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toward Auschwitz. Through cracks in the wood planks where he pressed his lips to breathe he glimpsed the names of the last stations in Italy, and each name was a farewell, a step in the voyage north toward winter cold, toward names of stations in German and then Polish, isolated towns no one had yet heard of: Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz. It took Margarete Buber-Neumann three weeks to travel from Moscow to the Siberian camp where she had been sentenced to serve ten years. When only three had passed, they ordered her onto a train back to Moscow, and she thought she would be set free; the train, however, did not stop in Moscow, it continued west. When finally it stopped at the border station of Brest-Litovsk, the Russian guards told Buber-Neumann to hurry and get her belongings together, because they were in German territory. Between the boards nailed over the window, she saw the black-uniformed SS on the platform and understood with horror and infinite fatigue that because she was German, Stalin’s guard were handing her over to Hitler’s guard, fulfilling an infamous clause in the German-Soviet pact.
    The great night of Europe is shot through with long, sinister trains, with convoys of cattle and freight cars with boarded-up windows moving very slowly toward barren, wintry, snow- or
mud-covered expanses encircled by barbed wire and guard towers. Arrested in 1937, tortured, subjected to interrogations that lasted four or five days without interruption, days and nights during which she had to remain standing, then locked for two years in solitary confinement, Eugenia Ginzburg, a militant Communist, was sentenced to twenty years of forced labor in camps near the Arctic Circle, and the train that carried her to her imprisonment took an entire month to cover the distance between Moscow and Vladivostok. During the journey, the women prisoners told one another their life stories, and sometimes when the train was stopped at a station, they put their heads out a window or to a breathing place between two boards and shouted their names to anyone passing by, or tossed out a letter or a piece of paper on which they’d scrawled their names, with the hope that the news that they were still alive would eventually reach their families. If one of two survives, if she gets back, before doing anything else she will look for the other’s parents or husband or children and tell them how her friend lived and died, give evidence that through hell and in the farthest reaches her friend never stopped thinking of them. In the Ravensbrück camp, Margarete Buber-Neumann and her soul mate Milena Jesenska made that vow. Milena told Margarete about her love affair with a man dead for twenty years, Franz Kafka, and she also told her the stories he had written, stories Margarete hadn’t read or heard till then and for that reason enjoyed even more, like the age-old stories no one has written down and yet are revived whole and powerful as soon as someone tells them aloud: the story, say, of the surveyor who comes to a village where there’s a castle he is never able to enter, or the one about the man who wakes one morning turned into an insect, or the one where police come to the director of a bank one day and tell him that he is going to be tried, although he never learns what accusation was brought against him.
    The love affair between Milena Jesenka and Franz Kafka is crisscrossed with letters and trains, and in it distance and written words count more than real meetings and caresses. In the spring of 1939, a few days before the German army entered Prague, Milena sent to Willy Haas the letters from Kafka that she had kept, the last of them coming to her sixteen years before, in 1923. On the journey toward the death camp, in the dark stations where the train would stop all night, she must have remembered the emotion and the anguish of those secret journeys of other days, when she was married and lived in Vienna and her