Milena

by Margarete Buber-Neumann

  “The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is on the Staromestske Nämesti. On March 15 it was buried under a mass of snowdrops…. That strange force, which in some mysterious way guides our steps, had led swarms of people to this place, and they had laid armfuls of flowers on that little grave recalling great memories. The people round about were all in tears. Men, women and children. And once again their behavior was typically Czech: no loud sobs, no sign of fear, no violent outbursts. Only grief. Their grief had to find some outlet….

  “I caught sight of a German soldier at the back of the crowd. He raised his hand to his cap. He realized that these people were in tears because he was in Prague….

  “I recall our beautiful illusions and wonder if Germans and Czechs, Frenchmen and Russians will ever be able to live together in peace, without harming, without hating, without wronging one another. Will governments ever be able to settle matters peaceably as individuals do? Will peoples ever cease to be separated from one another by frontiers?

  “What a fine thing that would be!”*

  In this article, published by Přítomnost when the Gestapo had already made itself at home in Prague, Milena, ordinarily so unsentimental, was moved to pathos.

  In the course of the months that followed the German invasion of her country, this brave journalist, who fought with her pen, became an active fighter against tyranny. On her advice, the group extended their list of people to be rescued to Czech officers and aviators. Milena’s ingenuity, her gift for devising camouflage and finding hiding places, proved exceedingly useful to the rescue team, as did her look of innocence, her spontaneous charm, and her staunch impassivity under questioning by the police. To those very qualities which had formerly been criticized as immoral, numerous people now owed their salvation. Joachim von Zedtwitz, who now saw Milena almost every day, was impressed by her political sagacity. “At that time,” he says, “Milena looked like Churchill. She had the same bulging forehead, the same prodigious intelligence in her eyes, the same asymmetrical mouth drawn in at the corners, the same look of determination. Her resemblance to Churchill is no accident; their looks reflected the same political genius.” And Zedtwitz went so far as to say that her handwriting also showed her political gift, that with its heavy, almost parallel downstrokes and elaborate, elegant flourishes, it bore the mark of a passionate, many-sided nature, disciplined by an extreme effort of the will. About her handwriting Max Brod wrote, “It shows, I believe, a certain resemblance to Thomas Mann’s, and that is most unusual, for Thomas Mann’s handwriting, especially in his early years, seems unique….”*

  Any journey to the Polish border at that time was exceedingly dangerous. One day young Zedtwitz’s passengers were Rudolf Keller, editor in chief of the Prager Tagblatt, and Holosch of the Prager Mittag. They had driven only a short way eastward when the first incident occurred. Zedtwitz knew the Germans had set up checkpoints all around Prague, and yet, taking a corner at high speed, he drove straight into one. He barely had time to instruct his passengers: “Don’t open your mouths. I’ll do the talking.” Thereupon, pretending that this was a routine check by traffic police, he jumped out, opened the hood, intent on distracting the German soldier, and pointed at the serial number of his engine. “When I saw the German soldier’s face,” Zedtwitz reports, “I felt sick. He had the look of a hardened criminal. But luckily he was slow on the uptake and my behavior threw him off. All he could think of saying, or rather snarling, was, ‘Are you carrying a Browning?’ “ Zedtwitz snapped back in his best Prussian manner that he had no need of one. No further questions were asked.

  They drove on. To avoid further checkpoints, they took back roads. All went well for a while. Then in Moravia it began to snow, and before long they got stuck in a snowdrift. At this point Holosch gave up; he somehow made his way to the nearest railroad station and returned to Prague. Rudolf Keller and Zedtwitz went on. They had an appointment to meet a guide in a certain village, but because of their delay he had already gone when they got there. Night was falling. Zedtwitz drove to a place where he hoped to find another guide. Leaving the car on the road, he crept up to the house and knocked. A frightened old woman opened. “Take care,” she whispered. “The man you are looking for has been arrested for smuggling people across the border.” Zedtwitz hurried away. In the beam of his headlights he saw Keller standing in the road with a policeman. Mastering his fear, he joined them with a friendly “Good evening.” The policeman turned to him and growled, “Papers!” To gain time, Zedtwitz took out an impressive sheaf of identification papers. But the law wasn’t satisfied. “What about his papers?” “Don’t worry,” said Zedtwitz, “he’ll find something.” Slowly and deliberately Keller rummaged through his pockets. What he finally came up with was an Austrian certificate of citizenship issued in 1886. Keller was indeed sixty-eight years old. While the policeman was studying this document, Zedtwitz, fearing the worst, started improvising. “Good God, Uncle Rudi, how can you run around without papers at a time like this?” And then, to the policeman, in a confidential tone, “He’ll never change. He still thinks the Emperor Francis Joseph is on the throne.” Rudolf Keller caught on at once and played the role of a doddering old man to perfection. The policeman began to laugh. “All right. AH right. But where are you going at this time of night?” Zedtwitz made up a long story about having to visit some dairy farms and losing their way. After a few jokes about senior citizens who couldn’t keep up with the times, the policeman let them go.

  There was nothing for it but to go back to Moravska Ostrava. They drove awhile in silence, then Keller asked Zedtwitz to stop, and said calmly, “Let me off here. I’ll just lie down in the ditch and take poison. Why in God’s name should a young man risk his life for an old man like me?” Zedtwitz replied, “There’s plenty of time for taking poison. Let’s have a good dinner first. Then we’ll think it over.” They came to an inn and ate a good dinner. Keller’s spirits revived. Next day they found a new guide, who led Keller to safety in Poland.

  On the day after the occupation the editors of PHtomnost met in a cafe to decide what was to be done. The situation seemed hopeless and all were deep in gloom. Milena was a little late. When she finally appeared, all looked up hopefully and one of the editors cried out, “Thank God, a man at last!” Much later Ferdinand Peroutka, the editor in chief, whom the Gestapo would arrest a few days later, was to remember a prophetic remark Milena had made while the Germans were marching in. “This is nothing,” she had said, “just wait till the Russians get here.”

  When Peroutka was arrested, Milena took over the editorship and kept it when Peroutka was released two weeks later. He remained in the background, contenting himself with inspiring the most important articles and doing all he could to keep the journal from being suppressed for as long as possible. This of course called for the utmost caution. Some readers resented this “opportunism,” and I can imagine that in the last months of Milena’s journalistic activity a good deal of what she had to do must have gone against her grain. In one article she apologized, as it were, to the readers. Czech journalism, she wrote, was like a tree that had lost all its leaves except for two or three at the top. And dull-witted people, who didn’t know how to read, were complaining that the tree had ceased to sound in the wind.

  Milena did her best to smuggle hints and warnings into her articles. Little by little, they came to feature Czech nationalism. In part, this must have been dust in the eyes of the German censors, but in part no doubt it reflected Milena’s conviction. She had always been cosmopolitan, but she was also a realist. She realized that in a country occupied by a foreign totalitarian dictatorship the only way of preserving the people’s will to resist is to reinforce its national consciousness.

  And there is yet another explanation for the milder tone of Milena’s articles at the time. By concealing her real opinions from the Gestapo, it enabled her to carry on her relief work in relative safety.

  But she did not content herself with legal journalism. She helped to foun
d an underground organ titled Vboj! (On with the Struggle!) and contributed to other illegal organs. One day she ran into her old friend Milos Vanek in the street. They sat down on a bench; after a short exchange, Van£k suggested that they put out an underground paper together. Milena burst out laughing. “Why not?” she said. “That will be the fourth.”

  A few days after Hitler’s entry into Prague, one Herr von Wol-mar was appointed to oversee the work of Mr. Smorane, head of the government press office. Smorane, an Agrarian, was a protege of former Prime Minister Hodza; his opinions were far to the right, and he was no friend of Milena’s. But he was a brave and upright man, and he succeeded for a time in playing a double game. In the end, he was unmasked by the Gestapo and executed.

  A special sort of love-hate relationship seems to have developed between Milena and Herr von Wolmar. He summoned her to his office at least once a week and they had long arguments which they both seem to have enjoyed. She described von Wolmar as an intelligent, cultivated man with perfect manners. He always treated her courteously, never kept her waiting, and made her feel that he thought highly of her.

  Only once did Herr von Wolmar lose his temper and forget his good manners. The occasion was an article of Milena’s in Přítomnost, entitled (in German) “Soldaten wohnen auf den Kanonen.”* In it she wrote that German soldiers’ songs were much better, specifically, more “soldierly” than their Czech counterparts; this was because the Germans were a more warlike, more soldierly people than the Czechs, in whose songs girts and lilies of the valley figured more prominently than deeds of heroism.

  Before writing this article, she had cast about for a typical German soldiers’ song. Her friend Fredy Mayer, a German, suggested Bertolt Brecht’s comically grisly song celebrating soldiers who live on top of their guns and make steak tartare of every foreign race they come across. Of course Fredy and Milena were well aware that this song came from The Threepenny Opera and was far from being a German soldiers’ song. But they felt that this was something that a Czech woman journalist would not necessarily be expected to know. Milena jumped at the idea, and that was how the Communist Bert Brecht came to be published in Pritomnost under the Nazi occupation. But the matter did not end there.

  All Czech-language articles were censored by Sudeten German Nazis, who had some knowledge of Czech but whose limited intelligence was unequal to the hidden allusions and subtle irony of Milena’s articles. It never occurred to them that Czech readers might not take Milena’s fulsome praise of German soldiers at its face value. Such passages as the following flattered their national pride: “Formerly, when a whole regiment of Czech soldiers marched past under our windows, the merry clip-clop of their steps sounded peacefully through the streets; today, when a single German soldier walks through a cafe, his firm tread makes the glasses ring and plaster fall from the ceiling….” And she goes on: “The Germans are as well able to command as to obey. Their soldiers tremble in fear of their superiors and carry out orders without question. How very different, how utterly unsoldierly, were the Czech officers, who far from shouting at their subordinates, spoke kindly to them, until the soldiers realized that what was being asked of them made sense….” This of course was pure irony. But the ignorant Nazi censors swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.

  Not so Herr von Wolmar when Milena’s article was brought to him in translation. He was intelligent enough to see through her little game. He sent for her and received her unsmilingly. “Tell me,” he said, “did you ever hear German soldiers sing that song? Are you, or are you not, aware that it was written by the Communist Bertolt Brecht?” Milena played innocent. No, she didn’t know. She had heard the song somewhere, she couldn’t remember when or where. But she had never doubted for a moment that it was a German soldiers’ song, because it sounded so very soldierly and so very German. By the time she concluded with a friendly smile, Herr von Wolmar’s temper was at boiling point. He threw the pencil he had been toying with in her face and shouted, “Enough! There are limits to everything. Do you think I was born yesterday?”

  That was a happy day for Milena. She was proud of having made this disciplined, cultivated German lose his self-control.

  In every aspect of her life, in love, in friendship, her political activity, and her writing, Milena was a fanatic. Time and again, despite the increasing precariousness of her situation, this fanaticism drove her to state her opinions loudly and clearly. “In a time of political upheaval, with new political values in the making, Czech journalists have been the only mediators between events and people, the sole purveyors of the living word. Every one of us is conscious of this mission, every one of us realizes that to be a Czech journalist is today an honor.” These remarks were addressed to her colleagues in June 1939. “In the present situation,” she goes on, “we journalists are bound to share the same feelings. Anyone who feels differently ceased long ago to be worthy of his calling…. The rest of us have committed ourselves to the imperative mission of guiding the nation to new life, new hope and new tasks. …”

  She attacks the German press and the letters in which German readers express the suspicion that the love for the Czech people that figures so prominently in her articles is simply an incitement to hate the Germans. “This suspicion is directed at all of us. Czech journalists, regardless of what paper we write for …

  neither overtly nor between the lines has any of us ever suggested that one should proceed by stealth. … If we have to live side by side with the Germans, we must not allow our sense of national honor to be crushed. In cultural level, in manual skills, in industriousness, and in personal integrity, we are in no way inferior to the Germans. We are their equals.

  “Never must we let inertia, discouragement or exhaustion impair this sense of our equality, which they deny. We have always said this and we shall continue to do so. None of us has whispered … none of us has so much as hinted that we should spy on the Germans, seek to ambush them. Undisciplined behavior, even of a purely personal nature, can destroy our whole nation. Each one of us proclaims loudly and clearly what is needed: stubborn endurance, courage and bravery; fear nothing, there is nothing to be afraid of; tell the truth.

  “We are adults, cultivated Europeans; and every one of us is a thinking human being…. Czech journalists are neither bandits nor cowards….”*

  More and more, Milena’s apartment became a secret meeting place and refuge. Sometimes as many as ten people were there at one time. The Englishmen would sit whispering in one corner; on the terrace a Russian Jewish woman would be playing with her child and Zedtwhz would be trying in vain to converse with her; Frau Menne, whose husband, the former editor of a newspaper in Essen, had already been smuggled across the border, was helping in the kitchen, and Walter Tschuppik, another German, who had been editor of the Munchener Neueste Nachrichten until 1933, was waiting patiently for his turn; meanwhile, Rudolf Steiner, who after successfully reaching Poland was chased back into Czechoslovakian territory by a drunken Polish border guard, was running frantically from room to room, making pointless and dangerous phone caiis. One day he went completely to pieces and announced that if he were not spirited out of the country at once he would go to the Gestapo and denounce them all.

  Zedtwitz writes: “Milena, who always wore a blue dress and welcomed every new arrival with a sweeping gesture of hospitality, comforted them all. She did it just by being there. In her presence people felt and somehow behaved better.”

  Nevertheless Milena made countless mistakes. Her apartment was open to all comers; she talked too freely, neglected the most elementary precautions, and thought it necessary to make a show of her hostility to the fascist conquerors. She had no qualms about appearing on the street with her Jewish friends, and when it was reported that the National Socialists were forcing Polish Jews to wear a yellow star, she sewed a Star of David on her clothes and displayed it ostentatiously. She wanted to set an example and hoped her compatriots would follow suit.

  Though she advised many friends and
even her lover to emigrate, she herself categorically refused to leave the country and ignored all warnings. One of her friends told her what to expect if she was arrested, “Beatings,” he said, “are hard enough to bear. But imagine what it would be like in a concentration camp if they pulled your hair out day after day. This’s worse than being shot….” Milena felt that she could not possibly run out on the people she had called upon to resist. It seems likely that she sacrificed herself deliberately, but she could not have suspected that the end would come so soon.

  The Germans had not been in Prague for long when Milena’s father called her on the phone. “Why,” he asked her sternly, “haven’t you been arrested yet? No self-respecting person should be out of jail at a time like this.” What Milena said in answer is not known to us. But be that as it may, Jan Jesensky did not have long to wait.

  The Gestapo had its eye on her. Soon she was summoned to her first interrogation. Asked whether she associated with many Jews, she replied, “Of course I do. Have you any objection?” Then: Where is your lover? No answer. He had left the country a long time ago. Next question: “Is the father of your child a Jew?” Reply: “I regret to say he is not,” At this the interrogator lost his temper and bellowed, “That will do. We’re not used to such answers here.” “And I’m not used to such questions,” Milena replied.

  In June 1939, Milena was forbidden to publish, but she went on editing Přítomnost until August, when it was suppressed by the Gestapo. On September 1, two days before the declaration of the Second World War, Ferdinand Peroutka was arrested. Milena had gone to see him the previous evening. He was taken to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Some days later the collaborator Moravec, now minister of culture, had Peroutka brought back to Prague and moved to the fashionable Hotel Esplanade. After trying in vain to bribe him, Moravec thought he could force Peroutka to put out a National Socialist Přítomnost. When that too failed, Peroutka was handcuffed and taken back to Buchenwald, where he remained until the end of the war.