“Life with the Discrimination That Foreshadowed the Holocaust:” Anna Vallée’s review of This Darkness Will Never End by Edith Bruck, translated by Jeanne Bonner

This Darkness Will Never End
Edith Bruck, translated by Jeanne Bonner
Paul Dry Books, 2025
187 pp.

The newly translated edition of Edith Bruck’s This Darkness Will Never End offers English-speaking audiences vital insight into the Holocaust and the experience of Hungarian Jews during World War Two. Originally published in Italian in 1962, ten years after Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, it is a wonder and a shame that no publisher in the United States had taken on the project until now, especially given Bruck’s fame and importance in Italy. Thanks to publisher Paul Dry Books and translator Jeanne Bonner, this failure has been remedied.

This Darkness Will Never End contains twelve distinct but related stories. Like Bruck, most of the protagonists are Hungarian Jews, and most are pre-teen or teenage girls. This point of view is unique, as translator Jeanne Bonner points out in her introduction. Unlike other Holocaust writers such as Primo Levi or Eli Wiesel, Bruck “foregrounds the voices and experiences of women and children.”

Given the topic, readers might expect Bruck’s stories to focus on the most fraught or painful experiences within the Nazi concentration camps. Instead, Bruck takes a different approach. Though she has written extensively about Auschwitz in her other novels and nonfiction books, most of the stories in This Darkness Will Never End are about life before and after the war. The Holocaust is a specter that looms large but remains on the edges for most of the book.

The collection begins with a deceptively ordinary scenario. In “The Frozen River,” a young girl named Erika navigates her first romance. At first, readers might recognize their own experiences in Erika’s expectations and anxieties. She worries about her crush’s feelings and tries to hide their meetings from her parents. But this coming-of-age tale has a more sinister undertone: the narrator is Jewish and her love-interest, Endre, is Christian. Though Endre cares for Erika, his parents forbid him to see her again.

Bruck employs this tactic numerous times, masterfully contrasting the simplicity of domestic life with the routine discrimination that foreshadows the Holocaust. In “A Surprise,” the narrator’s extended family arrives for a reunion. Coupled with the happy occasion is the challenge of lodging everyone, and when the narrator goes to pay the Christian neighbors for rooms, many refuse. In “Come to the Window, It’s Christmas,” the young, female narrator anxiously awaits her caroling Christian friends only to be greeted by shouts of “Heil Hitler!”

The Holocaust is directly addressed in two haunting stories: “This Darkness Will Never End” and “Silvia.” In the latter, the young son of a German officer sneaks off to the tracks near his house to see train cars of Jews pass, heading for the concentration camps. Though he is scolded for watching, he returns, and the second time he witnesses one of these trains, he finds a young girl. “The snowy little mound moved and I saw a slender arm laboring to poke out, followed by one tiny hand waving, then another.” To the dismay of his mother, the boy takes the girl home and names her Silvia.

“This Darkness Will Never End” gives its grim title to the collection. In the story, a young girl takes care of her blind brother, Beni, while their parents work. She spends much of her free time trying to cheer him up, describing their house and their surroundings as more beautiful than their reality. “Every morning, he asked me the color of the sky. And I would tell him it was bright, a sweet, tender blue, even if it was black as tar.” The siblings’ circumstances grow more dire until finally they are taken away by soldiers. When they board the train that will transport them to the concentration camps, the narrator continues to lie to her brother, telling him that the train will bring the sickest people to the city to be healed. The story ends with her hollow words of comfort. “What’s about to happen, you can’t feel – you simply believe me…Hug me and hold onto me with all of your might. We’ll wake up in a new world. I can already see the first lights of the city.”

Bruck was born in Hungary in 1931, near the border with Ukraine, and she was only thirteen when she was sent to the concentration camps. She spent time in Auschwitz, where her mother died, followed by Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. She was finally liberated by the Allies in 1945. Though her first language is Hungarian, Bruck opted to write in Italian after the war. According to scholar Philip Balma, this choice was “a shield that would allow her to dive back into her painful past without directly reliving the suffering,” (xii). When her first book was released, critics saw her as “an analogue” for Anne Frank had Frank survived the war.

In Italy, she is renowned, which is why her lack of publication in the United States is inexplicable. Many Italian critics speculate that one of her stories inspired Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning film, Life is Beautiful. Her latest book, Lost Bread, was a finalist for Italy’s most prestigious literary award. Before his death, Pope Francis met Bruck at her apartment and gave her a menorah. For decades, Bruck has given talks to Italian school children to educate them about the Holocaust.

Paul Dry Books was the first to publish Bruck’s writing in the United States in 2001, and the publisher has since translated two of her other titles, including This Darkness Will Never End. After more than six decades, American audiences finally have access to the tough but crucial narratives in This Darkness Will Never End. New generations of readers can pay their respects to victims of the Holocaust by reading and remembering Bruck’s moving collection.

Anna Vallée is a fiction writer, creative writing instructor, and MFA student at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. She received her Ed.M from Harvard University. Her short fiction won a Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award in 2023. She has worked for the fiction and development teams at Consequence Forum, a literary magazine focused on war. Anna lives in Medford, MA with her family and is currently working on a novel.