I came to Milena Jesenská through Franz Kafka. Most people do. She was his translator, his correspondent, and the great love of his life — or at least the great love of the last years of his life, which amounts to the same thing. Their letters are extraordinary: passionate, anguished, funny, and strange in the way that only Kafka can be strange.

But Milena was so much more than a footnote in Kafka's biography, and it took me a while to understand that. She was a journalist — one of the best of her generation in Prague. She wrote about fashion and food and politics and the lives of ordinary women with equal intelligence and equal care. She had a gift for making the reader feel that she was speaking directly to them, personally, about something that mattered.

She was also brave in ways that cost her everything. When the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia, Milena did not flee and did not go quiet. She used her position to help Jewish friends escape, to hide people, to pass information. She was arrested by the Gestapo in 1939 and sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she died in 1944.

I read Margarete Buber-Neumann's biography of her — Buber-Neumann was a fellow prisoner at Ravensbrück and one of Milena's closest friends in the camp. The portrait she draws is of a woman who remained, even in the worst conditions imaginable, fully and defiantly herself: curious, generous, furious at injustice, and incapable of indifference.

There is a particular kind of person who moves through the world as if they are responsible for it — as if the suffering of strangers is their personal business. Milena was that kind of person. It is a quality that tends to get people killed, and it got her killed. But it also means that she lived more fully in her forty-eight years than most people do in eighty.

I think about her often. I think about what it means to write honestly, to care about the right things, and to keep caring even when it becomes dangerous. She is one of those people who makes you want to be better — not in a vague, inspirational-poster way, but in a specific, practical, what-would-Milena-do way. I am grateful to have found her.