Edith Bruck

Edith Bruck, née Steinschreiber, was born to poor Jewish parents in the village of Tiszabercel, Hungary. She was the youngest of six children. In 1944, aged 13, along with her parents, two brothers, and a sister, she was deported to Auschwitz, where her mother died. The family was transferred to other camps, including Dachau, where her father died; Christianstadt; Landsberg; and finally Bergen-Belsen. Edith, her sister, and one brother survived to be liberated by the Allies in 1945. After the war, Edith briefly returned to Hungary, then went to Czechoslovakia, where another sister lived. At age 16, she married Milan Grün and moved to the newly-created State of Israel; the couple divorced the following year. She then married Dany Roth; that marriage also ended in divorce. She next married an acquaintance named Bruck to postpone her compulsory military service; she divorced him by the time she was 20 but kept his surname. In 1954, unhappy in Israel, she was planning to go to South America but decided instead to move to Italy and settled in Rome. She made her debut as a writer in 1959 with an autobiography, Chi ti ama così (translated into English as Who Loves You Like This, 2001). In 1971, she wrote her first play, Sulla Porta, which was staged in Milan and Rome. She was one of the co-founders of the Teatro della Maddalena in Rome. From the 1970s to the 1990s, she worked for the RAI as a film director and screenwriter. She wrote 13 novels and several collections of poetry; she also translated works by the Hungarian poets Attila József and Miklós Radnóti into Italian. She married Italian poet and director Nelo Risi. In 2021, she was named Cavaliere di Gran Croce of the Italian Republic.