SMOKE OVER BIRKENAU (Il fumo di Birkenau)

Short stories by Liana Millu, 1947

Smoke over Birkenau (1991; Il fumo di Birkenau, 1947) is a collection of six stories, each centered on a different woman. The women are prisoners at Birkenau, also known as Auschwitz II, a vast complex of barracks, gas chambers, and crematoriums about two miles from the older, smaller camp called Auschwitz I, near Kraków, Poland. Presumably each of the women underwent the selection process on the train ramp upon arrival and, because of her age, health, and strength, was chosen to enter the camp to perform forced labor until death. That selection process, involving forcible separation from most accompanying family members and the immediate gassing of those too young, old, or feeble to work, is not described here. Nor is the reader told when, how, and why the women, each from a different country, were arrested. Instead, author Liana Millu focuses entirely on the women's camp experiences and daily routines. Their stories are universal—the chronicles of prisoners in circumstances of extreme brutality and deprivation.

At the same time, the stories are historically unique. It is late 1944 at Birkenau, where most of the prisoners are confined not because of political or criminal activities but because they were born Jewish. At Birkenau the forced labor is absurd, the intent is to exterminate, and the sick and the weak will be murdered rather than cared for. As Primo Levi relates in his introduction to the 1986 Italian edition of Smoke over Birkenau, there was "above all the haunting presence of the crematoria, located right in the middle of the women's camp, inescapable, undeniable, their ungodly smoke rising from the chimneys to contaminate every day and every night, every moment of respite or illusion, every dream and timorous hope." And yet, the women dare to hope. Allied planes fly over the camp. The guns on the Russian front are audible. The war, they think, may end any day. They struggle to stay alive until then.

The stories of the six characters are also unique by gender. They could only have happened to women, not to men. There is no suggestion that the experiences of male prisoners at Birkenau were not equally horrible. The focus here is simply on women. A single narrator, also a female prisoner and surely based on the author herself, introduces the women. The reader meets, for example, gentle "Lili Marlene" from Hungary, doomed because she dares to remain feminine and attracts the attentions of her female kapo 's lover. Maria's terrifying secret is that she was undetectably pregnant when she arrived at the camp and wants to have her baby. Bruna, from Milan, arrives at Birkenau with her 13-year-old son, who is confined in the men's section and whom she sees only when their labor battalions pass each other in the evening. Their wrenching love and anguish affect all the women. Zina, a Russian, struggles to see her husband, rumored also to be at Birkenau. Gustine, from The Netherlands, rejects her beloved sister Lotti, who has chosen prostitution as a means of survival. And Lise, desperately hoping to survive for her husband at home, must decide whether to encourage the attentions of a male prisoner who can keep her alive at a price. As they deal with their personal problems, the women perform tedious but grueling labor, eat little, and struggle against filth, disease, exhaustion, and human cruelty. Despite all odds they fight to survive and retain their humanity.

—Susan Zuccotti