As its survivors die, so too will the stream of Holocaust
testimony. Though narrowing, the trickle continues. This Italian
testament has both polish and poetry and strong images of suffering
barely borne, but more indelibly it serves as a particular focus
into the specially female hell of the camps, what made the woman
prisoner different from the man. Displaced, brutalized, sick,
dying, the women wretches of Millu's Birkenau lager are as much
buoyed as cast down by what remains of their sentimental or family
relations: a husband or lover or son perhaps still alive across the
fence in the men's camp, Auschwitz; a hidden pregnancy;, a sister
unforgivably become a whore in the camp's brothel. There is no fake
sisterhood or sorority - if anything, the internecine competition
is fiercely vocal, sexually cynical - but there is shared attention
to the pain of the heart as well as to the body and spirit: These
are prisoners who might give over their whole meager ration of
daily bread to a camp fortuneteller in hopes of hearing how a loved
one fares. The storylike chapters have a professional, even on
occasion a melodramatic feel, somewhat disconcerting; but Millu's
writerliness is also able to deliver the unforgettable passage from
which the book takes its title: "I remember what Jeanette used to
say, watching the dense spirals rise from the crematoria and trail
across the sky: the black curls were the souls of the lager's
old-timers marching in orderly rows of five toward the kingdom of
the merciful God, while the wispy little white curls that drifted
and vanished waywardly, the merest puffs, were the souls of
children and newcomers who had yet to learn discipline." (Kirkus
Reviews)
An Italian-Jewish journalist and schoolteacher who joined the
partisans in 1943, Liana Millu was arrested in 1944 and deported to
Birkenau. The astonishing stories in this book tell of the women
who lived and suffered alongside Liana during her months there.
They are stories of violence and tragedy, but also of resistance,
of dreaming in the middle of a nightmare, and of the endurance of
the human spirit.
General
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