There Is a Place on Earth

This unusually moving memoir of a young wife from Turin who survived 10 months in Birkenau and Auschwitz testifies to the particular way in which the experience ravaged women physically even while their patience and support of others helped them to endure. Parks's sensitive translation conveys an almost unbearable immediacy in the author's prose as she describes the squalor, starvation and torment of the camps against a background of the crematoriums' flaming stacks. A mother of two when she entered the camps, Tedeschi recalls how rare glimpses of a leafing birch, a snatch of song or rumors of Allied advances revived her often flagging will to live. Her husband died in the camps; after the liberation, she went on to pursue a teaching career. (May)