Beyond Kafka's letters: 130 years since the birth of journalist and resistance fighter Milena Jesenská
Milena Jesenská is known around the world primarily through Franz Kafka's letters to her. Yet her own life story is just as compelling: a pioneering journalist who stood up to Nazism and paid for it with her life in the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Milena Jesenská was born in Prague in 1896. During the interwar years, she established herself as a prominent journalist and translator. It was her work as a translator that brought her into contact with Franz Kafka. When she wrote to him in 1919 asking for permission to translate one of his short stories, it marked the beginning of a friendship and correspondence that would later become world-famous.
Kafka’s letters to Milena reveal a deep intellectual bond. Kafka found in Milena someone who truly understood him, while Milena found a man who could articulate her thoughts with remarkable precision. They met only twice, yet the collection of his letters to her remains one of the most intense and inspiring intellectual exchanges in European literature.
Milena was far more than "Kafka's Milena." In Prague, she became one of the respected journalists of the First Czechoslovak Republic. She wrote feuilletons, feature stories and political commentaries distinguished by their clear style and sensitivity.
A journalist turned resistance fighter
When Nazi troops occupied Prague in March 1939, Jesenská immediately became involved in helping those at risk. She hid persecuted people in her apartment, obtained forged documents and helped organize escapes across the border. She saved dozens of lives, including those of Jewish friends, Czech military officers and pilots.
Her courage was quiet and unassuming. She refused to think about her own safety. The Gestapo arrested her in November 1939 and charged her with anti-Nazi activities. After being imprisoned in Prague and Dresden, she was deported to Ravensbrück, the largest women's concentration camp.
Ravensbrück: The final chapter
At Ravensbrück, she worked in the camp infirmary, caring for sick fellow prisoners. There she met the German inmate Margarete Buber-Neumann, who had also survived the Soviet Gulag. Milena was among the few who believed her accounts of Stalinist camps—an extraordinary display of insight even under such extreme conditions.
The two women planned to write a book about their experiences in the concentration camps. Milena never had the chance. Exhaustion, hunger and illness gradually weakened her. She died of kidney failure in May 1944, just weeks short of her 48th birthday.
A legacy that crossed borders
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After the war, “Letters to Milena” came out, and the world came to know her as the woman who had understood Franz Kafka. Over time, however, recognition also grew for her own remarkable life story—that of a journalist who wrote the truth and a woman who stood up to Nazism.
In 1995, she was awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem for saving Jewish lives. Today, her name stands among the heroes of the Czech resistance.
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