**"Lost Bread adds an essential chapter to the literature of the
Holocaust. With a broad transnational sweep, it recounts a refugee's
search for a new home, from country to country, until finally settling
in Italy. In this elegant translation, the voice of Edith Bruck--Italy's
most important witness together with Primo Levi--reaches the English
reader with all its poignance and raw emotional power."
--Michael F. Moore, translator of The Drowned and the Saved, by Primo
Levi, and The Betrothed, by Alessandro Manzoni
**
***Drawing on the remarkable events of her own life, renowned author and
Holocaust survivor Edith Bruck tells the story of Ditke, a young Jewish
girl living in Hungary during World War II.
***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.
