On her 92nd birthday, Pope Francis sends birthday wishes to the Holocaust survivor and writer Edith Bruck, saying that her work “tells young people about the importance of fighting for an ideal.”
By Joseph Tulloch
Pope Francis was in the middle of a catechesis about his recent trip to Hungary when he paused and laid his prepared remarks to one side.
“We have in Rome an excellent Hungarian poet,” he said, speaking off-the-cuff, “who has been through many trials, and tells young people about the importance of fighting for an ideal, about not being defeated by persecutions, by discouragement.”
“This poet is 92 years old today: Happy Birthday, Edith!”
A witness to evil
Edith Bruck, a writer and Holocaust survivor, was born in 1931 to Hungarian Jewish parents.
In 1944 she and her family were sent to a concentration camp, where her parents and brother died. Mrs Bruck was liberated from the camp, together with her sister, in 1945.
She first moved back to Hungary, then to Israel, before finally settling in Rome, where she began a career as a writer.
Bruck has dedicated much of her work – which has included novels, poetry, plays, translations, and screenplays – to bearing witness to the evils she experienced in the concentration camps. She was asked to do so by two fellow concentration camp inmates, she says, who asked her to “tell the story. They will not believe you. But if you survive, tell the story, for us too.”
