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[ 43 No one pushes his way through here, certainly not someone with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window and dream of that message when evening comes. [ FRANZ KAFKA, “An Imperial Message” With these words, Samuel Taylor Coleridge immortalized the horror a person feels at being interrupted in the course of his serene life by someone who forces on him an awful truth, a story the untroubled man does not want to hear and resents for having nothing to do with him: he holds him with his skinny hand, “There was a ship,” quoth he. “hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!” Eftsoons his hand dropt he.1 Not unlike the Ancient Mariner of Coleridge’s poem, the Shoah witness carries a story that, besides being an unfathomable tale, must also be forced onto its listeners: it’s a story no one volunteers to hear. in Il Sistema periodico, Primo Levi recalls his first months after the liberation: “The things i saw and suffered were burning inside of me; i felt closer to the dead than to the living, and i felt guilty of being a man because men had built Auschwitz and Auschwitz had swallowed millions of human beings, among whom many were my friends, including a woman very dear to my heart. i thought that telling all of this could purify me, and i felt like Coleridge’s Ancient Marnier, who waylays the wedding guests on their way to the feast and inflicts on them the story of his misfortune.”2 The writer and poet Edith bruck, Levi’s good friend, had a similar outlook. After years of going from school to school, from one tv show to the next, repeating her holocaust survival story to crowds of anonymous people, she also began to doubt the efficacy of imposing such testimony on those who form a merely passing, and often passive, audience to a narration. No matter how sympathetic and sincerely touched these audiences ChAPTER 1 EDiTh bRUCK’S DEAD LETTERS 44 holocaust mothers & daughters were, bruck felt, they were being charged with a message from the dead that they would rather do without. Children especially ended up more confused than enlightened by this elderly lady’s visits to their classrooms; a young member of such an audience once addressed bruck as “Mrs. Auschwitz.” bruck writes: “Often . . . i felt as if i were talking into a void, a desert, despite the hundreds of heads in front of me that all looked the same.”3 Feeling, as did Levi, that she was like someone from the land of the dead who harasses the living with a horror-filled narration, bruck for a long time stopped accepting invitations for public appearances and kept to herself, choosing instead to write in her sundrenched apartment by the Spanish Steps in Rome, where today she still sits at her small desk with typewriter, paper, her indispensable cigarettes, and sepia photographs of her martyrs lining the walls. born in 1932 in the small town of Tiszakarad, hungary, bruck and her seven siblings grew up in conditions of extreme poverty (two of the children died before the war). her mother, a strict Orthodox woman, strove to maintain the household and feed and clothe the children with the little her husband was able to procure for the family through his unstable work. For the most part he was absent and not interested in what went on at home, but the main cause of tension between him and his wife was due to the fact that he wasn’t a believer and did not share her unfaltering love of God. Tiszakarad, an agricultural village that today is close to the border with Slovakia and Ukraine, was not a shtetl, and there were few Jews living there. Antisemitism was a constant threat, and hunger and isolation were just as dangerous. When the war broke out and the Nazis, helped by the local police, hunted down hungarian Jews, Tiszakarad’s remoteness did not safeguard bruck’s family. They were seized early one morning in 1944 and herded onto a cattle train headed for the ghetto of Satoraljaulhely before the final transfer to Auschwitz. Once there, the eleven-year-old Edith and her mother were immediately selected for extermination. The ss selection panel distributed victims into two lines: to the left, those destined to die; to the right, those (temporarily) spared. Edith and her mother, among numberless others , stood on the left, unaware of the...

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