For many peo­ple, the word ​“Holo­caust” sum­mons images of ghet­tos, forced-labor camps, and mass-mur­der cen­ters of cen­tral and east­ern Europe. How­ev­er, a large num­ber of Jews who lived out­side the areas that are usu­al­ly the focus of Holo­caust sto­ries were deeply impact­ed as well.

Such was the case with Maria Eisen­stein (neé Moldauer), a young Jew­ish woman whose stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Flo­rence took her far from her Pol­ish Jew­ish par­ents and her birth city, Vien­na. Still in Italy when her adopt­ed coun­try entered the war, Maria found her­self an ene­my of the state: a title thrust upon for­eign Jews in Italy dur­ing its Fas­cist days. Her account of her time in an intern­ment camp, first pub­lished in Italy in Octo­ber 1944, is a fas­ci­nat­ing look at a less­er-known Holo­caust experience. 

This new edi­tion, trans­lat­ed by Will Schutt and pub­lished by the Cen­tro Pri­mo Levi, is the first Eng­lish-lan­guage crit­i­cal edi­tion. It includes not only Eisenstein’s writ­ings from her time incar­cer­at­ed at Vil­la Sorge in Lan­ciano, Italy, but also help­ful con­tex­tu­al mate­r­i­al, such as an after­word writ­ten by Eric Feingersh Steele, the author’s son; and his­tor­i­cal con­text by Car­lo Spar­ta­co Capogre­co, a his­to­ri­an who, arguably, res­cued the man­u­script and Eisen­stein from obscu­ri­ty. As his essay ​“In Search of Maria Eisen­stein” explains, the orig­i­nal pub­li­ca­tion of Internee Num­ber 6 was essen­tial­ly banned in Italy in the years fol­low­ing its 1944 pub­li­ca­tion. Res­i­dents of Lan­ciano, in par­tic­u­lar, were not ready to con­front their own role in facil­i­tat­ing the unjust incar­cer­a­tion of their Jew­ish neighbors. 

With­in her diary, Eisen­stein is crit­i­cal of the treat­ment she and her sev­en­ty-five fel­low internees received at the hands of Ital­ian author­i­ties, who are some­times bum­bling, some­times cru­el, and always exploita­tive. Her tone often drips with sar­casm, yet there are also moments when she lays her fears down on the page, espe­cial­ly as rumors of what was hap­pen­ing to her fam­i­ly in east­ern Europe trick­led into the camp. Eisen­stein lets read­ers into the wak­ing night­mares she has of ​“Jew­ish corpses … in one inter­minable row, a row sev­en­teen mil­lion bod­ies long” that haunt her every night. 

While it is true that Eisenstein’s Holo­caust expe­ri­ence was sig­nif­i­cant­ly dif­fer­ent from that her rel­a­tives who per­ished, for instance, in the Łódź Ghet­to — she had ade­quate food and even free­dom to occa­sion­al­ly leave the camp — the gnaw­ing anx­i­ety at the heart of Internee Num­ber 6 leaves a strong impres­sion. The author’s expe­ri­ence and unique voice, and the fact that hers was the first pub­lished mem­oir depict­ing life for a Jew in a Fas­cist deten­tion cen­ter will make this mem­o­rable for researchers and casu­al read­ers alike.