Holocaust and genocide discussion

The short story collection, This Darkness Will Never End by Edith Bruck, portrays in colorful detail the lives of poor Hungarian Jews before, during and after World War II, with the Holocaust alternately looming ahead as a fate that can't be avoided or as the horror that can't be outrun. The collection, which I translated into English for the publisher Paul Dry Books, includes a story that is considered by film scholars to have inspired Robert Benigni's Oscar-winning movie "Life Is Beautiful." Bruck, who was born in Hungary in 1931, settled in Italy after the war and has been writing in Italian for more than a half-century. She is the author of two dozen novels, short story collections, books of poetry and works of nonfiction, many of which touch on her survival of the 20th century's worst atrocity. Through her work, Bruck supplies an answer to a critical question: What can women writers tell us about surviving the Holocaust era?

Not to be negative, but many people (including me) consider the film, Life is Beautiful, to be inadvertently offensive. Life was decidedly not beautiful in the camps. The depiction in the film had, as I recall, little bearing on reality. That is part of the danger of fictionalized accounts of the Holocaust.

Thanks for your message. The director, it appears, was inspired by one of the most compelling aspects of the title story -- the act of concealing a deportation from a young boy as an act of love -- and built a movie around that. There is almost *nothing* else in the film that was inspired by Edith Bruck's story, except of course the virulent anti-Semitism. Edith's story is 100 percent somber, poignant, heartwrenching, crushing. Guido doesn't appear in the story, nor is there a bookstore or scenes from the concentration camp in Edith's story. But the act of concealing the Nazis' evil acts to protect a young boy -- that is what the two have in common and it's powerful.