What literary translation taught me about World War II

During a 2018 trip to Italy, I found myself face to face with history. I was meeting with a woman who had once come before the notorious Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele. At only 13 years of age, she’d managed to elude his attention during a treacherous prisoner selection process in Auschwitz.

The woman was Edith Bruck, considered the most prolific Italian author to write about the Holocaust by scholars, and I was at her apartment because I’d begun to translate her short stories, which are based on her experiences of Nazi persecution. She was deported from her native Hungary in 1944. I was stunned to learn that although she’d lost both of her parents and a brother to the concentration camps, she harbored no hatred.

After she was liberated, she began telling the world what she’d seen to fulfill a pledge made to dying prisoners. And after I met Ms. Bruck, I vowed to tell her story by translating as much of her work as I could.

This year marks eight decades since World War II ended, and there have been various commemorations, including May 8, the 80^th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe. I wasn’t alive during the war, and my parents were small children at the time, living in the New York area. None of my relatives served in combat in World War II. But I’ve grown up in a world shaped by the conflict – we all have. And as I’ve translated Ms. Bruck’s work, I’ve begun to devour books about the Holocaust specifically and World War II in general. I’ve concluded I’ll never know enough about the greatest tragedy of the 20^th century or the sacrifices made by so many during World War II. So, I’ll keep reading.

In a speech called “My Alma Mater Is Auschwitz,” that Ms. Bruck gave to college students, the Hungarian-born Italian author said living in concentration camps taught her three things: “You’ll never be a racist, [or] a fascist; you’ll never discriminate against anyone; and you’ll never be like your persecutors.” Many Americans who fought the Nazis learned that lesson, too.

Bruck’s story reminds me that new tragedies don’t displace old ones. She has been critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, and she vehemently opposes what she termed in an interview with the Italian news site, Il Fatto Quotidiano “an endless war against the Palestinians.” But nothing that happens today changes the fact that she and six million others were violently evicted from their lives and taken on a cruel journey that in her case left her parentless and stateless.

For all of our advances in this modern age, it often feels as though we forget the lessons so painstakingly learned by those who came before us. The past is always getting rediscovered, but sometimes too late.

Rediscovery, as it turns out, is part of a literary translator’s job description. That’s because translators routinely unearth works of literature from past decades that have been overlooked. In addition, translators often introduce into their native languages authors celebrated in one country but virtually unknown in another.

That’s true in Ms. Bruck’s case; she’s a living legend in Italy, and at 94, one of the last great chroniclers of the Holocaust. Her work has been translated into French, German and Spanish. Pope Francis insisted on meeting her to pay homage to her work bearing witness. And although she isn’t a household name here, millions of American movie-goers are familiar with one of her stories because it’s considered the basis by film scholars and literary critics of Roberto Benigni’s 1997 Oscar-winning film, “Life is Beautiful.”

Literary translation can sometimes feel like a magic trick. You reveal a text that until the moment it’s published in English has been a hidden treasure, locked away in a foreign language. But in my work translating Edith Bruck’s stories, what’s revealed has been hidden in plain sight. We all learned about the Nazis, right?

Yes and no, it turns out. In this digital age, information is so ubiquitous that we’re all drowning in it. To be sure, many stories about World War II have been told, and decades of commemorations have taken place.

But the anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe forces us all to think about our history. Can we live up to the example set by previous generations? What actions will we take to fight tyranny now?

The outlook can at times appear bleak. Many people don’t seem to know or care about these lessons. But if some among us want to coerce the human race into repeating the mistakes of our forefathers, authors like Edith Bruck are here to remind us all of the atrocities of our past. And even when Ms. Bruck is no longer with us, her translators will carry on that sacred work. Because we know which side of history we want to be on and it’s not Mengele’s side.