Many people forget that not only Jews found themselves trapped within the German concentration camps during WWII. Gwen Strauss brings to life the horrific conditions at an all women’s camp, Ravensbruck, how Jews and non-Jews are treated differently and how a gay and bisexual women find love. Czech Milena was Kafka’s first translator and a journalist opposed to fascism. Margarete, born to a middle-class family, married the son of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. She left him for a Communist who share her passion for the Bolshevik Revolution. They traveled to Moscow where he was killed and she was sent to a gulag. were arrested. Two years later, Stalin traded her to Hitler, who had her placed in Ravensbruck.

The political wrangling for power among the officers exacerbated the abhorrent treatment among the inmates from brutal beatings, the harsh working conditions devoid of proper clothing, subsistence level food and denial of medical treatment. My writing cannot capture the brutality or the atrocities suffered constantly. How Milena and Grete found each other, fell in love and still met up while understanding that they suffer dire consequences, is an incredible story by itself.

Strauss’s research has you lying next to others infected with lice, typhoid, many other diseases or dead. You don’t just read this, you live it. While this is a universal view of the camp, gays were never given a voice after the war to tell their stories. Human suffering is human suffering. Brava for Strauss.

Thank you NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press.

Any time anyone, anyone at all, asks, "why can't you just keep quiet about all that queer stuff?" show them this story.

Because people died for being themselves. And the survivors were too afraid to talk about it.

That's down to people, "nice" people, privileged people, simply not wanting to know that some girls like girls and some biys like boys. That culture of silence to avoid making the most privileged, spoiled brats among the world's most privileged, spoiled people...the most privileged the planet has ever produced!...just don't think they should ever have to think uncomfortable thoughts or consider other people's existence and freedom to be themselves as important.

"Alligator Alcatraz" is a concentration camp. If you think it isn't go look at the definition of one.

So think about this: your silence, your uninterest in speaking up for whatever selfish, personal reason, puts someone you know...me...at the very real risk of being treated like these two "passionate friends" (if you imagine there was a way to consummate their love in Ravensbrück, you're wrong). I'm not made of the tough, gritty stuff these women are, so....

We need to stand up to this ever-developing system. Talk about it on social media, post memes, do anything except nothing. Milena and Grete (as she is most often referred to) can't speak to us with their mouths. Author Strauss, in confronting the silence about queer people in Holocaust literature, is pointing the way to a fuller undersy=tanding of the Holocaust's horrors and evils, and the vileness of Stalin's mirror of it in the gulag system, as we see the steady slide back into a system that accepts this horror as normal.

It's not a particularly smooth pointing...it's narratively idea-driven, putting the small person's need for linear narratives behind following a thought to its conclusion. One person whose name we learn only to discover she dies, before we hear the rest of her anecdotal appearance, particularly stands out as an infelicity of organization. Another factor that led me to rate the book four stars was the sheer, numbing weight of the horrors inflicted by the Nazis on the inmates. It happened; reasonable people know it happened; but because we are often far afield from Milena and Grete, the weight of horror often outweighs the burden of these two women's joyous discovery of love.

It does a fine job of personalizing the horrors of the Holocaust, but a less stellar job of making Milena and Grete come alive. I don't know that this is avoidable, given time and the destruction of records, but it was something I felt disappointment about.

Good writing and a truly underrepresented subject within Holocaust literature compensated me well: "I am using their beautiful love story to shine a light on sexuality in the camps and how it was seen, hidden, and the important role it played in survival, because to have found love in a concentration camp is extraordinary."

It absolutely is.

Milena and Margarete: A Love Story in Ravensbrück by Gwen Strauss

“I am using their beautiful love story to shine a light on sexuality in the camps…the important role it played in survival, because to have found love in a concentration camp is extraordinary.” While the thread of this one was Grete and Milena, the author wrote of all women in Ravensbrück who lost their voices because of the circumstances.

I do wish more of the focus would’ve been on the love story, but based on limited records and doing the whole topic justice, I understood why it was structured how it was. This one stood out to me because of its focus on the intersectionality of what it meant to be a prisoner. It explored politics, sexuality, gender, religion, and mental/physical ability and how all of those things played into the complicated nature of camp life.

I had a bit of a hard time following along based on timeline jumps and all the characters that were introduced. While it was a lot of information, I did feel that all of it should be included because it provided a deeper understanding of the intricacies of the political turmoil. It was abundantly clear this was well researched. Like any book about this time, it was not a happy story. It was hard to read more often than not, but I feel deeply that we should bear witness to these stories as they are uncovered and told.

Fans of books from this time period, books about defiance and resilience, and books that memorialize stories history tried to erase will find a successful story here.

Thank you Netgalley for the Arc. I have always read a lot of WWII historical fiction books. It is easily my favorite genre. This is a story about two women who were imprisoned in Ravensbruck during WWII. This is the first LBGTQ WWII book I have read and found it extremely intriguing. I really enjoyed this story.

This seems an especially appropriate time for a book about finding love in a concentration camp. This book is not a novel, though the author felt she needed to write it as if it were. How else to get at the feelings of two women who met each other and fell deeply in love in a place where love seemed impossible, where their relationship had no realistic hope for a future, where they risked their lives if any evidence—such as a journal or even scraps of writing—of the depth of their love were discovered by their sadistic captors?

That’s the amazing thing about this book. Even as we wonder how she knows this about some of the scenes and dialogue Strauss offers in this story, she convinces us that what she is telling—and more important, showing-- us about the passionate relationship of these two extraordinary women is true. She does this by drawing on everything that is known about day-to-day life in Ravensbruck (no easy task considering that the camp’s records were destroyed before it was liberated), by providing crucial details of the experiences and events that led to Milena and Margarete finding and falling in love with each other, by giving us relevant background information on the political and historical context of the story, and by including vivid (occasionally too-vivid) characterizations of some of Milena and Margarete's fellow inmates and the ever-changing cast of human monsters who controlled the camp. In other words, she uses her evidence the same way any good novelist would use her imagination.

A recurring line in the book is “There is everything to cry about.” It is spoken to Grete by her husband when he is about to be arrested and probably killed by Stalin’s secret police. And it is said on more than one occasion in Ravensbruck by Milena to Margarete. Yes, it was true of their lives in those places in that time.

But, as Strauss wants us to remember, this continued to be true for certain survivors of the war. We now live in a world where it is possible to publish the story of Milena and Margarete.
But in the years following the war, this would not have been possible, even if the all the evidence was available. In the years following the war historiography of the Holocaust—like society in general-- was characterized by homophobia.

Women who loved women, sex workers, trans men who lived through the same experiences as Milena and Margarete never were given the opportunity to testify at war trials; never were offered the chance to write memoirs. Some were persecuted and imprisoned after they were liberated from the camps. The historical record contains very few of their names.

But now the historical record of the Holocaust will include the love story of Milena and Margarete..

Thank you St. Martin’s Press for providing an advance copy in galley form for review consideration via NetGalley. Please note: Quotes taken from a galley may change in the final version.
All opinions are my own.

The story of Milena and Margarete shows the strength of women as well as the strength and endurance of love. It tells of a deep personal love between the two women that could not be overcome by the cruelties of the times they were facing in Ravensbrück and beyond. While those of us who want to keep this history alive and want to read everything we can get our hands on in order to share the truth of what happened, it is also disheartening that there are SO many of these stories. This story is different from others in both the personal way in which it is told, and the way it focuses on the stories of the atrocities done to the women of this camp. Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the opportunity to read and review this advance reader copy. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own. #NetGalley #MilenaandMargarete

I got an ARC of this book.

One of my special interests in the Holocaust. I read everything I can on it, I watch all the documentaries. So some of the details in the book were not surprising, what was surprising was this was the first time I had seen anything beyond a few tiktoks from one historian in the last month about Ravensbrük. This camp just never made it into anything else I had read or seen, which suspiciously fits right into what the Nazis were hoping for.

The stories of the women of Ravensbrük were supposed to not make it out. There were falsified documents, there were destroyed documents, there was general plans to hide what was happening to the women. Nazis did not want to start an outcry over the treatment of women, but that did not stop them from experimenting and being horrific people. They just didn’t want anyone else to know about it. So the lack the information that has been readily accessible for me on this particular camp just fits into that idea that this camp had nothing special going on and fits right into the outdated narrative that only Jewish people were targetting in the camps.

Ravensbrük did have Jewish prisoners, but the focus was on political prisoners, “asocials”, and other people who spoke out against the Nazis. The best part of this book for me was the effort Strauss put into using language that made sense for the people it was describing. Calling this a lesbian history would be inaccurate. While this focuses on two women with a “passionate friendship” they did not identify as lesbians. They both married men and had families with them. So bisexual or queer might be better terms, but the rampant homophobia even within the camp would make it incredibly difficult to see them using any queer terms for themselves. So while they experienced a deep love for each other, the respect Strauss showed by not labeling them as lesbians was something I greatly appreciated. It allowed for respect for these women, something they were denied for years of their lives, and allowed for a more accurate discussion of their lives.

What I didn’t like about this book is much less personal. I just didn’t like how indepth all the backstories were for people that were only mildly involved. Did I really need to have quotes and information about the anxiety that Kafka (yes, THE Kafka) felt over women and sex? It just felt like adding more details for the sake of more details. Knowing that he was a friend and a lover at one point in the past and his stories were being retold in the camp to keep spirits up was fascinating. The deep dive into his own history and backstory just felt like a distraction. Each section had so much backstory about the men in the lives of Milena and Grete that it felt like it was taking away from thier own stories. They did not exist for large chunks of the book, instead the men in their lives took center stage.

I loved that there was such a focus on how sexuality plays out in the camps, but also in society. Pretending that there are not friendships that are passionate and romantic is folly. Assuming every love requires sex to be a real relationship is laughable. The erasure of sapphic women and other women who are not actively having sex with men contiues to this day. It is not a one off, but how society still treats women. They are not allowed to stand on their own, their stories are framed around men or the lack of men. This book shows just how far this can go when used to imprison women and how far the homophobia can go when still engaging in similar to the same behaviors.

Overall, this was a wonderful read. It was a bit dense and slow at times, mostly when it was backstories of men. But I am glad this book is coming out and I was able to take their stories in.

Milena and Margarete, A Love Story in Ravensbrück, is intense and moving. It seems there is no end to what we can learn about this tragic period in world history; there are so many perspectives, so many stories, so much pain yet so much strength. Milena and Margarete come from different places, different backgrounds and different experiences, but they have extraordinary strength and determination in common, and an unbreakable bond grows between them in the unlikely setting of Ravensbrück, located outside Berlin and the only concentration camp built for women.

Detailed, well-written and well-researched, Milena and Margarete tells the story of not only these two remarkable women but of their lives before being sent to Ravensbrück and also of the events that led to the war and the complex conflict and scheming between Hitler and Stalin. Informative, enthralling and often heart-breaking, Milena and Margarete is well worth reading. Thanks to St. Martin's Press for providing an advance copy of Milena and Margarete, A Love Story in Ravensbrück, via NetGalley. I voluntarily leave this review; all opinions are my own.

Strauss shines a light on a part of WWII Germany and its prison camps that has not been widely explored in this well researched and accessibly written volume. Milena and Margrete were sent to Ravensbruck for different reasons but they found one another. Their bond, their special friendship and then love supported them throughout the worst. And they helped others. Gentle readers unfamiliar with Ravensbruck should be prepared for the horrors these women faced, Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. This is a testament to resilience and the power of the heart.

Final Review

(thoughts & recs) I love the story of these two women who defied almost certain death for their love for each other. They represent humanity's capacity for resilience in the face of great danger and difficulty. But I didn't love the organization. It was challenging to track the primary narrative because so many other little segues keep veering me off course. I believe that these details are an important part of the story and should remain therein, but some more structure and organization wouldn't hurt any.

I recommend this book to readers of queer history, Jewish history and the history of the Holocaust and concentration camps. Relatively little has been written about Ravensbrück, where women and children were inprisoned.

My Favorite Things:

✔️ "Prison societies, it has been noted, are especially keen to control and police status . Perhaps when one is living in an extreme environment , when survival is precarious, it becomes important to have someone beneath you, the other, the one who is even worse off than you. Perhaps there is comfort in knowing that your situation is not as bad as the other." p11 Very dark. Prison stories often are.

✔️ This is actually the last sentence in the book, and for me, it came way too late. "I am using their beautiful love story to shine a light on sexuality in the camps and how it was seen, hidden, and the important role it played in survival, because to have found love in a concentration camp is extraordinary." p236 I wish she had been clearer about her purpose throughout the text.

Notes: SA, gr*pe, genocide, concentration camps, the Holocaust, murder, torture, medical experimentation, starvation

1. content notes: prison, imprisonment, lice, beatings, humiliation, violence against women, death ot a child, forced abortion,

Thank you to the author Gwen Strauss, publishers St. Martins Press, and NetGalley for an accessible digital arc of MILENA AND MARGARETE. All views are mine.

Milena and Margarete gave you a new perspective of Ravensbruck Concentration Camp from before the atrocities started through the end of WWII and even beyond. It was beautifully written and research. A few sections seemed out of place.

Thank you Netgalley for the ARC

An incredibly sad but important story, not just about the intertwined lives of two imprisoned woman, but the circumstances surrounding their experiences and existence as well. Highly recommended, if troubling at times. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

This is a beautifully written historical nonfiction story that takes place in Ravensbruck, the WWII concentration camp for women located in northern Germany. Milena Jesenska and Margarete "Grete" meet and fall in love there. They both had jobs where they were able to save other women from the horrible things that were being done to the prisoners. This was a very well researched and well written book full of facts and information about Ravensbruck that I did not know before. I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes to read historical nonfiction books about World War II.

Thank you NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the ARC of this truly amazing book.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for letting me review this book. This book tells of a deep and loving friendship of Milena and Grete along with the horrors that many witnessed in the Ravensbrück camp.The atrocities these women saw and experienced yet after the war; had to rebuild their lives. If you’re into WW 2 history, pick up this book.

A beautiful love story of two women in love at a concentration camp during WWII. The book was incredibly informative and thought provoking.

A wonderfully written true love story during the most heartbreaking of times.

Milena and Margarete formed an instant and intimate bond the moment they met in the Ravensbruck concentration camp. The two formed a “passionate friendship” finding some amount of beauty among the overwhelming horrors they faced.

Strauss does an excellent job of accurately depicting the two’s relationship and the plight of lesbians under Nazi rule. This book ensures not only Milena and Margarete’s story is accurately told, as well as millions of women who faced deadly consequences solely for who they were.

I received a free DRC of this book through Netgalley. I read a lot of WWII historical fiction. This is based on two women who were both imprisoned in Ravensbruck during WWII. It was terrible to read about how some people sent to Nazi camps were imprisoned after the Nazis were overthrown. This treatment of LGBTQ+ people is horrifying even today in so many parts of the world. Milena and Margarete's relationship gave them a purpose and kept them going even in what had to be one of the worst places that ever existed on Earth.

Milena and Margarete first met in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Immediate friends, they were soon inseparable. Milena, a Czech journalist, known as the first translator of Kafka’s work, she was a feminist born in the wrong time. German born Margarete became part of the Bolshevik Revolution and was later imprisoned by the regime. They found love and comfort in each other's arms during the worst time of their lives.

This was a beautiful story of love and friendship during WWII. The fact that they were able to find each other, and come together during horrible circumstances, shows that love will prevail. Overall, 4 out of 5 stars.

What a beautiful and harrowing story about two women who did their best despite everything they were forced to endure. As some who is queer and has lost family in the Holocaust, I feel a deep connection to their story. It is beautiful but also extremely emotionally difficult to read.

A spellbinding look at a horrific situation. Milena and Grete meet when they are sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp. The author 's meticulous research reveals the likelihood that the two women were a couple in love. Strauss's description of the brutal conditions of the camp are riveting and appalling. In the large canon of books about the Holocaust, this one is a standout.