“It’s Me, Francois,” the friendship between camp survivor Edith Brooke and Pope.

In the orderly abundance of her Roman apartment, Edith Brooke stands tall, surrounded by a lifetime of reading and a few mementos hanging on the walls. Sitting at his desk, he pours some milk into his coffee and lights a long, thin cigarette. At the age of 91, the writer sometimes lets his face light up with a wonderful cheerful air.

But as her blue gaze sweeps across the living room to the two seven-branched chandeliers in the library, her voice is tinged with a special tenderness. “The big one is mine. Little Francois gave it to me. » This is how Edith Brooke speaks of the pope as an old acquaintance. And from his eyes, which have seen the darkest nights, he smiles when he remembers the beautiful incongruity of this late friendship. “Una cosa strangessima”, “One of the weirdest things,” he said.

His latest book, translated from Italian, It’s me, Francois (Editions du Sous-Sol), recently published in France. In this brief account of his meeting with the Sovereign Pontiff in February 2021 and of the ties they have maintained since then, he recalls the happy collision, sensitivities and concerns of the past between two humanities that he wanted nothing to cross. On the one hand, the Argentinian prelate who became Pope was inhabited by the search for dialogue between religions and the value of forgiveness. On the other hand, a Jewish atheist, one of the last witnesses to the Holocaust, born in Hungary, a forgotten haven in Central Europe with mixed languages ​​and bloody borders, arrived in Italy in 1954 after years of wandering. A ruined continent.

A long writing assignment

“There is a book at the beginning of our meeting”, Edith Brooke remembers. French toastReleased in 2021 (Babelio), it was very successful in Italy. It describes the abduction in the story of the ordinary existence led as a child by Edith Brooke, the last of a large and poor family. He recounts his deportation, his experiences in the camps, in Auschwitz, then in Bergen-Belsen, and the inability to rediscover the course of his life among those who, even close friends, did not want to know anything, to hear anything.

“He asked for forgiveness for the martyrdom of the Jews. I told him I appreciated his gesture, but I couldn’t be alone in forgiving the millions who died. » Edith Brooke

“In an interview published in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, after the publication of the book, I described the pope in these words: “a man, in the noblest, highest sense of this term.” » Appalled by her words, the pope asks to see her, and the first interview is held with Edith Brooke. “He asked forgiveness for the martyrdom of the Jews” The writer recalls. He stops. “I told him I appreciated his gesture, but I couldn’t be alone in forgiving the millions who died. »