Edith Bruck

Edith Bruck (born 3 May 1931) is a Hungarian-born writer, director and Holocaust survivor. She has lived most of her life in Italy and writes in Italian.

Early life

The daughter of poor Jewish parents, she was born Edit Steinschreiber in the village of Tiszabercel near the Ukrainian border. In 1944, with her parents, two brothers and a sister, she was sent to Auschwitz, where her mother died. The family was transferred to Dachau where her father died, then to Christianstadt and finally Bergen-Belsen, where the remaining children were liberated by the Allies in 1945. One brother also died in the concentration camps. She returned to Hungary and then went to Czechoslovakia, where another sister was living with her family.

Career

Bruck is a transnational Italian writer and the author of two dozen novels, short story collections, books of poetry and works of nonfiction. Most of her literary production has been devoted to Holocaust testimony, and she has also written several novels about her long marriage to Italian writer and film director Nelo Risi.

Since 1959, five years after settling in Italy while with a dancing troupe, her works of literature have been published in Italian. In 1959, Bruck published her autobiography Chi ti ama così, later translated as Who loves you like this (2001).

Her 1974 short story collection Due Stanze Vuote was a candidate for Italy's Strega literary prize.

In 1971, Bruck wrote her first play, Sulla porta. Bruck was a co-founder of the Teatro della Maddalena theatre in Rome, where Mara, Maria, Marianna (co-written with Dacia Maraini and Maricla Boggio) opened in 1973. From the 1970s to the 1990s, she worked for the RAI as a director and screenwriter.