‘Lost Bread’ Review: A Child Endures Auschwitz

The 92-year-old Holocaust survivor Edith Bruck is so celebrated in Italy that Pope Francis not only paid her a visit at her home in Rome in 2021, but also invited her to the Vatican and wrote the preface to “Sono Francesco” (“I Am Francis”), Ms. Bruck’s 2022 book recounting their conversation and their shared belief in the need to remember the past.

Ms. Bruck begins “Lost Bread”—as she did her 1959 memoir, “Who Loves You Like This”—by conjuring her own impoverished childhood in a small, close-knit Hungarian village. It is an idyllic place for a young girl, named Ditke—as the young Edith was also called—to dance barefoot in the dusty streets. But soon Ditke’s formerly friendly Christian neighbors conform to the increasingly vicious antisemitic mandates, and the Jewish girl suddenly finds herself in a “world gone back to barbarism.” That is also the new reality that Ms. Bruck, forced into maturity at age 12, confronted when the Nazis deported her and her family to Auschwitz in 1944.

Originally published in Italian in 2021, “Lost Bread” has been labeled by Ms. Bruck’s publisher as a novel. But the book’s story tracks so closely to the details of its author’s life that it would be more accurately classified as an autobiographical novel infused with occasional flights of fancy, sudden jumps in narrative viewpoint, and almost hallucinatory descriptions of the horrors witnessed in the concentration camps.

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Very soon after their arrival at Auschwitz, Ditke is separated from her mother, and the two are sentenced to opposite fates: to the left, the gas chamber; to the right, the workers’ barracks, where Ditke cries out incessantly for her mother, stopping only when another inmate points to the billowing smoke of the crematorium and taunts: “She has been burned!”

For the young Ditke, an oven was a kitchen hearth used to bake the family’s daily bread. But at Auschwitz she comes to view ovens as murderous instruments for turning human bodies into ash. The severely rationed lumps of bread handed to the camp inmates are not meant to sustain them but to slowly starve them in body and soul.

In an interview conducted by Gabriella Romani, who, together with David Yanoff, capably translated “Lost Bread,” Ms. Bruck has elaborated on the link between bread and life: “At some level I identify my mother with bread. Also, because she used to make bread, she kneaded it, her apron smelled of flour and therefore, for me, she was symbolically my bread. And for her, the most important thing was to provide bread for her children.”

This symbiosis helps explain Ditke’s mother’s near-delirious lament, as she is herded into a cattle car bound for Auschwitz, for the “lost bread” she has been forced to leave behind. Rather than being burned, however, those loaves had yet even to be placed in the oven. It’s an anguished allusion to the many future generations of Jews never to be born because of the Holocaust.

After Ditke finds her older sister, Judit, in the Auschwitz barracks, the two are sent from one camp to another, laboring at Dachau until they fall “under the weight of the rail ties” they are forced to carry even as their German guards hound them “to work faster,” laughing at their “haggard faces and famished eyes” while throwing sausages to their dogs. Soon after, the guards order the prisoners on an endless death march to an unknown destination, “seeding the earth with cadavers on the way.”

After five weeks of marching, Ditke is left so fragile that her sister must drag her “on the frozen roads as if [she] were a sled.” They arrive at Bergen Belsen, where they are greeted by a human pyramid of naked corpses. A few prisoners, barely breathing, murmur “their names and places of origin,” begging those who can hear them to tell the world what they have witnessed.

This is the pledge Ms. Bruck has sought to fulfill through her writing. But there remained a question: In which language would she—could she—bear to remember? As she roamed through Europe after liberation, she found that, for her, her native Hungarian had become poisoned with the memories of antisemitic slurs.

The narrator of “Lost Bread” hopes, as Ms. Bruck once did, to find a new life—and a new language—in the newly formed state of Israel. But the “Babelic” tongues of so many immigrants from so many countries provide little consolation. There is also the gulf, in Israel as in Europe, between the Jews who have survived the camps and those who have not—an abyss of understanding, regardless of language.

Still unmoored, Ditke joins a dance group and arrives, at the end of a European tour, in Italy. There, for the first time, she feels “immediately at home, after such a long, sad pilgrimage.” In the Italian language she discovers the words she needs “to speak about Auschwitz.” Indeed, this is the language in which Ms. Bruck has written more than 20 books of fiction, memoir and poetry; composed film and television scripts; and delivered so many educational talks about the Holocaust that she is known in Italy as Signora Auschwitz.

Writing in Italian, says Ms. Bruck to Ms. Romani in her interview (which has been appended to the book), has given the author “complete freedom to say what I want.” She uses the example of—what else—bread. “If I say bread in Hungarian, kenyér, I think of my mother, and tragic memories come to my mind. . . . If I say bread in Italian, pane, I think of the bakery where I buy it, of its fragrance, but nothing else. . . . It does not make me cry. While bread in Hungarian still hurts.”

In whatever language you encounter Ms. Bruck’s work, her spare prose captures the raw terror and bitter sorrow of the camps. She also finds lyrical beauty and unexpected joy in moments of calm. Reading her work is like breaking bread with her, seeking light amid the shadows cast by history.

—Ms. Cole is the author of the memoir “After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges.”