At the age of 13, in 1944, deported with her whole family to Birkenau, Edith Bruck suddenly became an adult by boarding a train.
But, unlike the few million women and men who did not survive summary executions, concentration camps, gas chambers or marches and forced labor, she is still alive to bear witness to it.
At 89, this Italian writer and director, born into a Jewish family in Tiszabercel, in northeastern Hungary, not far from the Ukrainian border, is undoubtedly one of the last great witnesses of the Shoah. In French toasta fast and telescoped story, it tells this long round trip to hell.
After a first sorting, she will be quickly transferred with her older sister to Birkenau, an extermination camp “where we walked on the ashes”. Then to Auschwitz and Dachau, where they will have to work in the kitchen of a castle where Nazi army officers were staying.
Impossible to paraphrase the brutality of their conditions of detention: “Hunger, cold, disease decimated us, and those who in their sleep died against us, froze us and waited impatiently for them to be carried away from us. “Young bourgeois women and men, who were more fragile, had fewer defenses, she says, and “our previous life, by its very harshness, had favored us and we had resisted better”.
Another move to Landsberg, then to Bergen-Belsen, followed by an interminable forced march where the prisoners had to “feed on garbage, miserly potato peelings, cabbage leaves and stems, bark of trees”.
After the liberation of the camps begins his “long and sad pilgrimage”; the two sisters somehow manage to reach Budapest. While the camps were a brutal and unimaginable experience, the return to “normal” life has not been smooth. One of the particularities of Edith Bruck’s story is that it exposes the difficulties of life after that – the very impossibility of a return.
In their village, in front of the small, almost destroyed family house, they had become enemies in the eyes of the very people who had probably denounced their family. “Our remaining life was just a weight, when we had hoped for a world that would have waited for us, that would have kneeled before us. It was as if the ground was once again giving way under his feet.
At 16, she left for Israel to join her sister, “where I expected to find hearts and arms that were open and not armed,” she said. After two marriages as short as unhappy and the categorical refusal to do her military service, Edith Bruck finds herself in Athens, a dancer in a traveling troupe. During a tour, his discovery of Naples marks his real return to life: “Here, I said to myself, this is my country. »
It is thus in Italy that she will find words and a new language to say the unthinkable.
In the vein of the great autobiographical accounts of the Holocaust and the deportation, such as those of Robert Antelme, Imre Kertész, Charlotte Delbo or Jorge Semprun, French toast is a moving book.
Edith Bruck, consumed by the fire of the duty to live and bear witness, concludes her story with a heartbreaking “Letter to God”, which will remain forever unanswered. “If I survived, that must make sense, right? It is up to us, readers, to react.