A total absence of pathos runs through this disturbing text about the female experience in the extreme conditions of a concentration camp. With an objectivity devoid of any rhetoric, which sometimes becomes ironic distancing, the author weaves six stories about the conditions of a life taken to the limit of the human. There are not many literary testimonies of the Holocaust from the female point of view: in the conditions of the camp the survival of the prisoners was doubly difficult. But, at the same time, there is a type of perception of the inhuman that we only find in the testimonies of Anna Frank, Evgenia Ginzburg or Liana Millu. As Primo Levi states in the introduction to this book, "The Birkenau smoke is one of the most intense European testimonies about the concentration camp."
