed). I'd recommend it if you want to learn more about this time period, Ravensbrück or the treatment of LGBTQ in the camps.
Milena and Margarete by Gwen Strauss was a bit disjointed and sometimes it was all over the place. Often the writing would go off on a tangent and I wish that this book had been organized differently to reduce the jumping back and forth between time periods and subjects. The chapter titles make it look like it will be chronological order however each chapter dives into different, but related, subjects as the story of Milena and Grete in Ravensbrück unfolds.
I was a little disappointed reading the author's note at the end where Strauss explains she had to infer a lot about the protagonists' relationship given the biased homophobic research material she had access to. For a book that is advertised as being largely about this relationship, it's frustrating to read a lot of it was invented. Granted she did a hefty amount of research and this was educated speculation.
Before reading Milena and Margarete, I read Sarah Helm's authoritative account of the history of Ravensbrück and atrocities committed there (If This Is a Woman, 2015) so a lot of the information relayed in this book was not new to me. I found the the dissemination of facts easy to follow because of this previous knowledge. However, if you know nothing about this women-only concentration camp, the book could be very confusing and difficult to follow.
I did like the focus on how skewed and homophobic post-war accounts of lesbianism in the camp were. It is so unfortunate that the love that blossomed amongst the prisoners would be ignored and relegated to minor mentions in history of "degenerate" behaviour. Strauss shares the beauty of such relationships eloquently and describes the tenderness and deep friendship between women without bias.
Of the two women, I found myself drawn to Milena in particular much in the same way the people in her life must have been. I identified with her view on life and the struggles she faced because she wasn't always conventional or accepted by her contemporaries. I also appreciated that Strauss didn't look at either women with an unrealistic, overly positive eye. She shared their flaws and mistakes just as she shared their triumphs and love.
If I had no previous knowledge of the Ravensbrück concentration camp, this book would have been very informative (if a little disjointed). I'd recommend it if you want to learn more about this time period, Ravensbrück or the treatment of LGBTQ in the camps.
August 14, 2025
This was one of those audiobooks that doesn’t just tell you a story—it immerses you in it. Gwen Strauss brings to life the true and powerful bond between Milena and Margarete, two women whose friendship and courage carried them through one of history’s darkest times. The narration is rich, heartfelt, and full of quiet strength, making it feel like you’re being personally entrusted with their memories.
The book follows their resilience, defiance, and deep humanity against the backdrop of Nazi-occupied Europe. It’s not an easy listen—there are harrowing, gut-wrenching moments that remind you just how high the stakes were—but it’s also deeply inspiring. The way Gwen Strauss handles their voices and histories is full of respect and emotional depth, making this not just a story of survival, but of loyalty, love, and resistance.
If you’re an audiobook lover, this one’s a must—the pacing, tone, and delivery pull you in and don’t let go. It’s the kind of history that stays with you long after you’ve finished.
Thank you to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.
The book follows their resilience, defiance, and deep humanity against the backdrop of Nazi-occupied Europe. It’s not an easy listen—there are harrowing, gut-wrenching moments that remind you just how high the stakes were—but it’s also deeply inspiring. The way Gwen Strauss handles their voices and histories is full of respect and emotional depth, making this not just a story of survival, but of loyalty, love, and resistance.
If you’re an audiobook lover, this one’s a must—the pacing, tone, and delivery pull you in and don’t let go. It’s the kind of history that stays with you long after you’ve finished.
Thank you to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.
August 30, 2025
Tragic in every way. Not only were they living in a time where women hardly had a voice but then as victims to the Holocaust as well as hiding their romance. They could hardly live a shred of their lives openly for various reasons.
The bond and loyalty between these two women is the true love story here in a mostly horrific backdrop, sadly.
All the same, we don’t often hear stories like this relative to concentration camps and their perspective and experiences give a one of a kind glimpse into those living in camps.
The bond and loyalty between these two women is the true love story here in a mostly horrific backdrop, sadly.
All the same, we don’t often hear stories like this relative to concentration camps and their perspective and experiences give a one of a kind glimpse into those living in camps.
August 20, 2025
Many people forget that not only Jews found themselves trapped within the German concentration camps during WWII. Gwen Strauss brings to life the horrific conditions at an all women’s camp, Ravensbruck, how Jews and non-Jews are treated differently and how a gay and bisexual women find love. Czech Milena was Kafka’s first translator and a journalist opposed to fascism. Margarete, born to a middle-class family, married the son of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. She left him for a Communist who share her passion for the Bolshevik Revolution. They traveled to Moscow where he was killed and she was sent to a gulag. were arrested. Two years later, Stalin traded her to Hitler, who had her placed in Ravensbruck.
The political wrangling for power among the officers exacerbated the abhorrent treatment among the inmates from brutal beatings, the harsh working conditions devoid of proper clothing, subsistence level food and denial of medical treatment. My writing cannot capture the brutality or the atrocities suffered constantly. How Milena and Grete found each other, fell in love and still met up while understanding that they suffer dire consequences, is an incredible story by itself.
Strauss’s research has you lying next to others infected with lice, typhoid, many other diseases or dead. You don’t just read this, you live it. While this is a universal view of the camp, gays were never given a voice after the war to tell their stories. Human suffering is human suffering. Brava for Strauss.
Thank you NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press.
The political wrangling for power among the officers exacerbated the abhorrent treatment among the inmates from brutal beatings, the harsh working conditions devoid of proper clothing, subsistence level food and denial of medical treatment. My writing cannot capture the brutality or the atrocities suffered constantly. How Milena and Grete found each other, fell in love and still met up while understanding that they suffer dire consequences, is an incredible story by itself.
Strauss’s research has you lying next to others infected with lice, typhoid, many other diseases or dead. You don’t just read this, you live it. While this is a universal view of the camp, gays were never given a voice after the war to tell their stories. Human suffering is human suffering. Brava for Strauss.
Thank you NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press.
July 28, 2025
We all know the horrors of Auschwitz and WW2 in general, but this tale is about Milena and Margarete, who were sent to Ravensbruck for their own reasons of "troubling" the Germans. Their story of coming together and falling in love gave a lot of light into how LGBTQIA+ were viewed in that era. While we live in troubling times of our own, this was an eye opening warning of how easy it is to let hate in.. I have nothing but respect and awe.
August 19, 2025
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: A profoundly moving celebration of love under the darkest of circumstances
From the moment they met in 1940 in Ravensbrück concentration camp, Milena Jesenska and Margarete Buber-Neumann were inseparable. Czech Milena was Kafka’s first translator and epistolary lover, and a journalist opposed to fascism. A non-conformist, bi-sexual feminist, she was way ahead of her time. With the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, her home became a central meeting place for Jewish refugees. German Margarete, born to a middle-class family, married the son of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. But soon swept up in the fervor of the Bolshevik Revolution, she met her second partner, the Communist Heinz Neumann. Called to Moscow for his “political deviations,” he fell victim to Stalin’s purges while Margarete was exiled to the hell of the Soviet gulag. Two years later, traded by Stalin to Hitler, she ended up outside Berlin in Ravensbrück, the only concentration camp built for women.
Milena and Margarete loved each other at the risk of their lives. But in the post-war survivors’ accounts, lesbians were stigmatized, and survivors kept silent. This book explores those silences, and finally celebrates two strong women who never gave up and continue to inspire. As Margarete wrote: “I was thankful for having been sent to Ravensbrück, because it was there I met Milena.”
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Any time anyone, anyone at all, asks, "why can't you just keep quiet about all that queer stuff?" show them this story.
Because people died for being themselves. And the survivors were too afraid to talk about it.
That's down to people, "nice" people, privileged people, simply not wanting to know that some girls like girls and some boys like boys. That culture of silence to avoid making the most privileged, spoiled brats among the world's most privileged, spoiled people...the most privileged the planet has ever produced!...just don't think they should ever have to think uncomfortable thoughts or consider other people's existence and freedom to be themselves as important.
"Alligator Alcatraz" is a concentration camp. If you think it isn't go look at the definition of one.
So think about this: your silence, your uninterest in speaking up for whatever selfish, personal reason, puts someone you know...me...at the very real risk of being treated like these two "passionate friends" (if you imagine there was a way to consummate their love in Ravensbrück, you're wrong). I'm not made of the tough, gritty stuff these women are, so....
We need to stand up to this ever-developing system. Talk about it on social media, post memes, do anything except nothing. Milena and Grete (as she is most often referred to) can't speak to us with their mouths. Author Strauss, in confronting the silence about queer people in Holocaust literature, is pointing the way to a fuller understanding of the Holocaust's horrors and evils, and the vileness of Stalin's mirror of it in the gulag system, as we see the steady slide back into a system that accepts this horror as normal.
It's not a particularly smooth pointing...it's narratively idea-driven, putting the small person's need for linear narratives behind following a thought to its conclusion. One person whose name we learn only to discover she dies, before we hear the rest of her anecdotal appearance, particularly stands out as an infelicity of organization. Another factor that led me to rate the book four stars was the sheer, numbing weight of the horrors inflicted by the Nazis on the inmates. It happened; reasonable people know it happened; but because we are often far afield from Milena and Grete, the weight of horror often outweighs the burden of these two women's joyous discovery of love.
It does a fine job of personalizing the horrors of the Holocaust, but a less stellar job of making Milena and Grete come alive. I don't know that this is avoidable, given time and the destruction of records, but it was something I felt disappointment about.
Good writing and a truly underrepresented subject within Holocaust literature compensated me well: "I am using their beautiful love story to shine a light on sexuality in the camps and how it was seen, hidden, and the important role it played in survival, because to have found love in a concentration camp is extraordinary."
It absolutely is.
The Publisher Says: A profoundly moving celebration of love under the darkest of circumstances
From the moment they met in 1940 in Ravensbrück concentration camp, Milena Jesenska and Margarete Buber-Neumann were inseparable. Czech Milena was Kafka’s first translator and epistolary lover, and a journalist opposed to fascism. A non-conformist, bi-sexual feminist, she was way ahead of her time. With the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, her home became a central meeting place for Jewish refugees. German Margarete, born to a middle-class family, married the son of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. But soon swept up in the fervor of the Bolshevik Revolution, she met her second partner, the Communist Heinz Neumann. Called to Moscow for his “political deviations,” he fell victim to Stalin’s purges while Margarete was exiled to the hell of the Soviet gulag. Two years later, traded by Stalin to Hitler, she ended up outside Berlin in Ravensbrück, the only concentration camp built for women.
Milena and Margarete loved each other at the risk of their lives. But in the post-war survivors’ accounts, lesbians were stigmatized, and survivors kept silent. This book explores those silences, and finally celebrates two strong women who never gave up and continue to inspire. As Margarete wrote: “I was thankful for having been sent to Ravensbrück, because it was there I met Milena.”
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Any time anyone, anyone at all, asks, "why can't you just keep quiet about all that queer stuff?" show them this story.
Because people died for being themselves. And the survivors were too afraid to talk about it.
That's down to people, "nice" people, privileged people, simply not wanting to know that some girls like girls and some boys like boys. That culture of silence to avoid making the most privileged, spoiled brats among the world's most privileged, spoiled people...the most privileged the planet has ever produced!...just don't think they should ever have to think uncomfortable thoughts or consider other people's existence and freedom to be themselves as important.
"Alligator Alcatraz" is a concentration camp. If you think it isn't go look at the definition of one.
So think about this: your silence, your uninterest in speaking up for whatever selfish, personal reason, puts someone you know...me...at the very real risk of being treated like these two "passionate friends" (if you imagine there was a way to consummate their love in Ravensbrück, you're wrong). I'm not made of the tough, gritty stuff these women are, so....
We need to stand up to this ever-developing system. Talk about it on social media, post memes, do anything except nothing. Milena and Grete (as she is most often referred to) can't speak to us with their mouths. Author Strauss, in confronting the silence about queer people in Holocaust literature, is pointing the way to a fuller understanding of the Holocaust's horrors and evils, and the vileness of Stalin's mirror of it in the gulag system, as we see the steady slide back into a system that accepts this horror as normal.
It's not a particularly smooth pointing...it's narratively idea-driven, putting the small person's need for linear narratives behind following a thought to its conclusion. One person whose name we learn only to discover she dies, before we hear the rest of her anecdotal appearance, particularly stands out as an infelicity of organization. Another factor that led me to rate the book four stars was the sheer, numbing weight of the horrors inflicted by the Nazis on the inmates. It happened; reasonable people know it happened; but because we are often far afield from Milena and Grete, the weight of horror often outweighs the burden of these two women's joyous discovery of love.
It does a fine job of personalizing the horrors of the Holocaust, but a less stellar job of making Milena and Grete come alive. I don't know that this is avoidable, given time and the destruction of records, but it was something I felt disappointment about.
Good writing and a truly underrepresented subject within Holocaust literature compensated me well: "I am using their beautiful love story to shine a light on sexuality in the camps and how it was seen, hidden, and the important role it played in survival, because to have found love in a concentration camp is extraordinary."
It absolutely is.
August 6, 2025
My thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the opportunity to review this audiobook.
Most of this story takes place in the Ravensbruck concentration camp, in the special ´re-education’ section for women who distinguished themselves by making the expansive Nazi hate list. Their distinctions brought them into squalid, crowded, unhygienic conditions where they were regularly beaten, starved, forced to participate in torturing other inmates, and simply brutalized.
The conditions at Ravensbruck are by now known to most people. I’ve read about them countless times, both in fiction and in scholarly non-fiction. Yet listening to this audiobook, as narrated by Julie Teal, still gave me chills. Her dispassionate telling makes descriptions of the constant acts of inhumanity especially hard to take, familiar though they are. Along with the number of characters, this makes me wonder whether reading it on the page would be a bit less unsettling. If that’s possible. It might at least help keep the characters and the time line straight, since the story is told mostly in flashbacks. The dual timeline also means that the two main characters don’t appear together for much of the book, since they met at the camp. The point of view of Margarethe Buber-Neumann dominates, though I expect that this is due to the fact that she figures in more of the historical records on which this book is based.
The Czech journalist Milena Jesenka met the German Margarethe, called Grete, at Ravensbruck in 1940. Milena is known mostly, perhaps unfairly given her own literary talents, as the girlfriend of Franz Kafka, who died of tuberculosis at the beginning of his own career. Like Grete, she had thought the Great War of her youth had finished all wars, so horrible were its consequences. Both women were atheists, non-conformist, anti-fascist and feminist-socialist. The author makes a mighty effort to show how many variations of such lol ideologies co-existed, and often not at all happily.
The worldly, open-minded Grete, imprisoned for communism (she was a social democrat) was placed in the ´asocial’ category, the very lowest in the camp hierarchy . The group included lesbians, sex workers, Roma and young Jehovah’s Witnesses (called Bible students), communists, the mentally ill or otherwise defective.’ Her organizational efficiency spared her from constant punishment because the camp directors were desperate for help in preventing chaos and keeping the women producing for the Nazi war machine . Interestingly, the ´free thinking’ sexuality that the Nazis considered a particularly odious leftist idea (but not applicable to them) was, in Gretés view, purely heterosexual.
As Gretés camp diary indicates, she felt an immediate soul bond when she met Milena, and came to think of her as the content of my life.’ Theirs was a ´romantic friendship’ that doesn’t seem to have been sexual. Like the Nazis, Greta considered lesbians ´morally and medically unfit,’ and thought they could be cured by finding ´the right man.’ Definitely attracted to each other, Grete and Milena ´lived each day’ for the stolen moments when they could talk together, learning deeply about each other before being forced to go back to their blocs.
Author Greta Strauss’s commitment to telling the stories of the women who lived and died within the hell that was Ravensbruck is what she eloquently terms ´an act of recovery and imagination.’ She points out that, for many of them—lesbians, Roma, the mentally ill, and so on—life outside the camp was equally hell. Their families abandoned them and they had no home to return to. They were at once determined to live and not afraid of dying. Surviving to see the war’s end gave them the will to live. But liberation did not guarantee that they would survive in the outside world.
This can’t help but be a tragic story. Even understanding the lengths they would go to in order to survive doesn’t make it easy to hear/read about the debasement that they were forced into. It is easy to think ´I would rather have died.’ But we haven’t been forced to choose, when all choices are equally terrible.
Because of the scarce records that kept these women, those who survived as much as those who died, hidden from history, books such as Strauss’s ´recovery and imagination’ can give us a sense of how they lived and died.
Most of this story takes place in the Ravensbruck concentration camp, in the special ´re-education’ section for women who distinguished themselves by making the expansive Nazi hate list. Their distinctions brought them into squalid, crowded, unhygienic conditions where they were regularly beaten, starved, forced to participate in torturing other inmates, and simply brutalized.
The conditions at Ravensbruck are by now known to most people. I’ve read about them countless times, both in fiction and in scholarly non-fiction. Yet listening to this audiobook, as narrated by Julie Teal, still gave me chills. Her dispassionate telling makes descriptions of the constant acts of inhumanity especially hard to take, familiar though they are. Along with the number of characters, this makes me wonder whether reading it on the page would be a bit less unsettling. If that’s possible. It might at least help keep the characters and the time line straight, since the story is told mostly in flashbacks. The dual timeline also means that the two main characters don’t appear together for much of the book, since they met at the camp. The point of view of Margarethe Buber-Neumann dominates, though I expect that this is due to the fact that she figures in more of the historical records on which this book is based.
The Czech journalist Milena Jesenka met the German Margarethe, called Grete, at Ravensbruck in 1940. Milena is known mostly, perhaps unfairly given her own literary talents, as the girlfriend of Franz Kafka, who died of tuberculosis at the beginning of his own career. Like Grete, she had thought the Great War of her youth had finished all wars, so horrible were its consequences. Both women were atheists, non-conformist, anti-fascist and feminist-socialist. The author makes a mighty effort to show how many variations of such lol ideologies co-existed, and often not at all happily.
The worldly, open-minded Grete, imprisoned for communism (she was a social democrat) was placed in the ´asocial’ category, the very lowest in the camp hierarchy . The group included lesbians, sex workers, Roma and young Jehovah’s Witnesses (called Bible students), communists, the mentally ill or otherwise defective.’ Her organizational efficiency spared her from constant punishment because the camp directors were desperate for help in preventing chaos and keeping the women producing for the Nazi war machine . Interestingly, the ´free thinking’ sexuality that the Nazis considered a particularly odious leftist idea (but not applicable to them) was, in Gretés view, purely heterosexual.
As Gretés camp diary indicates, she felt an immediate soul bond when she met Milena, and came to think of her as the content of my life.’ Theirs was a ´romantic friendship’ that doesn’t seem to have been sexual. Like the Nazis, Greta considered lesbians ´morally and medically unfit,’ and thought they could be cured by finding ´the right man.’ Definitely attracted to each other, Grete and Milena ´lived each day’ for the stolen moments when they could talk together, learning deeply about each other before being forced to go back to their blocs.
Author Greta Strauss’s commitment to telling the stories of the women who lived and died within the hell that was Ravensbruck is what she eloquently terms ´an act of recovery and imagination.’ She points out that, for many of them—lesbians, Roma, the mentally ill, and so on—life outside the camp was equally hell. Their families abandoned them and they had no home to return to. They were at once determined to live and not afraid of dying. Surviving to see the war’s end gave them the will to live. But liberation did not guarantee that they would survive in the outside world.
This can’t help but be a tragic story. Even understanding the lengths they would go to in order to survive doesn’t make it easy to hear/read about the debasement that they were forced into. It is easy to think ´I would rather have died.’ But we haven’t been forced to choose, when all choices are equally terrible.
Because of the scarce records that kept these women, those who survived as much as those who died, hidden from history, books such as Strauss’s ´recovery and imagination’ can give us a sense of how they lived and died.
July 17, 2025
Thank you for the free ARC in exchange for an honest review.
4 stars
It has taken me a few days to read this in its entirety but here I am, at 11:35 pm, trying desperately not to tear up and to think of the best way to describe my thoughts on this.
It's horrifying, it's bittersweet, it's beautiful at moments. It is not for the faint of heart. There are moments where the cold hard facts are presented and the absolute devastation takes a moment before it hits you. It is brutal, some of the descriptions about the acts of violence committed make you feel nauseous.
It's a historical account of real events, but adding that human perspective makes it even more devastating. I've been having nightmares about some of the things I have read in this book and I have felt this impending sense of dread and rage as I continued. It makes you wonder how humans could ever do this? How could we ever hurt others like this and just not care? It makes my whole chest hurt with anger and despair.
At times, while reading this, I just admired the writing. It felt like it was engaging and not to dry or stuffy. (Sometimes non-fiction books feel like they were written to not be read.) I'm glad the author wrote in a more compelling way; the human stories and the suffering, all of it can't be passed by. You need to see if from their point of view. Too often we hear numbers and facts that make us feel detached from the true horrors being presented.
It's very easy to feel almost clinical about it. To disconnect from all of it and dismiss it to the backs of our minds. When we get to know the people involved, we become invested. And we feel. It's horrible to say, because it might sound like I'm making out everyone to be a sociopath or something. But I find it's very true. Numbers and facts don't really register the same way that identifying and connecting with individuals do. When you know their names, age, their mannerisms, it becomes a burden on your soul. Because now you can't just forget about them.
Milena and Grete had their own flaws. The author doesn't shy away from explaining their histories and what was normal at the time. I appreciate that they weren't just presented as perfect people. They made mistakes, they discriminated, they loved, they hated, they tried their best. They were real people at the end of the day.
If you read this book, and I really do recommend that you do, just be aware of the pain you will put yourself through. It's necessary but it will be pain. Barely a fraction of the pain these women went through, but pain is still pain. You can still feel agony in your heart and soul knowing you can't do anything for them. It's not a fiction story where I can just rewrite the ending in my head to make it better.
They were real people with real lives and real stories.
This long rambling of mine comes to a close as I just think about how all of the women who suffered and were buried by history could start to be recognized properly again. I really hope all of them could find peace. (I may go cry now.)
4 stars
It has taken me a few days to read this in its entirety but here I am, at 11:35 pm, trying desperately not to tear up and to think of the best way to describe my thoughts on this.
It's horrifying, it's bittersweet, it's beautiful at moments. It is not for the faint of heart. There are moments where the cold hard facts are presented and the absolute devastation takes a moment before it hits you. It is brutal, some of the descriptions about the acts of violence committed make you feel nauseous.
It's a historical account of real events, but adding that human perspective makes it even more devastating. I've been having nightmares about some of the things I have read in this book and I have felt this impending sense of dread and rage as I continued. It makes you wonder how humans could ever do this? How could we ever hurt others like this and just not care? It makes my whole chest hurt with anger and despair.
At times, while reading this, I just admired the writing. It felt like it was engaging and not to dry or stuffy. (Sometimes non-fiction books feel like they were written to not be read.) I'm glad the author wrote in a more compelling way; the human stories and the suffering, all of it can't be passed by. You need to see if from their point of view. Too often we hear numbers and facts that make us feel detached from the true horrors being presented.
It's very easy to feel almost clinical about it. To disconnect from all of it and dismiss it to the backs of our minds. When we get to know the people involved, we become invested. And we feel. It's horrible to say, because it might sound like I'm making out everyone to be a sociopath or something. But I find it's very true. Numbers and facts don't really register the same way that identifying and connecting with individuals do. When you know their names, age, their mannerisms, it becomes a burden on your soul. Because now you can't just forget about them.
Milena and Grete had their own flaws. The author doesn't shy away from explaining their histories and what was normal at the time. I appreciate that they weren't just presented as perfect people. They made mistakes, they discriminated, they loved, they hated, they tried their best. They were real people at the end of the day.
If you read this book, and I really do recommend that you do, just be aware of the pain you will put yourself through. It's necessary but it will be pain. Barely a fraction of the pain these women went through, but pain is still pain. You can still feel agony in your heart and soul knowing you can't do anything for them. It's not a fiction story where I can just rewrite the ending in my head to make it better.
They were real people with real lives and real stories.
This long rambling of mine comes to a close as I just think about how all of the women who suffered and were buried by history could start to be recognized properly again. I really hope all of them could find peace. (I may go cry now.)
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 21, 2025
Margarete Buber-Neumann, known as Grete, was born in Germany. In the late 1920’s, she became romantically involved with Heinz Neumann and the German Communist Party. Over time though, Grete became disillusioned with the Communist Party, and was eventually arrested by the Russians who sent her to a gulag, until 1940 when she was transferred to Ravensbruck concentration camp as part of a prisoner exchange. Milena Jesenska was a Czech born journalist, Kafka's first interpreter, and his lover. She opposed fascism and had also become disillusioned with the Communist Party, ultimately working with the resistance in Prague at the beginning of the war. She helped smuggle jews out of Czechoslovakia and was eventually arrestedand also sent to Ravensbruck in October 1940. Grete “would remember her first encounter with Milena as the turning point of her life.” Strauss gradually reveals the growing love between Greta and Milena, while also shedding light on their lives prior to Ravensbruck.
The book is a moving account of two women finding strength and love through their “passionate friendship”. As Strauss details the horrid conditions at Ravensbruck, she also dives deeper into the complex and little known or documented world of lesbian love within the prison. She sheds light on the social stigma and brutal treatment of lesbians in the camps and the stigma that continued long after the war, which forced many lesbians into silence and many of their stories to be lost. Strauss states, "Precise numbers of how many women were deported or killed for their lesbianism, verses or along with other reasons, is impossible to calculate. Trying to compare the numbers and thus calculate suffering is a useless endeavour. It does not get to the central truth about the intersectionality of persecution- that is the many ways women were controlled, oppressed, silenced, and made invisible." Strauss states in the authors notes, "Scholars have recognised that for to long history was written about kings, conquerors, and colonisers. The narrative left out the majority - everyday people, the enslaved, the colonised, and of course the marginalized. To rectify this imbalance, in telling the story, I engage in an act of recovery and imagination." In this book Strauss provides a powerful voice to the moving, emotional, and complex history of life within a womens concentration camp and the many ways in which women were persecuted and oppressed for being not only Jewish/a bible student/communist/lesbian/antisocial/criminal, but also being women. I also appreciated the insight into the women in roles such as SS Guards and Kapos or Block Leaders who struggled with their own sense of self preservation, the horror of what was unfolding, and the desire to help the women they were responsible for. This book reminds us of the importance of human connection and the power of love at a time when the Nazis tried to destroy any shred of humanity amongst prisoners in the camps.
The book is a moving account of two women finding strength and love through their “passionate friendship”. As Strauss details the horrid conditions at Ravensbruck, she also dives deeper into the complex and little known or documented world of lesbian love within the prison. She sheds light on the social stigma and brutal treatment of lesbians in the camps and the stigma that continued long after the war, which forced many lesbians into silence and many of their stories to be lost. Strauss states, "Precise numbers of how many women were deported or killed for their lesbianism, verses or along with other reasons, is impossible to calculate. Trying to compare the numbers and thus calculate suffering is a useless endeavour. It does not get to the central truth about the intersectionality of persecution- that is the many ways women were controlled, oppressed, silenced, and made invisible." Strauss states in the authors notes, "Scholars have recognised that for to long history was written about kings, conquerors, and colonisers. The narrative left out the majority - everyday people, the enslaved, the colonised, and of course the marginalized. To rectify this imbalance, in telling the story, I engage in an act of recovery and imagination." In this book Strauss provides a powerful voice to the moving, emotional, and complex history of life within a womens concentration camp and the many ways in which women were persecuted and oppressed for being not only Jewish/a bible student/communist/lesbian/antisocial/criminal, but also being women. I also appreciated the insight into the women in roles such as SS Guards and Kapos or Block Leaders who struggled with their own sense of self preservation, the horror of what was unfolding, and the desire to help the women they were responsible for. This book reminds us of the importance of human connection and the power of love at a time when the Nazis tried to destroy any shred of humanity amongst prisoners in the camps.
August 19, 2025
This seems an especially appropriate time for a book about finding love in a concentration camp. This book is not a novel, though the author felt she needed to write it as if it were. How else to get at the feelings of two women who met each other and fell deeply in love in a place where love seemed impossible, where their relationship had no realistic hope for a future, where they risked their lives if any evidence—such as a journal or even scraps of writing—of the depth of their love were discovered by their sadistic captors?
That’s the amazing thing about this book. Even as we wonder how she knows this about some of the scenes and dialogue Strauss offers in this story, she convinces us that what she is telling—and more important, showing-- us about the passionate relationship of these two extraordinary women is true. She does this by drawing on everything that is known about day-to-day life in Ravensbruck (no easy task considering that the camp’s records were destroyed before it was liberated), by providing crucial details of the experiences and events that led to Milena and Margarete finding and falling in love with each other, by giving us relevant background information on the political and historical context of the story, and by including vivid (occasionally too-vivid) characterizations of some of Milena and Margarete's fellow inmates and the ever-changing cast of human monsters who controlled the camp. In other words, she uses her evidence the same way any good novelist would use her imagination.
A recurring line in the book is “There is everything to cry about.” It is spoken to Grete by her husband when he is about to be arrested and probably killed by Stalin’s secret police. And it is said on more than one occasion in Ravensbruck by Milena to Margarete. Yes, it was true of their lives in those places in that time.
But, as Strauss wants us to remember, this continued to be true for certain survivors of the war. We now live in a world where it is possible to publish the story of Milena and Margarete.
But in the years following the war, this would not have been possible, even if the all the evidence was available. In the years following the war historiography of the Holocaust—like society in general-- was characterized by homophobia.
Women who loved women, sex workers, trans men who lived through the same experiences as Milena and Margarete never were given the opportunity to testify at war trials; never were offered the chance to write memoirs. Some were persecuted and imprisoned after they were liberated from the camps. The historical record contains very few of their names.
But now the historical record of the Holocaust will include the love story of Milena and Margarete..
Thank you St. Martin’s Press for providing an advance copy in galley form for review consideration via NetGalley. Please note: Quotes taken from a galley may change in the final version.
All opinions are my own.
That’s the amazing thing about this book. Even as we wonder how she knows this about some of the scenes and dialogue Strauss offers in this story, she convinces us that what she is telling—and more important, showing-- us about the passionate relationship of these two extraordinary women is true. She does this by drawing on everything that is known about day-to-day life in Ravensbruck (no easy task considering that the camp’s records were destroyed before it was liberated), by providing crucial details of the experiences and events that led to Milena and Margarete finding and falling in love with each other, by giving us relevant background information on the political and historical context of the story, and by including vivid (occasionally too-vivid) characterizations of some of Milena and Margarete's fellow inmates and the ever-changing cast of human monsters who controlled the camp. In other words, she uses her evidence the same way any good novelist would use her imagination.
A recurring line in the book is “There is everything to cry about.” It is spoken to Grete by her husband when he is about to be arrested and probably killed by Stalin’s secret police. And it is said on more than one occasion in Ravensbruck by Milena to Margarete. Yes, it was true of their lives in those places in that time.
But, as Strauss wants us to remember, this continued to be true for certain survivors of the war. We now live in a world where it is possible to publish the story of Milena and Margarete.
But in the years following the war, this would not have been possible, even if the all the evidence was available. In the years following the war historiography of the Holocaust—like society in general-- was characterized by homophobia.
Women who loved women, sex workers, trans men who lived through the same experiences as Milena and Margarete never were given the opportunity to testify at war trials; never were offered the chance to write memoirs. Some were persecuted and imprisoned after they were liberated from the camps. The historical record contains very few of their names.
But now the historical record of the Holocaust will include the love story of Milena and Margarete..
Thank you St. Martin’s Press for providing an advance copy in galley form for review consideration via NetGalley. Please note: Quotes taken from a galley may change in the final version.
All opinions are my own.
August 21, 2025
Thanks to NetGalley and St Martin's Press for an Advanced Reader Copy - pub date 8/19/2025. Even in a place of utter darkness, hope and light and love can be found. Milena Jesenska, a free-spirited Czech journalist, and Margarete Buber-Neumann, a disillusioned German Communist, never should have had anything in common but, when their eyes met across the yard at dark Ravensbrück, should became irrelevant. Before long, they were inseparable friends, protecting each other from the danger of camp life, supporting each other when spirits flagged, and sharing love and hope for a future where they could write a book together and walk the streets of Prague, hand in hand.
Gwen Strauss provides the reader a carefully researched and thoughtfully told book, complete with a full history of the deadly camp and the various people who arrived there. There are a lot of names and a lot of personalities to juggle but Strauss manages it neatly. The focus remains on Milena and Grete, even as friends and family and prison staff rotate in and out and affect them. The characters of the others are not always so easy either; some are skin-crawlingly evil but some are flawed and scared. There is no excuse for those who did harm but, as you feel Milena would have wanted, there are degrees of evil and some still have an ounce of grace. Beyond all of that, though, the true draw is the two women. Both of them had very different backgrounds and different outlooks and approaches. Some of the things might be solid guesswork by Strauss to recreate details but others are written down in Grete's book after the war and in the stories shared by their friends. These facts also drive Strauss' careful choice of words. While most today would readily recognize Milena and Grete as a full couple, the word lesbian had a very dangerous weight at the time of WWII in Nazi Germany and in the camps. Even after the end of the war and the camp liberation, it continued to be avoided and kept separate from those "passionate friendships" in the camps which were held as acceptable and high-minded. As Grete never used the word, Strauss also avoids it... for all the good such exclusion does when Grete herself says, "I was thankful for having been sent to Ravensbrück, because it was there I met Milena.”
This is not a cheerful, easy read by a long shot and, in light of some of the things happening in the US at the moment, I understand if a reader wants to push it off for the moment. However, it is a very good book and it challenges the mind and heart and I recommend coming to it when you are ready. Because we should all be able to keep hope and love close. Even when we aren't guaranteed a happily ever after.
Gwen Strauss provides the reader a carefully researched and thoughtfully told book, complete with a full history of the deadly camp and the various people who arrived there. There are a lot of names and a lot of personalities to juggle but Strauss manages it neatly. The focus remains on Milena and Grete, even as friends and family and prison staff rotate in and out and affect them. The characters of the others are not always so easy either; some are skin-crawlingly evil but some are flawed and scared. There is no excuse for those who did harm but, as you feel Milena would have wanted, there are degrees of evil and some still have an ounce of grace. Beyond all of that, though, the true draw is the two women. Both of them had very different backgrounds and different outlooks and approaches. Some of the things might be solid guesswork by Strauss to recreate details but others are written down in Grete's book after the war and in the stories shared by their friends. These facts also drive Strauss' careful choice of words. While most today would readily recognize Milena and Grete as a full couple, the word lesbian had a very dangerous weight at the time of WWII in Nazi Germany and in the camps. Even after the end of the war and the camp liberation, it continued to be avoided and kept separate from those "passionate friendships" in the camps which were held as acceptable and high-minded. As Grete never used the word, Strauss also avoids it... for all the good such exclusion does when Grete herself says, "I was thankful for having been sent to Ravensbrück, because it was there I met Milena.”
This is not a cheerful, easy read by a long shot and, in light of some of the things happening in the US at the moment, I understand if a reader wants to push it off for the moment. However, it is a very good book and it challenges the mind and heart and I recommend coming to it when you are ready. Because we should all be able to keep hope and love close. Even when we aren't guaranteed a happily ever after.
August 24, 2025
I received an advanced copy of Gwen Strauss’s true story titled “Milena and Margarete: A Love Story in Ravensbruck” from NetGalley prior to its publication. It’s an astonishing, vivid account of life inside the Nazi concentration camp built specifically to house women during World War II, initially to reeducate female political prisoners, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the “Asoziale,” “antisocial” Roma and Sinti women, prostitutes, vagrants, and lesbians who did not live up to the Nazi’s ideal of “fertile, subservient womanhood.”
Margarete Buber-Neumann was a German former communist who arrived at Ravensbruk in August 1940 after spending two years imprisoned in Stalin’s gulag after her husband fell victim to Stalin’s purges for his alleged “political deviations.” Eventually she was traded by Stalin to Hitler and initially found Ravensbruk practically an oasis in comparison to the gulag. During her time there until she finally was liberated at the end of the war, things changed dramatically, in unimaginably horrific and incomprehensible ways. Eventually, each day brought with it the possibility of death by torture, disease, gunshot, gassing, or simply the whim of a sadistic SS guard.
Milena Jesenská was a Czech journalist who possessed an incandescent passion for life. She maintained a fierce independence, even throughout her entire imprisonment at Ravensbruk, that beguiled other prisoners and the guards alike, allowing her to transcend the limits the camp tried to impose upon her. She was charming, funny, and intelligent, and she was someone who was easy to love, having had many lovers, male and female, and a couple of marriages before her imprisonment. One of her most notable relationships was with writer Franz Kafka, with whom she had a fervent epistolary affair and was the first to translate his work from its original German. Many of his letters to her survived and were compiled into a book simply called “Letters to Milena.” Milena arrived in Ravensbruk two months after Margarete, after spending fifteen months in Gestapo prisons for helping Jews flee the Nazis.
From their first meeting, these two women formed an intimate, unbreakable bond. Because lesbians were considered deviant, not only at the time but for decades after, Margarete referred to their relationship as a “passionate friendship.” Both repeatedly risked their lives for the welfare of the other and also for many other prisoners in the camp. Both were fiercely loyal, compassionate women. Author Gwen Strauss does a wonderful job piecing together the story of these two remarkable women, creating a portrait of love, loyalty, and friendship that was able to flourish even amid death, disease, and despair. Kudos to Ms. Strauss. My opinions of this book are voluntary.
Margarete Buber-Neumann was a German former communist who arrived at Ravensbruk in August 1940 after spending two years imprisoned in Stalin’s gulag after her husband fell victim to Stalin’s purges for his alleged “political deviations.” Eventually she was traded by Stalin to Hitler and initially found Ravensbruk practically an oasis in comparison to the gulag. During her time there until she finally was liberated at the end of the war, things changed dramatically, in unimaginably horrific and incomprehensible ways. Eventually, each day brought with it the possibility of death by torture, disease, gunshot, gassing, or simply the whim of a sadistic SS guard.
Milena Jesenská was a Czech journalist who possessed an incandescent passion for life. She maintained a fierce independence, even throughout her entire imprisonment at Ravensbruk, that beguiled other prisoners and the guards alike, allowing her to transcend the limits the camp tried to impose upon her. She was charming, funny, and intelligent, and she was someone who was easy to love, having had many lovers, male and female, and a couple of marriages before her imprisonment. One of her most notable relationships was with writer Franz Kafka, with whom she had a fervent epistolary affair and was the first to translate his work from its original German. Many of his letters to her survived and were compiled into a book simply called “Letters to Milena.” Milena arrived in Ravensbruk two months after Margarete, after spending fifteen months in Gestapo prisons for helping Jews flee the Nazis.
From their first meeting, these two women formed an intimate, unbreakable bond. Because lesbians were considered deviant, not only at the time but for decades after, Margarete referred to their relationship as a “passionate friendship.” Both repeatedly risked their lives for the welfare of the other and also for many other prisoners in the camp. Both were fiercely loyal, compassionate women. Author Gwen Strauss does a wonderful job piecing together the story of these two remarkable women, creating a portrait of love, loyalty, and friendship that was able to flourish even amid death, disease, and despair. Kudos to Ms. Strauss. My opinions of this book are voluntary.
July 28, 2025
An important book exploring the treatment of political prisoners and LGBTQ+ persons in the concentration camps. Milena and Margarete met in Ravensbruck in 1940. The book tells the stories of each of their lives and how they ended up in Ravensbruck. It discusses their "passionate friendship" and how they relied on each other to survive the worst possible circumstances. The book is full of information on the types of prisoners in the camps, the camps themselves, and the greater political climate.
I really enjoy books that explore topics that aren't often discussed. Ravensbruck was a brutal place and the only camp made only for women. While it was not the largest camp, it has a prominent place in WWII history. I am glad to see more books discussing it.
This book was not my favorite. I did not like that it was not chronological. The story seems to jump around quite a bit to go into the histories of different people. It is a bit repetitive because of this. One particular example that irked me was the discussion of a character and then putting in a sentence about how she died. Then it resumes her narrative. At that point, the reader knows what will happen to her and any hope that she can survive is dashed. This is a non-fiction book, and I know that the fates of each person mentioned can easily be searched online. I just wish the death wasn't thrown in prematurely. There is also a lot of information in the book that is entirely unrelated to Milena or Margerete. It is all important information that should be shared with readers, but I did not understand its context in the book. It did not involve the two women the book is about. I personally think the book would have been better by either 1) splitting the book into two parts. The first being the general history and details of what happened and then the second part focusing only on Milena and Margarete or 2) changing the title to not make it seem like the book is just about the two people mentioned. For these reasons, I only give the book 3 stars. This book might be great for those who are just learning about Ravensbruck for the first time.
I was fortunate to received an advanced audio version of this book. The narrator did a fine job.
*Thank you to Mcmillan Audio and NetGalley for the ALC in exchange for an honest review*
I really enjoy books that explore topics that aren't often discussed. Ravensbruck was a brutal place and the only camp made only for women. While it was not the largest camp, it has a prominent place in WWII history. I am glad to see more books discussing it.
This book was not my favorite. I did not like that it was not chronological. The story seems to jump around quite a bit to go into the histories of different people. It is a bit repetitive because of this. One particular example that irked me was the discussion of a character and then putting in a sentence about how she died. Then it resumes her narrative. At that point, the reader knows what will happen to her and any hope that she can survive is dashed. This is a non-fiction book, and I know that the fates of each person mentioned can easily be searched online. I just wish the death wasn't thrown in prematurely. There is also a lot of information in the book that is entirely unrelated to Milena or Margerete. It is all important information that should be shared with readers, but I did not understand its context in the book. It did not involve the two women the book is about. I personally think the book would have been better by either 1) splitting the book into two parts. The first being the general history and details of what happened and then the second part focusing only on Milena and Margarete or 2) changing the title to not make it seem like the book is just about the two people mentioned. For these reasons, I only give the book 3 stars. This book might be great for those who are just learning about Ravensbruck for the first time.
I was fortunate to received an advanced audio version of this book. The narrator did a fine job.
*Thank you to Mcmillan Audio and NetGalley for the ALC in exchange for an honest review*
May 9, 2025
Thank you to St. Martin's Press Early Readers + St. Martin Press + Netgalley for the gifted copy.
This is a book worth reading if you love history, historical fiction, and non-fic. I have learned about WWII through school growing up, movies, documentaries, and books, but it's always nice to learn some more. You can always, never stop learning about the past. There were parts of WWII that I learned that I did not know. I did not know about Milena and Margarete until I read this story. You get a first-hand glance of what the writer experienced during this history when their love had to be hidden away. You get a glimpse of what the consequences could've been if their relationship were to be exposed. This book is intense because it draws out a lot from you mentally and emotionally.
This is such a beautiful, well-researched sapphic biography on two women named Milena and Margarete. They both met in 1940 at a concentration camp in Ravensbrück. Their friendship was beautiful, and they helped each other, and with this, they were able to help the lives of so many people. This book covers details and facts about the Holocaust during WWII. The women, and so many others that lived during that time, had experienced so many hardships and even death. Hardships really would be putting it lightly. The cruelty that these women and these people had to live through during this time is unfathomable and unforgivable.
This is a book worth reading if you love history, historical fiction, and non-fic. I have learned about WWII through school growing up, movies, documentaries, and books, but it's always nice to learn some more. You can always, never stop learning about the past. There were parts of WWII that I learned that I did not know. I did not know about Milena and Margarete until I read this story. You get a first-hand glance of what the writer experienced during this history when their love had to be hidden away. You get a glimpse of what the consequences could've been if their relationship were to be exposed. This book is intense because it draws out a lot from you mentally and emotionally.
#MilenaAndMargarete
#GwenStrauss
#SMPEarlyReaders
#StMartinsPress
This is a book worth reading if you love history, historical fiction, and non-fic. I have learned about WWII through school growing up, movies, documentaries, and books, but it's always nice to learn some more. You can always, never stop learning about the past. There were parts of WWII that I learned that I did not know. I did not know about Milena and Margarete until I read this story. You get a first-hand glance of what the writer experienced during this history when their love had to be hidden away. You get a glimpse of what the consequences could've been if their relationship were to be exposed. This book is intense because it draws out a lot from you mentally and emotionally.
This is such a beautiful, well-researched sapphic biography on two women named Milena and Margarete. They both met in 1940 at a concentration camp in Ravensbrück. Their friendship was beautiful, and they helped each other, and with this, they were able to help the lives of so many people. This book covers details and facts about the Holocaust during WWII. The women, and so many others that lived during that time, had experienced so many hardships and even death. Hardships really would be putting it lightly. The cruelty that these women and these people had to live through during this time is unfathomable and unforgivable.
This is a book worth reading if you love history, historical fiction, and non-fic. I have learned about WWII through school growing up, movies, documentaries, and books, but it's always nice to learn some more. You can always, never stop learning about the past. There were parts of WWII that I learned that I did not know. I did not know about Milena and Margarete until I read this story. You get a first-hand glance of what the writer experienced during this history when their love had to be hidden away. You get a glimpse of what the consequences could've been if their relationship were to be exposed. This book is intense because it draws out a lot from you mentally and emotionally.
#MilenaAndMargarete
#GwenStrauss
#SMPEarlyReaders
#StMartinsPress
August 21, 2025
TL;DR: This is rough to read, but well worth the time.
Source: NetGalley - Thank you to the publisher!!
Readability: A bit dense, it reads slowly and it’s heartbreaking at times.
Scope: While showing us the relationship between Grete and Milena we also have a lot of background and political information along with the heart breaking facts about the camp.
Sources: A little over 10% of this (according to the kindle edition I have) is sources and a bibliography.
Thoughts:
Occasionally (and not as often as I should) I try to read something related to World War 2, and especially so if that focuses on women or queer folk. Milena and Margarete was a fantastic pick for this as I learned a lot, and was once again forced to look at the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany, how othering others and turning them into nothing but politics can ultimately pay out.
Milena and Margarete were two very different women from different walks of like. One was a passionate Soviet citizen who believed in her country and the movement, but was disillusioned and sent as a prisoner trade to the camps. The other was Kafka’s first translator and political journalist. They met at the Ravensbrück Camp, a long erased women’s concentration camp.
This book does not hide away from the things that these women saw. Based on the survivors accounts and writings from one of the title women, we see the way the camps began and ended. At first it was ‘reeducation’ and ‘prison’, by the end it’s nothing more than senseless slaughter. We also see moments of light and joy as the two women, and others, fight to keep a sense of self and humanity in conditions that attempt to take that away.
The only thing I had to complain about this was just the pacing. I wasn’t entirely engrossed in this till well after 50% because of the introduction style of this to our women. But the contents are worth reading, the story needs to be told. If you’re a fan of World War 2 history or the history of women or queers, or all of the above this one is one you need to read.
Source: NetGalley - Thank you to the publisher!!
Readability: A bit dense, it reads slowly and it’s heartbreaking at times.
Scope: While showing us the relationship between Grete and Milena we also have a lot of background and political information along with the heart breaking facts about the camp.
Sources: A little over 10% of this (according to the kindle edition I have) is sources and a bibliography.
Thoughts:
Occasionally (and not as often as I should) I try to read something related to World War 2, and especially so if that focuses on women or queer folk. Milena and Margarete was a fantastic pick for this as I learned a lot, and was once again forced to look at the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany, how othering others and turning them into nothing but politics can ultimately pay out.
Milena and Margarete were two very different women from different walks of like. One was a passionate Soviet citizen who believed in her country and the movement, but was disillusioned and sent as a prisoner trade to the camps. The other was Kafka’s first translator and political journalist. They met at the Ravensbrück Camp, a long erased women’s concentration camp.
This book does not hide away from the things that these women saw. Based on the survivors accounts and writings from one of the title women, we see the way the camps began and ended. At first it was ‘reeducation’ and ‘prison’, by the end it’s nothing more than senseless slaughter. We also see moments of light and joy as the two women, and others, fight to keep a sense of self and humanity in conditions that attempt to take that away.
The only thing I had to complain about this was just the pacing. I wasn’t entirely engrossed in this till well after 50% because of the introduction style of this to our women. But the contents are worth reading, the story needs to be told. If you’re a fan of World War 2 history or the history of women or queers, or all of the above this one is one you need to read.
September 4, 2025
Strauss has written a biography of two women finding strength and love through their friendship.
Milena and Margarete loved each other at the risk of their lives. But in the post-war survivors' a biography of two political dissidents who developed an intimate relationship while interned at the Ravensbrück concentration camp during WWII. Czech writer Milena Jesenská had been Kafka’s lover (in letters only) and translator before marrying an architect and becoming an antifascist journalist. German communist Margarete Buber-Neumann had been married to the son of philosopher Martin Buber and later to far-left politician Heinz Neumann, with whom she moved to the Soviet Union. The couple were punished during Stalin’s purges—Neumann was executed, Margarete was sent to a gulag until a prisoner exchange landed her in Ravensbrück. Immediately drawn to each other, Milena and Margarete were friends (lesbians). This book explores those silences Milena became recordkeeper at the infirmary; Margarete, secretary to the head guard. In these roles they saved fellow prisoners from death and committed sabotage—at one point, Margarete was held in solitary confinement for months after being caught tampering with guards’ reports to help fellow inmates evade punishment. The duo also gathered evidence of Nazi crimes, intending to write a book and imagining a postwar life together, a dream dashed when Milena died in 1944. The author discloses the moral quandary of the couple’s roles as assistants to their jailers, and emphasizes how their relationship provided them the motivation to survive. But in the post-war survivors' accounts, lesbians were stigmatized, and survivors kept silent.
Gripping, moving, and ultimately groundbreaking, this unusual account of a “passionate friendship” between two extraordinary women in Ravensbrück. Lesbian history and Holocaust history converge in this remarkable account. It is a book I shall never forget.
Disclaimer: I received an arc of this book from the author/publisher from Netgalley. I wasn’t obligated to write a favorable review. The opinions expressed are strictly my own.
September 14, 2025
Audiobook Review: Milena and Margarete: A Love Story in Ravensbrück by Gwen Strauss
Narrated by Julie Teal
I received this audiobook from NetGalley, and I’m always grateful for the chance to “read with my ears.”
Going into this book, I thought it would focus more heavily on Milena and Margarete’s love story and how they survived the Holocaust together. While their relationship is central to the narrative, I quickly realized this is much more historical than romantic. The author, Gwen Strauss, dives deep into the brutal history of Ravensbrück—the Nazi concentration camp for women—and the horrifying conditions that Milena Jesenská (a Czech journalist and activist, and once Franz Kafka’s lover) and Margarete Buber-Neumann (a German political dissident) endured. Their bond is certainly moving and important, but the book reads more like a meticulously researched historical account than a sweeping romance.
That said, I did learn a lot from this book. I read a lot of Holocaust literature, and yet every story brings something unique. This one shed light on Ravensbrück specifically, and on the extraordinary courage and resilience of women imprisoned there. It was heartbreaking, sobering, and important.
The narration by Julie Teal was excellent. She has a clear, expressive voice that carried both the weight of the history and the humanity of Milena and Margarete. I especially appreciated hearing the correct pronunciation of names and places—it added authenticity and helped immerse me in the story.
While it wasn’t quite the romantic narrative I expected, Milena and Margarete is still a powerful and deeply significant book. It’s a testament to love, resilience, and solidarity in one of history’s darkest times, and an important reminder of why these stories must continue to be told.
Narrated by Julie Teal
I received this audiobook from NetGalley, and I’m always grateful for the chance to “read with my ears.”
Going into this book, I thought it would focus more heavily on Milena and Margarete’s love story and how they survived the Holocaust together. While their relationship is central to the narrative, I quickly realized this is much more historical than romantic. The author, Gwen Strauss, dives deep into the brutal history of Ravensbrück—the Nazi concentration camp for women—and the horrifying conditions that Milena Jesenská (a Czech journalist and activist, and once Franz Kafka’s lover) and Margarete Buber-Neumann (a German political dissident) endured. Their bond is certainly moving and important, but the book reads more like a meticulously researched historical account than a sweeping romance.
That said, I did learn a lot from this book. I read a lot of Holocaust literature, and yet every story brings something unique. This one shed light on Ravensbrück specifically, and on the extraordinary courage and resilience of women imprisoned there. It was heartbreaking, sobering, and important.
The narration by Julie Teal was excellent. She has a clear, expressive voice that carried both the weight of the history and the humanity of Milena and Margarete. I especially appreciated hearing the correct pronunciation of names and places—it added authenticity and helped immerse me in the story.
While it wasn’t quite the romantic narrative I expected, Milena and Margarete is still a powerful and deeply significant book. It’s a testament to love, resilience, and solidarity in one of history’s darkest times, and an important reminder of why these stories must continue to be told.
May 9, 2025
Milena and Margarete is a poignant, deeply moving book about an incredibly dark time in history. The story describes the meeting and experiences of Milena Jesenská and Margarete Buber-Neumann during their imprisonment in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. After meeting in the camp, the women become friends and then soon fall in love. At risk to themselves, they strive to shield each other from the cruelties surrounding them. Through horrific living conditions, violence, and sickness, Milena and Margarete love and support each other.
Both primary and secondary sources are used with great effect to provide context for many of the events of WWII. Strauss is excellent at explaining how these events would have been viewed by women in the camp as well as the wider world. This book showcases major events in WWII while also providing great detail on the inner workings and every day life of the women incarcerated in Ravensbrück. Strauss also provides details on how the experience of incarceration in Ravensbrück changed over time, and connected those changes to wider events happening in Germany and across the world. I was moved to tears by some of the descriptions of the living conditions in the camp, as well as by the way the Nazis and collaborators treated the incarcerated women. The endurance of love and compassion among the prisoners in those conditions was immensely poignant. While reading this book, I felt the full spectrum of emotion from hope, heartbreak, disgust, shock, and empathy.
I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading about history, especially WWII. I have watched many documentaries and read many books on WWII history and I felt that this book provided me with fresh insight. I would also recommend to those who enjoy reading about queer and LGBTQ+ history.
Thank you to Net Galley and St. Martin’s Press for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Both primary and secondary sources are used with great effect to provide context for many of the events of WWII. Strauss is excellent at explaining how these events would have been viewed by women in the camp as well as the wider world. This book showcases major events in WWII while also providing great detail on the inner workings and every day life of the women incarcerated in Ravensbrück. Strauss also provides details on how the experience of incarceration in Ravensbrück changed over time, and connected those changes to wider events happening in Germany and across the world. I was moved to tears by some of the descriptions of the living conditions in the camp, as well as by the way the Nazis and collaborators treated the incarcerated women. The endurance of love and compassion among the prisoners in those conditions was immensely poignant. While reading this book, I felt the full spectrum of emotion from hope, heartbreak, disgust, shock, and empathy.
I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading about history, especially WWII. I have watched many documentaries and read many books on WWII history and I felt that this book provided me with fresh insight. I would also recommend to those who enjoy reading about queer and LGBTQ+ history.
Thank you to Net Galley and St. Martin’s Press for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
August 11, 2025
Milena and Margarete, A Love Story in Ravensbrück, is intense and moving. It seems there is no end to what we can learn about this tragic period in world history; there are so many perspectives, so many stories, so much pain yet so much strength. Milena and Margarete come from different places, different backgrounds and different experiences, but they have extraordinary strength and determination in common, and an unbreakable bond grows between them in the unlikely setting of Ravensbrück, located outside Berlin and the only concentration camp built for women.
Detailed, well-written and well-researched, Milena and Margarete tells the story of not only these two remarkable women but of their lives before being sent to Ravensbrück and also of the events that led to the war and the complex conflict and scheming between Hitler and Stalin. Informative, enthralling and often heart-breaking, Milena and Margarete is well worth reading. Thanks to St. Martin's Press for providing an advance copy of Milena and Margarete, A Love Story in Ravensbrück, via NetGalley. I voluntarily leave this review; all opinions are my own.
Detailed, well-written and well-researched, Milena and Margarete tells the story of not only these two remarkable women but of their lives before being sent to Ravensbrück and also of the events that led to the war and the complex conflict and scheming between Hitler and Stalin. Informative, enthralling and often heart-breaking, Milena and Margarete is well worth reading. Thanks to St. Martin's Press for providing an advance copy of Milena and Margarete, A Love Story in Ravensbrück, via NetGalley. I voluntarily leave this review; all opinions are my own.
August 28, 2025
I just finished Milena and Margarete: A Love Story in Ravensbrück by Gwen Strauss and here are my thoughts.
Can you imagine finding love in Ravensbruck? A concentration camp for women? During the worst world war we have ever seen?
That’s what happened to Milena and Margarete.
Milena was arrested by the Nazis for her part in the resistance activities in Prague and Margarete was traded to the Germans from the Russian because of her political views. They fell in love when they were held together. Loving each other could have meant the end of their lives but that didn’t stop them and this book gives you a fascinating glimpse of 2 incredible women during a time of serious unrest and danger.
I really got sucked into this book. It was truly wonderful to read about two awe inspiring women and their ability to endure horrific circumstances while loving each other so passionately was moving in the most beautiful way.
It was well researched. I love books that weave a real story in a really entertaining way. The writing was amazing and I am so glad I was introduced to these women!
4 stars
Thank you @stmartinspress for my gifted copy
Can you imagine finding love in Ravensbruck? A concentration camp for women? During the worst world war we have ever seen?
That’s what happened to Milena and Margarete.
Milena was arrested by the Nazis for her part in the resistance activities in Prague and Margarete was traded to the Germans from the Russian because of her political views. They fell in love when they were held together. Loving each other could have meant the end of their lives but that didn’t stop them and this book gives you a fascinating glimpse of 2 incredible women during a time of serious unrest and danger.
I really got sucked into this book. It was truly wonderful to read about two awe inspiring women and their ability to endure horrific circumstances while loving each other so passionately was moving in the most beautiful way.
It was well researched. I love books that weave a real story in a really entertaining way. The writing was amazing and I am so glad I was introduced to these women!
4 stars
Thank you @stmartinspress for my gifted copy
April 28, 2025
Milena Jesenska and Margarete Buber-Neumann met in 1940 in Ravensbrück concentration camp. The women became inseparable as they navigated the cruel atmosphere that tried to separate them from all they held dear. The "passionate friends" helped each other survive. This book shares the stories of their backgrounds, families and relationship.
I appreciated the book's flow and writing style. It's organized in a logical way and easy to read.
The book is packed with historical facts, too. I learned a lot about culture at the time and discovered new details about the Holocaust.
Perhaps the women were lesbians. They chose to label themselves as "passionate friends." Regardless, the author affirms "Scholars have recognized that for too long history was written about kings, conquerors, and colonizers. The narrative left out the story of the majority——everyday people, the enslaved, the colonized, and of course, the marginalized . To rectify this imbalance, in telling this story, I engage in an act of recovery and imagination."
I appreciated the book's flow and writing style. It's organized in a logical way and easy to read.
The book is packed with historical facts, too. I learned a lot about culture at the time and discovered new details about the Holocaust.
Perhaps the women were lesbians. They chose to label themselves as "passionate friends." Regardless, the author affirms "Scholars have recognized that for too long history was written about kings, conquerors, and colonizers. The narrative left out the story of the majority——everyday people, the enslaved, the colonized, and of course, the marginalized . To rectify this imbalance, in telling this story, I engage in an act of recovery and imagination."
September 13, 2025
Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the digital galley and ARC of the book and ALC of the audiobook.
Milena Jesenska and Margarete Buber-Neumann met in 1940 in Ravensbrück concentration camp and were inseparable. Milena was an anti-fascist journalist and Franz Kafka’s first translator (and pen pal lover). She was a bisexual feminist in German occupied Czechoslovakia. German Margarete got caught up with Heinz Neumann, a communist who was victim to Stalin’s purges. Margarete was sent to a gulag and later transferred to Ravensbrück.
It’s not a happy story, nor does it have a happy ending, but the account of these two women is inspiring, both in their love for each other and the small acts of resistance they were able to carry out for years in the camp to keep hold of their humanity in the face of such brutality.
We don’t often hear about the political, religious, and sexual “deviants” who were put in the camps, and this book reveals more about some of them through the story of these two women and the ladies they lived with in the camp.
August 23, 2025
This book was absolutely heartwrenching to read (as is any book about the Holocaust), but is told with so much sensitivity and respect for its subjects. This nonfiction story explores the loving relationship between two women who were imprisoned in the Ravensbruck concentration camp together during the war. I was a little familiar with this camp because I read Martha Hall Kelly's "Lilac Girls," but I wasn't as knowledgeable about political prisoners who were taken to the camps. Although this book was full of historical facts, Strauss included enough details to remind the viewers of the personal and devastating costs of this dictator's reign. There were, of course, accounts that were horrific to read about, but I think it's more important than ever to be educated about what went on in these concentration camps. Strauss found the perfect subjects for an endlessly fascinating book.
*Free ARC provided by Netgalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review*
*Free ARC provided by Netgalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review*
September 10, 2025
This is the story of Milena Jesenska, a Czech journalist (also known for being a correspondent with Franz Kafka and translator of his work) and Margarete Buber-Neumann, a German writer, both of whom were political prisoners who met and and formed a very close relationship (perhaps even romantic/sexual) whilst in the Ravensbruck concentration camp. It is a fascinating but often harrowing look into life in the camp. It also goes into both women's histories prior to imprisonment. I found it did jump around a bit in the narrative. In the author's notes, the author states that she became intrigued by who Milena was after reading Kafka's "Letters to Milena" eventually resulting in this book. I can appreciate this as often books will encourage a reader to delve further into a story and lead to other books.
I won an advanced reading copy of this book from Goodreads as part of the Giveaway program.
I won an advanced reading copy of this book from Goodreads as part of the Giveaway program.
August 17, 2025
The story of Milena and Margarete shows the strength of women as well as the strength and endurance of love. It tells of a deep personal love between the two women that could not be overcome by the cruelties of the times they were facing in Ravensbrück and beyond. While those of us who want to keep this history alive and want to read everything we can get our hands on in order to share the truth of what happened, it is also disheartening that there are SO many of these stories. This story is different from others in both the personal way in which it is told, and the way it focuses on the stories of the atrocities done to the women of this camp. Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the opportunity to read and review this advance reader copy. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own. #NetGalley #MilenaandMargarete
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