Remember everything

This article is published in issue 6 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until February 9, 2021

“To be born by chance / to be born a woman / to be born poor / to be born Jewish / it’s too much / in a single life” is Edith Bruck’s verse that tells everything about her.

Every day is Remembrance Day, not just January 27th. On January 27th, however, I finally spoke with this poet and writer whom I admired since – three years ago – I had read her beautiful memoir entitled The swallow on the radiator, where she spoke of the relationship with her long-ill husband, the poet Nelo Risi.

The afternoon before hearing her on the phone I had devoured her latest book, which had upset me a lot. It was from this summer, ever since I had read a novel called A life like many others, that a reading did not move me so deeply. The lost bread (The ship of Theseus), this is the title of Edith Bruck’s short work that I read to talk about it on the radio on Remembrance Day, it is a reading that will be unforgettable for me.
The author has a writing so immediate, dry, engaging, devoid of rhetoric, that already in the first pages a magic happens: we identify ourselves completely in the happy and vital curiosity of a little girl running barefoot in the dust of a poor Hungarian village. After a few pages we are with her and her family in the wagon that takes her to Auschwitz.
How many books have we read on the Shoah? Yet in the Lost bread, through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old woman who feels in a mysterious and confused way a destiny made of words, it is as if we have discovered the Shoah for the first time. More: it is as if we were present, as if we were that little girl. She who loses her parents, who dies of hunger, who sees all the evil in the world, who remains alive by chance, who at seventeen marries a sailor, who works as a waitress, then runs away from Israel, who is a dancer in Switzerland, arriving in Italy. What a writer Edith Bruck! And what a formidable woman. At 88 she is mercilessly lucid. Remember everything. “Our ears were deaf to both insults and threats. We no longer cared about dying or living. We were exhausted, indifferent, but at the sight of a whole loaf that a hand had thrown out the window, we became tigers ».
On the phone she said she was worried: about the wind polluted by new racisms, nationalisms and anti-Semitisms that she feels blowing in Europe. But with what sobriety and simplicity she added that, despite everything she has seen – and which she remembers perfectly -, every day, every moment of her life, she is unable to hate, “because hate is a feeling that is harmful above all to oneself “.

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