[2] The daughter of poor Jewish parents, she was born Edit Steinschreiber in the village of Tiszabercel near the Ukrainian border.

The family was transferred to Dachau where her father died, then to Christianstadt and finally Bergen-Belsen, where the remaining children were liberated by the Allies in 1945.

[2] She has translated works by the Hungarian poets Attila József and Miklós Radnóti into Italian.

She next married an acquaintance named Bruck to postpone her compulsory military service; she had divorced him by the time she was 20 but kept his surname.

In 1954, Bruck moved to Rome and later married Italian writer and director Nelo Risi.