These heroines saved innocents from their Nazi executioners

In Sophocles' play, the ancient Greek heroine Antigone said to her executioner, the tyrant Creon: “I was not born to hate, I was born to love.” In the 20th century, many modern Antigones followed this path at the risk of their lives. Dissidents in the Russian sense of the word, they “thought differently” from the leaders of modern despotism.

One such example is Margarete Buber-Neumann. Having suffered persecution under both the Soviets and the Nazis, she was a key witness against dehumanizing totalitarian endeavors. 

When Margarete arrived at the Ravensbrück camp in 1940, she had already experienced the Soviet Gulag in Kazakhstan, where she nearly starved to death. The daughter-in-law of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber — who was also a translator of the Hebrew Bible — Margarete was the widow of Heinz Neumann, a former senior leader of the Communist International. Her husband had been arrested in Moscow on Stalin's orders during the Great Terror of 1937.

Arrested in her turn, Margarete was sentenced to five years in a “corrective” labor camp as a “socially dangerous element.” She was deported to the Karaganda concentration camp complex. There, prisoners lived among garbage. Women carried sacks weighing up to a hundred pounds. Refusal to work was punishable by death. Informers abounded: “Here, you can't even trust the walls,” said a fellow inmate. When Margarete fell ill, she coughed up blood, and only recovered with difficulty.

Despite all that, she knew moments of unexpected grace. One day, a guard on horseback risked everything to bring bread and sugar to a group of starving inmates. Another time, a young Lithuanian, seeing her exhausted, discreetly swapped furrows with her as she had to dig under the blazing sun. Standing apart, two Orthodox nuns sang religious hymns: remembering bits of her Catholic education, Margarete sang a hymn to the Virgin Mary for them.

In August 1939, after the German-Soviet Pact, Hitler and Stalin exchanged political prisoners. The Russian authorities handed Margarete over to the Gestapo. Once back in Germany, they sent her to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. She sought news of her husband Heinz: in the late summer of 1939, “no one has seen him either in a penitentiary or in a camp…”

At Ravensbrück, the Nazis stripped prisoners of their human dignity. Punishments ranged from starvation to solitary confinement in the bunker and caning. The SS wanted to train inmates to lash their fellow inmates just as they did, in return for an extra ration. A former prostitute, Else Krug, refused, exclaiming, “I will never hit another inmate!” The camp commandant immediately condemned her to death.

Margarete Buber-Neumann was introduced to “Milena from Prague,” a prisoner with a surprisingly relaxed appearance. “A personality that had not been broken, a free being among the humiliated” was the impression this Czech woman immediately gave her. The daughter of a leading Lutheran doctor, Milena lost her mother at the young age of 13, after the death of her younger brother. Fearless but despotic, her father raised her the hard way.

Cosmopolitan in character, she sought the company of German and Jewish intellectuals. At the age of 20, Milena married and moved to Vienna. This was to be followed by a series of infidelities and great material hardship. For a time, she became a drug addict.

Milena gave birth to a baby girl, but she fell ill with septicemia, leaving her disabled with a stiff leg. In her eyes, “If marriage is to have any meaning, it must be founded on something broader and more real than the aspiration to happiness.” She advocated “decency towards each other, truthfulness, home, fidelity, and friendship.” She urged her readers: “Great God, let's not be afraid of a little suffering and unhappiness.” Back in Prague, she became a well-known journalist. She joined the Czech Communist Party but rebelled against conformism and was expelled in 1936.

Milena Jesenska worked as a translator with Franz Kafka, author The Trial and The Castle, and a leading light of irony and independence. These prophetic texts foreshadow the political nightmares of the totalitarian bureaucracies of the nascent 20th century. Milena saw in Kafka, who was Jewish, “a spiritual purity that distanced him from all compromise” and “a sense of the irrevocable necessity of perfection and truth.”

As a journalist, she warned her fellow Czechs of the danger of their country being invaded by Nazi Germany. A resistance fighter in Prague from the time of the 1938 invasion, she hid Jews and military officers and smuggled them abroad.

The Gestapo arrested her in 1939 and deported her to Ravensbrück as well. As a young mother, she was cruelly aware that she was leaving behind a child condemned to orphanhood. While in Ravensbrück, Milena soon told her new friend Margarete, “When we're free again, we'll write a book together.” She was the first to come up with the idea of a book about the camps of the two totalitarian systems, with their parallel enterprises of enslaving millions of human beings. 

A Russian speaker, Margarete became secretary-interpreter to SS head guard Johanna Langefeld. One day, Langefeld confided to Margarete that while interning at Auschwitz, she had discovered “the most horrible thing a human being could imagine”: gas chambers and crematoria operating on an industrial scale.

As a worker in the camp infirmary, Milena soon discovered the lucrative crimes of SS doctor Rosenthal: every night, he killed patients who had gold crowns or dentures, which he traded clandestinely. Alongside him, an accomplice, a strange midwife, drowned the newborn babies of pregnant inmates in a tub. 

In 1942-43, Polish deportees condemned to death were subjected to experimental operations. In April of 1943, Margarete alerted the warden Langefeld, who immediately had two of them returned to their barracks. Little by little, these interventions reportedly saved the lives of 75 inmates.

With astonishing audacity, Milena went to see the Gestapo representative. She revealed to him the SS doctor's odious trafficking in gold, assuming — rightly — that he knew nothing about it. A winning bet: the policeman decided to have Rosenthal arrested. Margarete and Milena also temporarily saved some babies threatened with infanticide. Nonetheless, the Nazi camp leader later refused to feed them.

Eventually, Margarete was sent to the hunger bunker, where she was beaten. As for the SS supervisor Langefeld, the day after Margarete's incarceration she was placed under house arrest. She was accused of having become “an instrument of political prisoners.” After 50 days of interrogation, she was judged incapable of being a real torturer and was fired from her job. Her child was taken away from her.

Some time later, Milena Jesenska fell seriously ill. In the infirmary, she recited the Our Father. She died shortly afterwards.

In the post-war years, Margarete wrote the book Milena had wanted to publish on the reality of the twin Nazi and Stalinist concentration camp systems. In 1949, she gave decisive testimony at the Kravtchenko trial, brought in Paris by Communist intellectuals against a Soviet dissident accused of slandering Stalin's “socialist paradise.”

She eventually joined the CDU (the German Christian Democratic Union party). She died three days before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Her testimony of life was a major service to world freedom.