Lost Bread

“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.