Milena and Margarete: A Love Story in Ravensbrück: The Nazi's Concentration Camp for Women by Gwen Strauss

Author:Gwen Strauss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ITHAKA PRESS
Published: 2025-07-10T00:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

1942

The Siren

Roll Call, drawing by Nina Jirsíková

T

HE GOOD NEWS DURING THE WINTER OF 1941–42 CENTERED AROUND the Yankees. Since the Americans had entered the war, hopes were high they would bring a swift end to the Germans. But the extremely cold and harsh winter made the end feel a long way off. A heavy uncertainty hung over everyone.

Despite the near disaster with Lotte and the list, Milena continued to take risks and intervene to help her fellow prisoners, her protégées, as Grete called them. One such person was Maria Hiszpańska, a young Polish painter. She was a quiet, timid girl. The work outside— hauling, shoveling, tossing bricks—was ruining her health and her hands, Milena told Grete. Maria made realistic, brutal drawings of everyday life in Ravensbrück and signed them with a small mouse. And so prisoners affectionately called her “Myszka”—“little mouse.” “Myszka must be helped so that her artistic talents are preserved,” Milena insisted. Milena stole paper and pencils from the infirmary and forged an inside-duty card for her. Grete reluctantly hid Myszka every day in the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ block.

Grete found the young artist too sensitive, and worse, she was self-pitying. Couldn’t she see that everyone was in the same miserable boat? Grete was a little jealous of Milena’s praise for Myszka’s artwork, and Grete worried about the danger should her drawings be discovered. She wondered if this risk was worth it, but every day, Grete hid the artist in the block because Milena asked her to. In the camp, Maria would make over four hundred drawings, but most were destroyed. After the war, she created expressive woodcuts of her traumatic memories and became known as the “Polish Käthe Kollwitz.”

Milena did not limit her rule-breaking to acts of altruism. She took a sly pleasure in breaking the rules just to upset the careful camp order. One of the things they all collectively hated vehemently was the siren. They called it the “howler” because it startled them out of sleep in the morning, howled them to roll call, to work, to sleep; it bellowed at them throughout the day. It was operated by one of the SS guards; she was the only person allowed to push the button, which was just outside of the infirmary blocks. Each time it howled at them, breaking up a stolen moment of closeness and pulling them apart, Milena would say to Grete, “Just once, I would love to press that button, just to see what would happen.”

“Would you want to be thrown in the bunker for something like that?” Grete asked, alarmed.

“Who says I will get caught?”

“Milena, you won’t always get away with everything!”

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