´The Beautiful Days of My Youth´

 

Born in Dej, Ana Novac (born Zimra Harsányi) grew up in Oradea (Nagyvárad). In 1944, she shared the fate of the Hungarian Jews, the last to be brought to Auschwitz. She was just a 14-year old girl hence the ironic title of her memoir, originally wroten in French The Beautiful Days of My Youth, which I´ve read in the German translation by the late Eva Moldenhauer. The diary covers her six- month experiences in Auschwitz and Plaszow, a camp in the South of Krakow, and many other small camps in the region. 

Every single memoir and story about Shoah helps to redraw the social and psychological escape of the tragedy. Even if it is mentioning new details about the circumstances and the interactions within the camp, or just shares personal feelings and memories, every single line of a testimony matters. 

Life at 14 means so much for young people. But for a generation of Jews who survived the Shoah - Ana´s parents and brothers didn´t - this formative time was associated with hunger, survival and the cruely of the Kapos. A time that will leave their mind and bodies with trauma for ever.

After being freed, she settled in Bucharest, Romania. In the mid-1960s she moved to Berlin and further on to Paris where she worked in the field of theatre and as an author. 

Her testimonies were not shared with her Hungarian or Romanian audiences and she is hardly known in Romania, although she used to have a relatively active presence in the world of theatre in the 1950s and 1960s - inculding by having one of her plays played on a main stage. Her memoir was published in Romanian only in 2004. The Romanian Secret police - Securitate - followed her - through a mole infiltrating the direct entourage of her then husband, the critic and writer Paul Schuster - and was perfectly informed about her intention to write the memoir. As a Hungarian-Jewish writer and intellectual she was a double target. Her first version of her memoir will be published in Hungarian - as A téboly hétköznapjai - at the end of the 1960s, where she lived for a short time, accompanying her then husband. The memoir was afterwards translated into French by Jean Parvulesco, a Romanian born journalist living in France, as Les Beaux Jours de Ma Jeunesse.

There is more than one generation of Romanians who grew up unaware of the Shoah and how it affected their fellow Jews. Although Novac´s story is related to the Hungarian pro-Nazi government who ruled at the time Transylvania, her testimonies would have raise questions about what happened with the Jews from the Romanian-led territories, which weren´t friendlier towards Jews either. 

The Beautiful Days of My Youth echoes those times and adds more knowledge to the topic, both humanly and historically. Her diary was compared to Anne Frank´s but had a lower literary profile due to the intricacies and anti-semitism of the Cold War politics in Romania.