In Gwen Strauss's novel-like Milena and Margarete, two remarkable women endured the horrors of a concentration camp together while falling deeply in love. In an "act of recovery and imagination," Strauss (The Nine) gives this multilayered account of the forbidden "passionate friendship" between the German Margarete Buber-Neumann and the Czech journalist Milena Jesenská, who first met as political prisoners in the all-female Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1940. Connecting over their shared experience of disillusionment with the Communist Party, they began exchanging letters and meeting for brief walks near the camp's high wall, nicknamed "the Wailing Wall," that had electrified wires on top.
Strauss confronts history's silence on these taboo female relationships by "reading between the lines" of Buber-Neumann and Jesenská's experience, piecing together Buber-Neumann's later writings to conclude that the two shared a "physical, tender, and profound" love. Strauss juxtaposes the women's moments of light and hope (they planned to write a book together after the war) with the painful refrain of suffering, torture, and death at the hands of Nazi camp officials. The novelistic dialogue Strauss employs to dramatize conversations is the "imagination" half of the narrative's recovery, but it is affecting, nonetheless. For four years, "they had built their little world together inside" a place of hellish torment; indeed, "to have found love in a concentration camp is extraordinary." Milena and Margarete is a heartrending story of love in an impossible place that also gives voice to the hidden stories of women loving women. --Peggy Kurkowski, book reviewer in Denver