Edith
Bruck says living with the memory of the Holocaust is akin to being eternally
pregnant with a “demon-child conceived in Auschwitz.”
And during this year, when the world is marking both the 80th anniversary of the
liberation of Auschwitz and 80 years since the end of World War II, Bruck’s words and the words of other women who
survived the Holocaust are especially worthy of our attention.
Of
the 245,000 survivors left worldwide, 61 percent are women, according to the
Claims Conference, which administers German compensation for victims of the
Nazis, and only by examining the testimony of women do we have a full picture
of the Holocaust.
With
such a milestone, much attention will be paid to the words of Primo Levi, Elie
Wiesel and other men who after miraculously surviving the Holocaust told tales
of their experiences. Understandably so; they were among the first to voice the
horror of the concentration camps.
But
I'm thinking of women like Bruck because after I began translating her 1962
short story collection, This Darkness Will Never End, I also researched
women survivors and found their perspectives weren’t well-known.
Born
in Hungary in 1931, Bruck moved to Italy in the 1950s and began writing in
Italian. She remains a vital literary voice in Italy and is a frequent critic
of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even as she shudders at what
Hamas has said about Jews.
To
a woman like me, her urgent words about the monster festering inside -- which
appear in a book called Signora Auschwitz that hasn’t been translated
into English -- viscerally convey the horror of the Holocaust in a way few
other things have.
In
her book, Letter to My Mother, published in the US in 2006, Bruck
describes arriving at Auschwitz at age 13, and being separated from her
mother. Bruck painfully recalls that her mother let go of her hand and pushed
her away from the line of people headed for immediate death. That last moment
spent with her mother likely saved the author’s life – and it mirrors the fate
of many women who were deported. They, rather than their husbands, were the
ones shepherding children to the concentration camps and they were often forced
to make difficult decisions like the one her mother made.
It
made me wonder: What else can women survivors tell us?
A
lot, as I learned during my research into Italian women survivors. They suffered
the same persecution by the Nazis as the men who were deported -- and also
pregnancies that had to be concealed and the fear of sexual assault. In fact, Levi
believed women faced harsher conditions at Auschwitz than many men.
Through
the eyes of women, the events of the Holocaust can take on a different cast. For
example, few Americans are aware of the notorious women’s prison, Ravensbrück,
but it’s the focus of two books by Lidia Beccaria Rolfi, neither of which have
been translated. She was a political prisoner so she was spared the brutal
discrimination faced by Jews, but she did risk being raped during the long postwar
journey home, when she and other liberated prisoners sheltered in an abandoned
concentration camp. Escorted by American GIs, Rolfi couldn’t circulate freely
for fear of predatory soldiers. As Rolfi wrote, any kind of woman would do for
a quick conquest by some soldiers, “even the skeletal ones, even the little
girls.”
Other
books by women that have been published in the US have fallen out of print,
unable to dislodge or even complement better-known testimony by men. Or in some
cases, the ideas of women survivors have been overlooked altogether.
Millions
of American movie-goers, for example, are familiar with an idea from a story by
Bruck where the barbaric reality of Nazi deportation is artfully concealed from
a young boy. Prominent film historians (including Yale's Millicent Marcus) and Italian literature scholars believe that
plot twist contributed to Roberto Benigni’s 1997 Oscar-winning film, “Life is
Beautiful,” although it’s uncredited.
Women’s
experiences, according to scholar Joan Ringelheim, “are rarely central to the
presentation of a ‘typical’ Holocaust story.” And yet, as she wrote in a 1999
anthology published by Yale University Press, Women in the Holocaust,
“Jewish women carried the burdens of sexual victimization, pregnancy, abortion,
childbirth, killing of newborn babies in the camps to save the mothers, care of
children, and many decisions about separation from children.”
Bruck’s
story reminds me that new atrocities don’t supplant old ones. She doesn’t
support what she called “an endless war against the Palestinians,” in an
interview with the Italian online news site, Il Fatto Quotidiano. But
nothing that happens today changes the fact that she was unnecessarily seized
from her home in the Spring of 1944 and taken on a treacherous journey that
ultimately left her parentless and without a homeland.
And
of course, I think often of Anne Frank, whose diary was certainly not written by a
man. The young Dutch girl’s story is known the world over. Less known is that when Bruck’s first book
appeared in Italy, five years after The Diary of Anne Frank had been
published, Italian critics deemed Bruck the kind of writer Anne would have become
had she survived.
We’ll
never know exactly what Anne endured before she died in a German concentration
camp. And we already know what many men suffered at the hands of the Nazis. It’s
time we listened to what women who survived have to say.
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