This Darkness Will Never End
First published in 1962, Edith Bruck’s masterful short story collection This Darkness Will Never End bears witness to the atrocities of World War II and the lives of those affected by the Holocaust.
Hungarian-born Bruck was liberated from a Nazi concentration camp as a teenager and later resettled in Rome. Her stories share common threads of struggling Hungarian Jewish families, endemic antisemitism, and the disconnected unity experienced by wartime survivors. In “The Darkness Will Never End,” Lenke dotes upon her blind brother, Beni, describing the world to him—and at times embellishing the realities of their small village and family home. After the war begins, the siblings are sent to a concentration camp. Lenke clings to Beni in a train full of “wailing” people, trying to assure her brother that they are going to a happier “new world.”
In “Silvia,” a German boy, Robert, watches the internment trains and waves to whom he believes to be “traveling strangers.” Though his father is a Third Reich officer, Robert has only a vague comprehension of the Nazi agenda. When he finds an abandoned child with a yellow star sewn onto her “tiny overcoat,” he is determined to adopt her as his sister.
The stories are poignant and crafted with subtle humor, compassion, and unsparing observations. In “Come to the Window, It’s Christmas,” “joking” holiday carolers gather to yell Heil Hitler!, while in “Matzoh Bread,” a local rumor accuses Jews of using Christian blood to make Passover matzo. In “Reading French Poetry after the War,” a teenage concentration camp survivor is filled with “unexplainable joy” when she sees a Zionist newspaper urging Jews to leave Europe for Israel.
Written with a sense of anguished history and oppressed vitality, This Darkness Will Never End is a compelling short story collection.
Reviewed by
Meg Nola
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