Once in 1942, the mail distribution brought on an outburst of grief. There were hundreds of Gypsies in Ravensbrück, classified as “asocial” and “racially inferior.” In 1941 a so-called family camp for Gypsies was set up near the Auschwitz death camp. Whole tribes of Gypsies lived there, men, women, and children, deprived of their freedom but living in a relatively mild form of captivity. Later on, the families were torn apart; men, women, and children were transferred to regular concentration camps. The extermination of the Gypsies must have begun at the end of 1942, and this is how we got news of it in Ravensbrück. Soon after the mail was handed out, women came running out of the Gypsies’ barracks, screaming and holding up the letters they had just received. Nearly all contained the same notification, that a husband, a son, or a brother had “died in the hospital.” The women howled with grief, tore their clothes, and beat their faces in an Oriental outburst of despair that swept away all camp discipline. From then on the mail was censored more strictly than ever.
Even so, the inmates waited impatiently for Saturday, when the mail was distributed. The 150 words a month we were allowed to receive in the first years were our only contact with our dear ones outside. The mere sight of a familiar handwriting brought comfort, but despair as well. What tears were shed over these letters!
Milena exchanged one letter a month with her father. Every letter she received from him churned up the whole past and aroused new antagonisms. Still, she tried to be fair to her father.
At Christmas 1941 the camp management had a sudden burst of humanitarian sentiment. For the first time the inmates’ relatives were authorized to send packages, though of specified weight and contents. Most surprisingly, each package could include a woolen jacket.
I ran to Milena with my package. I had opened it, and a golden-yellow knitted jacket lay on top. I was beside myself with pleasure, and I wondered why she was reluctant to show me hers. Her father had sent her a Bavarian costume jacket, and she was ashamed of his bad taste. I did my best to comfort her and asked how she had dressed “before.” But that was another sore point. A severe illness had caused her to put on so much weight that she lost all interest in clothes. But now that she was as slim as she had been as a young girl, she felt quite differently. She forgot the silly costume jacket and we reveled in fantasies about the lovely clothes we would wear “later.” Milena saw herself in a tailored suit; she had always looked well in tailored suits.
An early photo of Milena shows her on the banks of the Vltava, wearing a striped two-piece suit with a long pleated skirt, a tarn, and high laced shoes. She is holding a chic Utile umbrella. Ail very elegant and in the taste of the time. Her soft, childlike profile, her Czech snub nose, and her luxuriant hair stand out against a light background. She must have been about thirteen when the picture was taken. Her mother, who was then still alive, had Milena’s clothes made by a dressmaker.
“When I was about fourteen, I was sent my first flowers, a real bouquet from Dietrich’s flower shop. They came with a visiting card, addressing me as ‘Miss’! There it was for all the world to see. The flowers had been sent by my first admirer, as a result, so to speak, of my first kiss. Shall I tell you about it? It’s a rather sad story, I still can’t think of it without a pang. Councilor Matus was a friend of my father’s, a great skier and sportsman. He suffered from cataract. For months he was in danger of going blind. He was a man of the old school, a bachelor, a famous waltzer, honorable, upright, courageous, and not at all calculating, either in love or in money matters. In short, a gentleman such as you don’t see anymore, When I visited him in the hospital, I brought him a bunch of violets. They took me to his room. I saw that his eyes were bandaged and realized that he had to spend whole days inactive in a darkened room, not knowing whether he would ever see again. I felt ashamed of my thoughtlessness in bringing him violets which he couldn’t even see, and the feel of which would only remind him of his misfortune. I wanted terribly to undo the harm I had done, to make him a present that would give him pleasure even if he couldn’t see it. So I threw my arms around him and kissed him. It was the first kiss of my life and I didn’t like it at all, because he needed a shave and I was so excited that my kiss landed on his nose and slid down to his chin. Once it was done, I tried to explain, but I didn’t know what to say. The best I could do was stammer idiotically, ‘That’s not what I meant,’ though I had no idea what he was thinking or what I might have meant. I was so confused that baby tears came to my eyes. But when I got home, a bouquet of magnificent hothouse lilacs was waiting for me with a visiting card, addressing me as ‘Miss,’ followed by a few words—something about the ‘best possible present’ for a sick man, proving that he knew perfectly well what I had meant. And my father said, ‘You see? Now there’s a gentleman.’”*
Jan Jesensky, who was always dressed fit to kill and looked much younger than his age, once spent a few days with this Councilor Matus in his summer house outside of Prague. Both men were fifty at the time. Matus looked sadly at the landscape and said with a sigh: “For fifty years I’ve been looking at these trees. One year is like another, nothing ages as much as we do. Always the same budding, flowering, and fading …” Such world-weariness was beyond Jesensky. He replied: “These trees. I’ve only been looking at them for fifty years. Every year they look new to me and they always will.”
Milena’s mother had been ill with pernicious anemia for years. If only for educational reasons, Dr. Jesensky thought it advisable that his daughter should help care for the invalid. Though only thirteen, Milena would stay with her mother until her father came home—often after nightfall—and relieved her. Milena’s mother sat up in bed, propped on pillows, while Milena in her chair struggled to keep awake. Every time her mother’s head drooped, Milena would start up guiltily, for she had fallen asleep. She would hurry over to the bed and help her mother up. But a few minutes later the same thing would happen again. At length her father came home from his card game or his lady friends, often in a state of euphoria. He would try to cheer the patient up with jokes and amusing stories, but it seemed to Milena that this only offended her and made her more aware of her pitiful condition. Milena loved her mother dearly, but now her strength failed her, she lost control over her nerves. One day, when nothing she did could satisfy the patient, she lost her temper and threw a tray with a whole meal on it on the floor. These were difficult days for the mother and the little girl. Her mother’s sufferings were such agony to Milena that she was almost relieved when at last death came.
Milena was thirteen when her mother died. Suddenly she found herself independent, free to dispose of her time, abandoned to her own resources. She describes herself as an emotional teenager, at once sentimental and rebellious. Once she took a room in a third-class hotel and stayed there all night by herself. It was an exciting adventure. It gave her a delightful feeling of being grown up, and besides, she hoped to find out what mysterious thing went on in these ill-famed hotels. She spent the night in a whirl of erotic imaginings, but nothing happened.
This was not her only nocturnal adventure. The cemetery had a magical attraction for her. She would sit on the wall, looking at the graves, and bask in tearful weltschmerz.
There were violent scenes when her father learned of her escapades, but the more he fumed, the more liberties she took. She had plenty of opportunity. As no one checked to see if she came home at night, she went right on with her adventures, triumphantly flouting her father’s authority. The painter Scheiner asked her to pose for his illustrations of fairy tales, and through him, while hardly more than a child, she became acquainted with a group of ultraconservative painters that called itself “Jednota.” Her experiences in their studios gave her a profound shock, and she recalled this period with loathing. Speaking of her father, or rather, of all parents, she once said, “Irresponsibly, they bring children into the world and, hardly bothering to get acquainted with them, push them out into life: ‘All right, now you can take care of yourself.’ “
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p; At fifteen Milena seemed an adult to ail who knew her. She had matured; mentally as well as physically, she had lost her girlish qualities and become a young woman. She had the unusual gift of being able to meet adults on their own ground. No doubt her conflict with her father, from whose influence she was determined to free herself, had a good deal to do with her precocity.
At that time Milena was a passionate reader, mainly of novels by Knut Hamsun, Dostoevsky, George Meredith, Tolstoy, J. P. Jacobsen, Thomas Mann, and others. It is hard to say what enabled her at so early an age to find herself and develop a sense of values. In her home she found nothing to guide her; she had only her own burgeoning mind, which led her to reject everything base, sordid, or in bad taste. Her conflict with her father had a profound effect on her that would take her years to surmount. In her rebellion against the conventional pseudomorality she had come to despise, she overshot the mark and lost all sense of proportion. Why should she let others tell her what was right and wrong, true and untrue? She would decide for herself. At that time she was widely regarded as a liar. But her critics failed to see that she, like many young rebels, was in a transitional stage, trying to work out her own standards. Her insecurity expressed itself in a dangerous arrogance, and she went through a period of moral collapse, from which, however, she was to make an admirable recovery.
* Milena Jesenska, “On the Art of Standing Still,” Přítomnost, April 5, 1939.
* Milena Jesenska, The Way to Simplicity.
4
THE MINERVANS COME OF AGE
Milena attended the Minerva School for Girls, which maintained the high educational standards of the old Austrian Empire. Latin and Greek were compulsory. One of the earliest secondary schools for girls, it had been founded at considerable financial sacrifice by a small group of Czech intellectuals. Its students included many who became prominent Czech teachers, sociologists, and physicians. Dr. Alice Masaryk, daughter of Tom£S G. Masaryk, the founder and subsequent president of the Czechoslovakian Republic, was among the first graduates.
Milena and her emancipated school friends were often referred to, half admiringly, half ironically, as “the Minervans.” Though an excellent student, Milena was far from being a model child. Close friendships were formed, not only, as usual, among members of the same school class, but also, in a manner of speaking, “vertically.” Members of different classes having the same interests and abilities were drawn together, a case in point being the trio: Milena—Sataša—Jarmila. Milena influenced the other two in very different ways, and meant something very different to each of them. Jarmila was so smitten with Milena that she took to imitating her almost slavishly. She wore the same clothes, made by the same dressmaker and paid for by Dr. Jesensky, though he didn’t know it. She spoke in the same tone of voice as Milena, affected the same facial expression and the same gliding movements. There was a strong physical resemblance between the two girls—they had the same beautiful figure, the same slender waist, and fine, long legs; both had magnificent hair—and this may have given Jarmila the idea of aping her friend. But Jarmila went even further. She even managed to imitate Milena’s expressive and highly original handwriting. Though she was well aware of what she was doing, it was quite innocent and merely showed how very much she admired her friend. She read the same books as Milena, listened to the same music, and fell in love with anyone Milena happened to be in love with. But to her great disappointment she always remained a few steps behind her idol. And that is not to be wondered at, for Apollo’s breath had never touched her; there was nothing Dionysian about Jarmila.
With Sataša, who was two years younger, it was a very different matter. The grown-ups referred to Sataša and Milena as “the Siamese Twins,” and whispered that they were lesbians. Actually, it was the sort of infatuation that can exist only between sixteen-year-old girls. Both were in a state of ecstasy, totally wrapped up in each other. But there was nothing physical, nothing erotic, about their love. Nor were they jealous of each other; there was no possessiveness, only an empathy free from unkindness, a tenderness that never lost its innocence. Sataša deliberately denied herself the right to criticize her friend and never hesitated to do whatever Milena, her superior, wanted. And yet, unlike Jarmila, she never sacrificed her own strong personality so far as to imitate Milena. She never became Milena’s shadow. These girls were full of life, they loved food, delighted in bananas, oranges, chocolate, and whipped cream. Especially bananas, which were then a rarity in Europe.
On the other hand, they sometimes made a show of being as decadent, blasphemous, and morbid as possible. They experimented with medicines that Milena stole from her father’s office. They would take all sorts of pills and wait eagerly to see what the effects would be. They even tried cocaine.When warned by adults, they argued that everyone has the right to experiment with his own body.
Dr. Prochaska, Sataša’s father, despite his reputation for liberalism, was horrified by this friendship between girls. He dramatized it unreasonably and did everything in his power to separate his daughter from Milena, who was indeed responsible for most of their escapades. But in this he was unsuccessful, though he had recourse to drastic methods, In the end, the passionate friendship that had given rise to so much gossip and indignation dwindled away all by itself.
When Milena was graduated from secondary school, her father, wishing her to carry on the medical tradition of the family, made her study medicine. During the First World War he forced her to help him in treating soldiers with face wounds. She was totally unsuited to such work. She was unable to control her nausea and suffered the torments of the wounded men as keenly as if her own face had been torn to pieces. But her father had no patience with such squeamishness. As far as he was concerned, the wounded men were merely “cases,” some more interesting than others, which he, as director of the Prague-Zizkov reserve hospital, was called upon to deal with. He experimented and tried to develop new methods of treatment. Milena told me how pleased her father had been with the success of one of his experiments. He had patched up a wounded man, a good part of whose lower jaw had been shot off. But as he had been unable to make the man’s salivary glands function normally, he had suspended a rubber bag from the patient’s neck for the saliva to drip into. Milena could imagine the life that awaited these poor devils, But Jesensky was proud of his handiwork. He discharged the man as “cured” and sent him home for Christmas. A few days later, a telegram came from the man’s parents. Their son had shot himself on Christmas Eve.
After a few terms Milena dropped out of medical school. She tried her hand at music, but though gifted, she didn’t get very far; though musical to the fingertips, she did not play very well. In those days it was by no means taken for granted that the daughters of the Prague bourgeoisie should learn a profession. They got married, and in the meantime their fathers supported them. In spite of her emancipation, Milena found it perfectly normal to live at her father’s expense, or to put it bluntly, to make free with her father’s money. She herself did not live in luxury, she did not have expensive habits. But money flowed through her fingers like water. She made presents, she gave unostentatiously where it was needed or would be enjoyed. No doubt her attitude toward money was one more form of protest against one of the basic tenets of her society, namely, the sanctity of property. In her opinion, anyone who accumulated money for its own sake was inhuman and deserved no consideration.
When I asked about her looks as a young girl, she replied hesitantly, “I didn’t think much of them, but other people thought I was beautiful, though not in a classical sense like Sataša.” A friend, who knew her in her youth, wrote, “Milena was very beautiful, slender, not delicate, but wiry like a boy. The most striking thing about her was her gait; it was never vulgar, she never swayed her hips. That lovely rhythmic gait seemed to cost her no effort at all, she seemed unaware of it. It was not walking, it was a gliding to and fro. You couldn’t help seeing how spontaneous it was; her movements were not so much ‘graceful’ as fluid
and immaterial. Her hands were eloquent too; they were rather large with almost bony fingers and expressed her state of mind even more clearly than her words. Her movements were reserved, economical, but that made her slightest gesture all the more expressive. She loved beauty and couldn’t live without it. In long, floating robes a la Duncan, with loose hair and an armful of flowers, she was vividly, stirringly beautiful despite her almost exaggerated disregard for what people thought. Milena loved flowers more than anything else; she had a gift for arranging them in a vase with almost Japanese lightness and grace. On flowers she was capable of spending her last groschen, and not always her own. She loved fine clothes but hated overdressing. She was able to devise costumes which, without being fashionable or sexy, were womanly, soft, flowing, and in rich unusual colors, You could say that she dressed her spirit more than her body. Milena loved nature, trees, meadows, water, and sunshine, but she was far from being a nature lover; she wasn’t one to investigate nature; she simply needed it in order to live.”
Milena was one of those people who spend themselves without stint. But she was far from being unique in her rebellion and wild urge to live. The same was true of other Minervans, especially those who were not markedly intellectual. Ready for any escapades, they gadded about, scandalizing the staid Prague bourgeoisie. This urge to break away from the old social patterns can be explained at least in part by the then prevailing atmosphere in Prague, The whole Czech nation was living in hopeful anticipation of national independence. Prague was a creative center. The young people were avid readers; they devoured the poems of the French symbolists and the Czech “vitalists”; they read Hora, Jsramek, and Neumann as well as the great Russians. In addition, a minority at least of the young Czechs were beginning to form ties with the German and German-Jewish writers living in Prague. National boundaries were giving way. It was a magnificent, though brief, period of intellectual fertility, a period fuil of expectation and promise.
Milena Page 3