Light Dancing Restless — A Review

On November 19, 1943, Carla Simons—a forty-year-old Dutch writer, translator, and woman of Jewish heritage—was murdered at Auschwitz. Her diary (1942-1943), recently published in Italian, is a radical breath of air. There is no hatred in these pages. This woman possessed the strength, the heart, and the intelligence to resist the horror that slowly enveloped her. There is neither hardness nor bitterness in this acute observer, someone capable of seeing perfectly into events as they unfold. Between the chronicle of a daily life growing less and less human ("Every time we think it could be worse, the limits haven't yet been crossed"); between her relationship with nature, with the suffering and hope of children; between enormous questions (do we change or stay the same?; will we be able to forgive, once all this horror is finished?); between various forms of disability (from her blind friend to the eruption of Operation T4)—even in the certainty of the end, Simons chooses never to answer evil with evil. Because it would only multiply it tenfold.