When we think about World War Two or the Holocaust, our minds go to those who fought or were deported to the camps. In this literary dialogue, Helen Finch and Alessio Baldini bring to you the voices of those writers who were left behind.

Natalia Ginzburg was 28 and the mother of three when her husband, Leone Ginzburg (an Italian Jew of Ukrainian descent) died in prison after being beaten by the Gestapo. The Ginzburg family had lived in ‘confino’ (internal exile) for a few years. As an Italian Jew, Natalia was now in hiding with her children to flee persecution. She survived to become one of the most important writers in post-war Italy. In her writings, she explores how vulnerability and dependence make us human, and often returns to how the war years have shaped her outlook on life.

Contemporary writer Katja Petrowskaja, a Jewish writer born in Ukraine and writing in German, explores narratives of Jewish family history in Ukraine and Germany before and after the Holocaust. Her major work Maybe Esther (tr. Shelley Frisch, 2014) traces the impossibility of reconstructing the lives of her family members who were destroyed in the Holocaust. More recently, Petrowskaja’s journalism from Berlin traces the connections between the Nazi invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s current war on Ukraine, started in 2022.