Bruck says no to award as Mussolini still honorary citizen of Anzio.

The Hungarian-born Bruck, who has spent most of her adult life in Italy, cited her objections in an open letter to Anzio's right-wing mayor Candido De Angelis, reports news agency ANSA.

The 90-year-old writer said the town had refused to honour Adele di Consiglio, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, whose family had been "annihilated by Nazi-Fascist barbarity."

Bruck went on to note that Anzio had conferred honorary citizenship on Italy's wartime fascist dictator Benito Mussolini "who still has many followers in your area."

• Pope Francis visits Holocaust survivor Edith Bruck in Rome

De Angelis said that Mussolini has had honorary citizenship of Anzio since 1924 and that none of his predecessors as mayor, of whom several were communists and socialists, had ever revoked it.

Bruck, who was visited at her Rome home by Pope Francis earlier this year, was born into a poor Jewish family in rural Hungary in 1931.

At the age of 12 she and her family were deported to Auschwitz, and then to other extermination camps: Dachau, Christianstadt, Bergen-Belsen.

In 1945 she was freed by the Allies along with one sister and one brother. Her parents and another brother did not survive the concentration camps.