There is a Place on Earth: A Woman in Birkenau - Tapa blanda

Giuliana Tedeschi, a young woman from Turin's Jewish intellectual community, was deported to Birkenau concentration camp in April 1944. How she summoned all her resources to remain alive and human is the subject of this remarkable autobiographical account. This is a woman's story, seen and felt through a woman's sensibility. It is an account of the destruction of the feminine personality, the loss of the body's rhythms, of intimacy, beauty and the sense of self. Yet simultaneously it affirms the human spirit in bizarre touches of tenderness: women gently pushing prams bearing, not babies, but heaps of Nazi loot: a birch tree in leaf glimpsed as the exhausted inmates return to the camp.Miraculously, despite the ever-present threat of annihilation, what prevails is a woman's frank love of the body and the senses, and a close bond with fellow prisoners. Spanning the extremes of human experience, this book depicts a nightmare world of suffering and survival, inhabited by people stripped to their very essence.