#7 - Liana Millu's Smoke Over Birkenau
I cannot believe I did not know until last month of this brilliant translation (in 1991) by the novelist and short-story writer, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, of Millu's six essays on her experiences in Birkenau. You will cry, and you will be amazed at her elegance, in these astonishing stories which tell of the women who lived and suffered alongside her during her months at Birkenau in 1944. 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." Primo Levi says that it is "one of the most powerful European testimonies to come form the women's lager at Auschwitz-Birkenau."