One can never say it all
In an account of the Holocaust and its aftermath, the cruelty of Auschwitz lingers long after liberation
Edith Bruck can capture the eternal desolation of the Holocaust in a few words. In a poem called “The Symbol,” she upends an otherwise calm meditation on how she would like to be remembered posthumously by concluding with the misfortune she can’t escape: “Once upon a time/ there was Auschwitz.”
In “Lost Bread,” a lightly-fictionalized account of her 1944 deportation by the Nazis and subsequent survival, Bruck writes of Eva, a girl from her village who was also sent to Auschwitz. All around them people were dying from the inhumane treatment meted out by the SS. Bruck writes, “Some from the selections, others during roll call, or from hunger or illness and some like Eva, who ran and killed herself on the electric current of the barbed wire, where she remained for a long time, hanging like Christ on the cross.”
Born in Hungary in 1931, Bruck was 12 when the police swooped down on her family early one morning, banging on the front door until it gave way, as she recounts in “Lost Bread.” Soon they were all deported; her parents perished in the concentration camps, as did a brother, but she survived. The author of nearly two dozen works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, Bruck settled in Italy after the war, and began writing in Italian, rather than her native Hungarian.
According to an introduction by Gabriella Romani, who translated the book with David Yanoff, when Bruck’s first book appeared in Italy, “The Diary of Anne Frank” had been published just five years before. Critics considered Bruck’s first book, “Who Loves You Like This,” similar to the account Anne might have written had she survived. “According to one reviewer, Edith had idealistically picked up the pen where Anne Frank tragically dropped it after being deported
and killed in Auschwitz,” Romani writes.
Given how Bruck begins this new book, one can see how critics conflated the two. The first image we have is of a carefree, barefoot girl, her braids bouncing as she makes her way down her tiny street in rural Hungary. But the story quickly turns dark as we see the noose tightening around Hungarian Jews in advance of their mass deportation in the spring and summer of 1944. Bruck writes of locals who capitalize on Nazi terror to vent their own prejudices against Jews: “At the only pump with drinkable water, they were shoved to the end of the line, and boys not infrequently spit in their buckets. All became legitimate; mimicking the grown-ups, even children felt powerful.”
When the authorities seize them, her mother frets about the family staple she’d begun to prepare: “The bread, the bread.” It’s one of countless references to bread in Bruck’s work (including this book’s title), recalling that her mother kept their large, impoverished family afloat with her weekly baking.
Once in Auschwitz, Bruck is immediately hurled into a hostile world that remains unimaginable for most of us, even after 75 years’ worth of Holocaust memoirs and fictionalized narratives about the Lager.
As the prisoners are forced on a death march, four girls accept a Nazi soldier’s offer to rest. They are immediately shot, and the officer says to Bruck and the others, “Understand? You walk or you die!” As Bruck writes, it was a lesson that “was enough for a lifetime.”
Bruck is largely unknown in the US but in Italy, she’s often mentioned in the same breath as Primo Levi, author of the seminal Holocaust narrative, “If This Is a Man.” The Italian original of “Lost Bread” was a finalist in 2021 for Italy’s most prestigious literary award. The final chapter of the book is entitled, “Letter to God,” and when Pope Francis read it, he insisted on meeting Bruck — at her apartment. Arriving with a menorah as a gift, he paid homage to her decades of bearing witness in Italian schools, and apologized for the Holocaust.
Many of the most prominent works about the Holocaust, including Levi’s memoir, understandably chronicle the depravity of the concentration camps. But Bruck’s gaze is often postwar, even if she’s recounting events directly tied to Nazi atrocities. As scholars have noted, Bruck’s frequent focus on the period following the liberation of the camps is part of what makes her work original and compelling. Hence, some of the most poignant lines in “Lost Bread” describe the emotional and geographic dislocation experienced after World War II. When Bruck and a sister, Judit, are reunited with their siblings after narrowly surviving Auschwitz, she finds they cannot grasp her description of the girls’ internment. One sister, a young widow living in Budapest with a small child and her own store of unpleasant wartime experiences, is nominally pleased to see them, but says the sisters’ emotional return scares her son and she insists they wash before getting close to him: “Judit and I exchanged glances in a silent dialogue, as if to say that there was an abyss between us and those who had not experienced what we had.”
After several false starts via relocations to Greece and Israel, Bruck finds hope again when she lands in Italy with a dance troupe. “For the first time, I felt immediately at home,” she writes.
And in this new home, she can express herself through writing in a different way.
“New words were needed to speak about Auschwitz … a new language, one that would hurt less than my mother tongue,” Bruck writes of embracing Italian as her lingua franca.
Bruck continues to speak to schoolchildren and to publish work about her experiences, honoring a pledge she tearfully made as she dragged naked corpses to a “death tent.” Many others would be ready to retire.
“But,” as she said during a bonus interview in the English edition, “there will never be enough writing about Auschwitz. One can never say it all, even with a hundred or a thousand books.”