Edith Bruck


Edith Bruck is a Hungarian-born writer and director who has lived most of her life in Italy and writes in Italian.

Life and career

The daughter of poor Jewish parents, she was born Edith Steinschreiber in the village of Tiszabercel near the Ukrainian border. In 1944, with her parents, two brothers and a sister, she was sent to Auschwitz, where her mother died. The family was transferred to Dachau where her father died, then to Christianstadt and finally Bergen-Belsen, where the remaining children were liberated by the Allies in 1945. One brother also died in the concentration camps. She returned to Hungary and then went to Czechoslovakia, where another sister was living with her family.
When she was 16, she married Milan Grün and moved to Israel; the couple divorced the following year. She then married Dany Roth, but that marriage also ended in divorce. She next married an acquaintance named Bruck to postpone her compulsory military service; she had divorced him by the time that she was 20 but kept his surname. In 1954, Bruck moved to Rome. In Italy, she married Italian writer and director Nelo Risi. In 1959, she published her autobiography Chi ti ama così, later translated as Who loves you like this.
In 1971, she wrote her first play Sulla Porta. Bruck was a founder of the Teatro della Maddalena theatre in Rome. From the 1970s to the 1990s, she worked for the RAI as a director and screenwriter.
She has translated works by the Hungarian poets Jòzsef Attila and Miklós Radnóti into Italian. Her own work has been translated into other languages including Hungarian, Danish, Dutch, English and German.

Selected works