What women survivors can still teach us about the Holocaust

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 80^th 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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