Auschwitz Belongs to Us All: A Memoir

Trieste, 1944. 

Marta is seventeen, an age when “everything pleased us and brought a smile to our lips.” Those smiles disappear on the evening of March 29, when two SS men break into the house to pick up the members of the Ascoli family, who are half Jewish. It is the beginning of an endless ordeal. The first stage is the rice mill of San Sabba, the only Nazi camp in Italy. Then come the separation from her mother and the nightmare train journey to Auschwitz, alone in a convoy of men so that she does not have to leave her father. Then to Birkenau, and Bergen-Belsen—the snow, the forced labor, starvation, disease, torture. And the words that sound like a death sentence: “The only way you’re getting out of here is up the chimney.”

Marta is tough and clings to life with all her might—but eventually, exhausted, she decides to kill herself by provoking a guard to shoot her as she attempts escape. Miraculously, the guard holds fire.

Through her testimony, Ascoli reminds us of the tragedy experienced by one family, by all Jewish people—and, with the force of a shout, she explains that Auschwitz belongs to us all, as a symbol of the open wound in the history of the twentieth century.