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By Jeanne Bonner

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There’s a line in a short story I’ve translated that remains impressed in my mind like a mantra: “She was the age I had been when I lost everyone and everything.”

Everyone – and everything — lost.

It’s one of many lines written by Edith Bruck, a transnational Italian author, that capture my attention. Simply written and simple to translate. Yet so pregnant with meaning and a  concise summary of the author’s own life. Hungarian gendarmes descended upon her home in the Spring of 1944, at the behest of the Nazis, and sent her and her family on a murderous voyage toward Auschwitz that would ultimately leave Bruck parentless and without a homeland.

The year she lost everyone and everything? She was a 12-year-old girl living in her native Hungary. She’s now 93, and she’s spent her entire life bearing witness through her writing.

The line above appears in a short story called “Matzoh Bread,” and it’s the final story in my translation of Bruck’s first short story collection, This Darkness Will Never End, which will be published by Paul Dry Books in April. Born in 1931 in a small town near the Ukrainian border, Bruck has been living in Italy — and writing in Italian — since the 1950s.

Bruck was the impetus for a fellowship I won at the New York Public Library to study the work of Italian women survivors after receiving an NEA grant to translate her short stories. It’s a group of authors that offers us keen insight into topics not often touched on in survivor literature by men — clandestine pregnancies in the Lager, for example, and the disappearance of menstrual cycles. A group whose work, however, often isn’t translated into English.

What I’ve discovered as I’ve translated Bruck’s fiction, nonfiction and poetry, is this: There is still so much we need to learn about the Shoah, and as the number of remaining survivors dwindle, women’s experiences of survival are key to having a full picture of Nazi atrocities.

This discovery for me came two decades after reading Primo Levi’s memoir If This is a Man. I’d long considered the Italian chemist’s work, including the Periodic Table, the foundation of my understanding of the Holocaust. Later, I built on that foundation by reading other seminal works, including Night by Elie Wiesel.

But Bruck brings a perspective that would probably not occur to male survivors: for her, living with the memory of the Holocaust is akin to being eternally pregnant with a “demon-child conceived in Auschwitz.”

To a woman like me, those urgent words about a monster festering inside that can never be expelled (from 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. And it’s a comparison that male survivors are unlikely to make, for obvious reasons.

So on January 27, when the world marks the 80^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, I will be thinking more than ever of Bruck’s words and the words of other women authors who survived the Holocaust. Of the 245,000 survivors left worldwide, 61 percent are women, according to the Claims Conference, which administers compensation from Germany on behalf of victims of the Nazis.

Indeed, what convinced me to translate Bruck’s work was the realization she added something different to my understanding of the Holocaust. For example, one of the short stories in her first short story collection is told from the point of view of a young boy whose father is a Nazi commander. Imagine feeling as though the memory of surviving the camps is a forced pregnancy you cannot terminate and then writing from the perspective of a young boy who could have grown up to be a Nazi but without vilifying this character. That’s what Edith did with the story “Silvia” — and I wanted to know more.

The fate of young girls — and young people in general — earns special attention in the collection, which was published in Italy in 1962 under the title Andremo in città (We’ll Go to the City). The vulnerability these girls feel and which Bruck captures perfectly is at times breathtaking. In one story, a girl tearfully tells her mother, “Mama, you’ll live forever because I love you too much.” Knowing Bruck’s mother died at the gates to Auschwitz and that her memory has haunted Bruck ever since casts the story in a particularly poignant light.

In both prose and poetry, Bruck is able to convey the horror of the Holocaust in a few words. The references sometimes are subtle or inferred. In her poem “To be born by chance,” which appears in an anthology of her poetry, Versi Vissuti (Lived Verses), she writes, “To be born a woman/To be born poor/To be born Jewish/It’s too much/For a single life.”  Here’s another instance where she’s summarized the fate foisted upon her in a few quick lines. There are almost certainly other poems like it by women survivors that illuminate their fate in a particular way. Yet if they are left untranslated, they remain in obscurity for most Anglophone readers – a secret treasure.

Bruck’s writing often touches on the intimacy of the mother-daughter bond. For example, in the nonfiction epistolary work Letter to My Mother (Lettera alla madre), the author imagines a frank dialogue with her mother that encompasses their deep connection but also the friction that existed between them — and of course, the anguish Bruck feels over her mother’s untimely death at the hands of the Nazis. In the short stories I’ve translated, the mother-daughter dynamic often forms the basic framework of the tales. In doing so, Bruck reminds us of the desperation many women felt as they arrived in the concentration camps and were immediately separated from their children.

And it made me wonder: what can other women survivors tell us about the Holocaust? And how much longer will we have the last generation of eyewitnesses to the Holocaust with us to tell these stories in person? These were questions I pondered during the fellowship at the New York Public Library.

In the past 30 years or so, many women survivors have published accounts of their experiences — Italian authors and others — and various books in the genre have been translated into English. In addition to Bruck’s Letter to My Mother, other books originally in Italian include Giuliana Tedeschi’s There Is A Place on Earth, published in English in 1992, and Liana Millu’s nonfiction book Smoke Over Birkenau, which came out in English in 1998. The tales these women have to tell, which include hidden pregnancies and sexual predation, are ones we need to hear.

But women’s accounts of surviving the Holocaust remain largely unknown. Scholar Sara Horowitz argues in the 1999 anthology Women and The Holocaust that women survivors are not cited as often as men in scholarly studies and that “women’s experiences are rarely central to the presentation of a ‘typical’ Holocaust story.” (It’s worth noting 25 years have passed since she made this observation, but has anything changed?)

To some extent, the reason why the stories of women survivors are less known is accidental; many women survivors didn’t write or speak out about their experiences until decades later. And within survivor circles, any effort to compare suffering has been understandably discouraged.

In Italy, Bruck has long been mentioned in the same breath as Primo Levi. She’s won some of Italy’s highest literary prizes, and Pope Francis insisted on meeting her to honor her years of visiting Italian schools – at her apartment. But in America, the only universally-known book about the Holocaust that wasn’t written by a man is The Diary of Anne Frank, which, while legendary, cannot tell us about conditions in the camps or the pain of survival because poor Anne never returned.

For serious readers, one book leads to the discovery of another, either through the bibliography or textual references. Perhaps for translators, a similar phenomenon occurs. In my case, this translation project handed me a task: to read as many books as possible about the Holocaust and especially to read the work of other women survivors.

As I await final publication of the Bruck translation, my mind reels at the thought of all the other books that tell women’s experiences, which haven’t been translated. If I’m honest, I see these books as constituting an impossible to-do list of works that I hope to translate. I do not translate full-time so it’s my choice to focus on work by overlooked Italian women writers. And now thanks to my interest in Bruck, I’ve become especially focused on the work of women survivors writing in Italian.

Through the eyes of women writers, the events of the Holocaust can take on a different cast, in part because some of what happened to female deportees was unique to them. For example, few Americans are aware of the notorious women’s prison, Ravensbrück, north of Berlin, but it’s the focus of two books by Lidia Beccaria Rolfi, neither of which has 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” (my translation).

That line comes from her book, L’esile filo della memoria: Ravensbrück, 1945: un drammatico ritorno alla libertà (a translation for the title could be: The Slender Thread of Memory: Ravensbrück, 1945, and a Dramatic Return to Freedom). And like the aspects of Bruck’s work that set her apart, the book chronicles the murky period after the war when liberated prisoners journeyed home and millions of people had to begin their lives all over again.

There are other Bruck titles to translate. For example, thanks to the NEA grant, I’ve also translated her second short story collection, Due Stanze Vuote, which was published in 1974 and was a finalist for Italy’s highest literary award, the Strega. The title story of the collection (Two Empty Rooms) is the stunning tale of a Holocaust survivor who returns to her native village with wide-eyed excitement only to crumble under the weight of confronting sheepish townspeople who seek absolution as they admit they didn’t help her or her family escape the Nazis. (My English translation hasn’t been published yet.)

Will the wisdom in these books ever see the light of day in America?

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Jeanne Bonner is a writer, editor and literary translator. Her translation of Edith Bruck’s first short story collection, This Darkness Will Never End, will be published by Paul Dry Books in April 2025. Her writing has been published by The New York Times, The Boston Globe and CNN. She was a 2022 NEA literature fellow in translation. She occasionally teaches courses in writing at Wesleyan University.