دانلود رمان انگلیسی “میلنا و مارگارت” – یک داستان عاشقانه در راونزبروک، اردوگاه کار اجباری زنان نازی‌ها

THE NOTE WAS WRITTEN ON A STOLEN SCRAP OF PAPER AND FOLDED carefully into a tiny square. It was small enough to be slipped surreptitiously into Grete’s palm by a friend as they passed each other on the dusty camp street. Grete felt its delicate edges in her hand, then slid it quietly into an inner pocket that she had made for hiding just such things. She had to wait until the right moment, when it would be safe to examine the note. When there were no hostile eyes watching her. There were those in the camp who were waiting for a chance to catch Grete and get her thrown out of her job and sent to the punishment block. She was struck first by the handwriting, bold and assured. And the words were simple, yet almost like an imperial summons: “Milena from Prague requests a meeting.” She didn’t even use her family name, just her city; where she came from was what mattered. Grete arrived at Ravensbrück concentration camp, fifty miles north of Berlin, in August 1940, when she was thirty-nine. From a middle-class family in Potsdam, Germany, she had spent the previous two years imprisoned in the brutal Soviet Karaganda Gulag, on the steppes of Kazakhstan. Milena arrived in Ravensbrück two months later, in October 1940, after fifteen months in Gestapo prisons. GRETE WOULD REMEMBER her first encounter with Milena as the turning point of her life. They met during the brief exercise period allowed to prisoners, when they could walk in a narrow oblong path between the backs of the housing blocks and the high gray wall topped with electrified wires. “The Wailing Wall,” Milena would sardonically name it. At age forty-four, Milena’s pallid, ashen face was marked by the months she had spent in various prisons. She had deep circles around her eyes, but Grete remarked that they shone with intelligence. Milena had gorgeous shapely lips and a dimple in her chin. Her delicate, weary face was crowned with a mass of reddish-blond curls. She was tall with wide shoulders and a statuesque frame. Though she had a hitch in her gait, she still moved gracefully, gliding through crowds where she easily stood out.