Small Peculiar

Milena Jesenská was a badass who deserves to be known as more than Kafka’s translator and pen pal. For her resistance work in occupied Czechoslovakia, helping Jews and others to emigrate, the Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück, where she died. (The Nazis didn’t directly murder her, she died of kidney failure, but I’m going to go ahead and guess that living in a concentration camp didn’t help.) If I am recalling correctly, years earlier Franz had told her she shouldn’t necessarily be so accepting of Jews—after all, they weren’t all as nice as he. Well, bite me, Franz, she got sent to a camp for us. You’re the one who wanted to suffocate us all in the laundry chest!