In 1944, twelve-year-old Ditke, her parents, and her siblings are forced out of their home by the Nazis and sent to a series of concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau. Miraculously surviving the war with one of her sisters, but losing her parents and a brother, Ditke begins a tortuous journey—first back to Hungary, where she knows she doesn’t belong, and then to Israel. There, she holds various jobs before she leaves with a dance troupe, touring Turkey, Switzerland, and Italy. In Italy she finds a home, at last, and a small measure of peace; there, too, she falls in love and marries.
Writing as herself, Edith Bruck closes Lost Bread by addressing a letter to God expressing her rejection of hatred, her love for life, and her hope never to lose her memory or ability to continue speaking for those who perished in the Nazi concentration camps. After the book’s publication in Italy, Pope Francis visited Bruck and thanked her for bearing witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust.
Edith Bruck was born in Hungary in 1931, and as a young teen she was deported with her family to the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Dachau, Christianstadt, Landsberg, and Bergen-Belsen, where she lost both her parents and a brother. After the end of WWII, she briefly returned to Hungary, lived in Czechoslovakia, and then moved to Israel, where she stayed for three years. Working for a dancing troupe in 1954 she traveled to Italy where she decided to settle and where she still lives today.
Bruck is the author of more than twenty books, both prose and poetry, devoted to her life-long commitment to Holocaust testimony, starting with
Who Loves You Like This (1959 in Italian and 2000 in English, published by Paul Dry Books)
. She has won several Italian literary awards; most recently, in 2021,
Lost Bread was a finalist for the prestigious
Premio Strega and winner of
Premio Strega giovani (youth)
.
Bruck has gained national and international recognition for her writings in Holocaust testimony and, more generally, in contemporary Italian literature. Among other honors, in 2021 she received the
Cavalieriato di Gran Croce, conferred by the President of Italy. Along with Primo Levi, Edith Bruck is one of the most prolific writers of Holocaust narratives in Italian. Her books have been translated into many languages including English, French, German, Dutch, Polish, Hungarian, and Hebrew.
Gabriella Romani is Professor of Italian at Seton Hall University. With Brenda Webster she translated Edith Bruck's
Letter to My Mother (2006) and Enrico Castelnuovo's
The Moncalvos (2017). She is from Rome and now lives in Philadelphia.
David Yanoff is an attorney and author from Philadelphia.
