Tragic in every way. Not only were they living in a time where women hardly had a voice but then as victims to the Holocaust as well as hiding their romance. They could hardly live a shred of their lives openly for various reasons.

The bond and loyalty between these two women is the true love story here in a mostly horrific backdrop, sadly.

All the same, we don’t often hear stories like this relative to concentration camps and their perspective and experiences give a one of a kind glimpse into those living in camps.

This is not my first Gwen Strauss read, so I knew to expect a well-researched story that would likely break my heart; I was not wrong. While not an easy read at times, I would highly recommend. And if you haven't read her previous title, The Nine, I would recommend that too.

Gwen Strauss brings to life the relatively unknown story of Milena Jesenska and Margarete Buber-Neumann, who met at Ravensbruch concentration camp in 1940. Milena, who was Czech, was a journalist and Kafka’s first translator. She was firmly opposed to fascism and hosted a meeting place for Jewish refugees, which was risky business in the years leading up to the start of World War II. She continued her risky behavior in the only concentration camp for women, taking life-threatening chances to help others from her relatively safe assignment as a secretary in the medical section even as her own health deteriorated. Margarete, Greta, was a German who first married a son of Martin Buber and later Henry Neumann, a Communist whom she met during the Bolshevik Revolution. She was eventually called to Moscow and held in prisons in appalling conditions. After meeting at Ravensbruch, they formed a friendship whose precise nature will never be known. It is clear that they cared for one another deeply and they may have been lovers. But it hardly matters. Strauss, aided by Julie Teal‘s straight forward narration, brings the two women to life. What is clear is that they cared deeply for each other and took risks to aid one another. They also took risks to help their fellow prisoners when they could, earning Greta stretches of time when she was put into a dark cell and deprived of food and water for days on end. Milena and Margarete will live on thanks to Strauss’s book, which is well worth listening/reading. It should appeal to readers who are interested in the Holocaust, in the role of women of both that period and the years that preceded it, and in trying to understand both the cruelty of people against other people as well as the impulse to act humanely in the face of evil.

An exceptionally well-written, well-researched book on the story of these two incredible women and their "passionate friendship," proving that love can endure all things under all conditions. Highly recommend this book. I feel so lucky to be able to read this before most everyone.

Thank you, #Netgalley and #MacmillanAudio for this ARC

Colleen Chi-Girl at GoodReads
🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟

This Holocaust memoir is now one of my favorites. It is certainly one of the most 💔 heartbreaking recountings of the all-female prisoners in the Ravensbruck Concentration Camp.

The way the author, Gwen Strauss, structures the unfolding of the events at the camp, she makes it incredibly painful as the tension and atrocities grow and rip apart every act of human decency. It features two friends who realize they’re in love with each other. You feel their individual pain, fear and anger, as well as how it affects their loved one from both viewpoints.

I listened to it on audiobook and the female narrator, Julie Teal, reads it almost like a newscaster. This gives it even more of a desperate feel with the reality of the situation. Although it took a little while, once I settled into her voice and style, I grew to appreciate it.

What sets this apart from other Holocaust fiction books is that you keep remembering that’s it’s not fiction and that makes it even more despicable and eye opening. Each time I read any book from this time period, I surprise myself by being surprised at even more horrific tactics and actions.

It is a love story and beautiful tribute to these brave and strong women whose story was hidden away until a historian brought it to the author’s attention.

My note:
This concentration camp, Ravensbrück, was specifically made for women and children in northern Germany. If that isn't enough to make you ill, there's more from Wikipedia:

Conditions at the camp were brutal, characterized by overcrowding, malnutrition, forced labor, and poor sanitation that led to the spread of diseases like typhus. Ravensbrück performed horrific medical experiments on women, including using: sulfonamide drugs, sterilization procedures, and bone-grafting experiments. Mass killings occurred via: shooting, lethal injection, starvation, and in early 1945, gassing. Thousands of women were also forced on death marches in the final months of the war, to prevent them from being liberated, by the advancing Soviet forces. And eventually the USA.

Thank you to the publisher McMillan Audio, NetGalley, and the author for this advanced copy. I would’ve hated to have missed this one.

This was one of those audiobooks that doesn’t just tell you a story—it immerses you in it. Gwen Strauss brings to life the true and powerful bond between Milena and Margarete, two women whose friendship and courage carried them through one of history’s darkest times. The narration is rich, heartfelt, and full of quiet strength, making it feel like you’re being personally entrusted with their memories.

The book follows their resilience, defiance, and deep humanity against the backdrop of Nazi-occupied Europe. It’s not an easy listen—there are harrowing, gut-wrenching moments that remind you just how high the stakes were—but it’s also deeply inspiring. The way Gwen Strauss handles their voices and histories is full of respect and emotional depth, making this not just a story of survival, but of loyalty, love, and resistance.

If you’re an audiobook lover, this one’s a must—the pacing, tone, and delivery pull you in and don’t let go. It’s the kind of history that stays with you long after you’ve finished.

Thank you to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

A sad and tragic story that was well researched and written in a way that kept me engaged throughout. I did struggle somewhat with some of the pacing at points, but this is likely simply do to personal preference. The narrator also did a fantastic job. I'll be recommending this one for purchase at my library.

My thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the opportunity to review this audiobook.

Most of this story takes place in the Ravensbruck concentration camp, in the special ´re-education’ section for women who distinguished themselves by making the expansive Nazi hate list. Their distinctions brought them into squalid, crowded, unhygienic conditions where they were regularly beaten, starved, forced to participate in torturing other inmates, and simply brutalized.

The conditions at Ravensbruck are by now known to most people. I’ve read about them countless times, both in fiction and in scholarly non-fiction. Yet listening to this audiobook, as narrated by Julie Teal, still gave me chills. Her dispassionate telling makes descriptions of the constant acts of inhumanity especially hard to take, familiar though they are. Along with the number of characters, this makes me wonder whether reading it on the page would be a bit less unsettling. If that’s possible. It might at least help keep the characters and the time line straight, since the story is told mostly in flashbacks. The dual timeline also means that the two main characters don’t appear together for much of the book, since they met at the camp. The point of view of Margarethe Buber-Neumann dominates, though I expect that this is due to the fact that she figures in more of the historical records on which this book is based.

The Czech journalist Milena Jesenka met the German Margarethe, called Grete, at Ravensbruck in 1940. Milena is known mostly, perhaps unfairly given her own literary talents, as the girlfriend of Franz Kafka, who died of tuberculosis at the beginning of his own career. Like Grete, she had thought the Great War of her youth had finished all wars, so horrible were its consequences. Both women were atheists, non-conformist, anti-fascist and feminist-socialist. The author makes a mighty effort to show how many variations of such lol ideologies co-existed, and often not at all happily.

The worldly, open-minded Grete, imprisoned for communism (she was a social democrat) was placed in the ´asocial’ category, the very lowest in the camp hierarchy . The group included lesbians, sex workers, Roma and young Jehovah’s Witnesses (called Bible students), communists, the mentally ill or otherwise defective.’ Her organizational efficiency spared her from constant punishment because the camp directors were desperate for help in preventing chaos and keeping the women producing for the Nazi war machine . Interestingly, the ´free thinking’ sexuality that the Nazis considered a particularly odious leftist idea (but not applicable to them) was, in Gretés view, purely heterosexual.

As Gretés camp diary indicates, she felt an immediate soul bond when she met Milena, and came to think of her as the content of my life.’ Theirs was a ´romantic friendship’ that doesn’t seem to have been sexual. Like the Nazis, Greta considered lesbians ´morally and medically unfit,’ and thought they could be cured by finding ´the right man.’ Definitely attracted to each other, Grete and Milena ´lived each day’ for the stolen moments when they could talk together, learning deeply about each other before being forced to go back to their blocs.

Author Greta Strauss’s commitment to telling the stories of the women who lived and died within the hell that was Ravensbruck is what she eloquently terms ´an act of recovery and imagination.’ She points out that, for many of them—lesbians, Roma, the mentally ill, and so on—life outside the camp was equally hell. Their families abandoned them and they had no home to return to. They were at once determined to live and not afraid of dying. Surviving to see the war’s end gave them the will to live. But liberation did not guarantee that they would survive in the outside world.

This can’t help but be a tragic story. Even understanding the lengths they would go to in order to survive doesn’t make it easy to hear/read about the debasement that they were forced into. It is easy to think ´I would rather have died.’ But we haven’t been forced to choose, when all choices are equally terrible.

Because of the scarce records that kept these women, those who survived as much as those who died, hidden from history, books such as Strauss’s ´recovery and imagination’ can give us a sense of how they lived and died.

We all know the horrors of Auschwitz and WW2 in general, but this tale is about Milena and Margarete, who were sent to Ravensbruck for their own reasons of "troubling" the Germans. Their story of coming together and falling in love gave a lot of light into how LGBTQIA+ were viewed in that era. While we live in troubling times of our own, this was an eye opening warning of how easy it is to let hate in.. I have nothing but respect and awe.

An important book exploring the treatment of political prisoners and LGBTQ+ persons in the concentration camps. Milena and Margarete met in Ravensbruck in 1940. The book tells the stories of each of their lives and how they ended up in Ravensbruck. It discusses their "passionate friendship" and how they relied on each other to survive the worst possible circumstances. The book is full of information on the types of prisoners in the camps, the camps themselves, and the greater political climate.

I really enjoy books that explore topics that aren't often discussed. Ravensbruck was a brutal place and the only camp made only for women. While it was not the largest camp, it has a prominent place in WWII history. I am glad to see more books discussing it.

This book was not my favorite. I did not like that it was not chronological. The story seems to jump around quite a bit to go into the histories of different people. It is a bit repetitive because of this. One particular example that irked me was the discussion of a character and then putting in a sentence about how she died. Then it resumes her narrative. At that point, the reader knows what will happen to her and any hope that she can survive is dashed. This is a non-fiction book, and I know that the fates of each person mentioned can easily be searched online. I just wish the death wasn't thrown in prematurely. There is also a lot of information in the book that is entirely unrelated to Milena or Margerete. It is all important information that should be shared with readers, but I did not understand its context in the book. It did not involve the two women the book is about. I personally think the book would have been better by either 1) splitting the book into two parts. The first being the general history and details of what happened and then the second part focusing only on Milena and Margarete or 2) changing the title to not make it seem like the book is just about the two people mentioned. For these reasons, I only give the book 3 stars. This book might be great for those who are just learning about Ravensbruck for the first time.

I was fortunate to received an advanced audio version of this book. The narrator did a fine job.

This was a very informative and important story about two courageous women and their love for each other. The fact that these ladies could show such compassion during those horrendous times, not only for each other but for other prisoners, is very inspiring. While it's acknowledged by the author that these two ladies were privileged compared to other prisoners, they still dealt with terrors no one should ever have to face.

The audiobook was narrated well, but it did take me some time to get into it, as it's very much tell not show. There are parts that are very info heavy, but I remembered a lot of it from school and my own research, so it became easier to follow as the book went on.

It's a well researched and moving story, with a lot of valuable commentary on how gays and other minorities were treated during the war and afterwards. Despite already knowing a considerable amount about this time in history, I still found myself shocked and surprised by some of what happened.

The story was written respectfully and allows space for the reader to interpret the characters of these strong women, without making them into spectacles of a horrific time.

Overall, it's a necessary story and one that I highly recommend. Thank you to Macmillan audio and Netgalley for the ALC