Not every book can stand up to a question that is often put openly to its author: Why does this book exist? Why, to what end, prompted by what urge did you initiate this effort? I think that this anthology can stand up to the question and also to the opposite question: Why only now? Why so late?
Late, yes: had the collection and transcription of these life stories been undertaken earlier, the memory of those interviewed would have been sharper, and their number greater. Many of our fellow former deportees have died. Late, for reasons of organization, but also because only recently, and not just in Italy, have we fully recognized that mass political deportation, accompanied by the will to slaughter and by the reestablishment of a slave economy, is central to the history of this century, on the same level as the tragic introduction of nuclear weapons. It’s also central in the memory of the survivors. Almost all the interviewees, even those who suffered less, even those whose health and family were not permanently affected, even those few who (for reasons we respect) refused to talk, know it, feel it, and said it, more or less explicitly. Finally, this modern-day return to barbarity is central in the conscience of the guilty and their heirs. If it weren’t so, we wouldn’t have witnessed the obscene efforts of the revisionists, young historians who have in recent years come out into the open, and though they claim to be politically pure, tabulae rasae, impartial, neutral, receptive to all the pros and cons, devote pages and pages of polemical acrobatics to proving that we didn’t see what we saw, didn’t live what we lived. Although the introduction doesn’t say so, this anthology of brutality and of pain deliberately inflicted is dedicated to them.
The level, the tone, and the historical value of the testimony varies. It couldn’t be otherwise: among the deportees were men and women; intellectuals, factory workers, and peasants; partisans, opponents with a strong political commitment, and poor souls rounded up randomly in the street; believers and laymen; Christians and Jews. Nonetheless, the stories largely coincide in certain essential aspects, which distinguish them from the recollections (often just as painful and dramatic) of returning soldiers or of former prisoners of war. There is, everywhere, described with naïveté or with surprising expressive strength, the trauma of separation, of feeling uprooted: the sealed train (an inevitable detail, to the point of becoming the very symbol of deportation) abruptly tears you away from your environment, climate, country, family, profession, language, friendships, and hurls you into an alien environment, strange, incomprehensible, hostile. Sometimes the deportee doesn’t even know what corner of Europe he has landed in. It’s the Lager, the KZ: new words for him, never heard before. In a way, it’s an upside-down world, where honesty and gentleness are punished, while violence, betrayal, and deception are rewarded. Here, as is to be expected, destinies and accounts differ. There are those who give up right away and adjust instinctively to a subhuman existence; those who try hard to understand and to react; those who seek, and find, comfort in their faith; those (in particular the political detainees, and especially the Communists) who recognize around them a life force, an untamed will to continue the struggle, an experience and an international solidarity that alleviate the material and moral sufferings of the newcomers. The events that follow diverge as well. Some found their families, homes, friends, jobs, and for them the liberation was a happy time, without shadows or difficulties. But some found their families annihilated, their homes destroyed, the world around them indifferent and deaf to their anguish, and had to laboriously rebuild a new life on the ruins of the old one. For them, the grief has never ended.
Another feature that unites all these interviews is their spontaneity, and the goodwill with which they were granted. Often one has the impression that the desire to talk, to find an interested and attentive listener, is old, and that the opportunity to give written form to experiences by now remote in time had long been hoped for. Many of the depositions share a characteristic trait: the need to speak, to “speak about it,” goes back to the time of imprisonment. Sometimes, it’s almost a vow, a promise that the believer makes to God and the nonbeliever to himself: If I ever return, I will speak, so that my life will not have been in vain. In other words, the hope of survival coincides with the obsessive hope of being able to tell others, to sit beside the fire, around the table, and talk: like Ulysses at the court of the Phaeacian king, like Silvio Pellico after surviving the squalor of the Spielberg, like Ruzante returning from battle, like Tibullus’ soldier who narrates his exploits and “draws his camp on the table with wine”; and like the unforgettable soldier described by Eduardo de Filippo, who returns “town by town” from Germany to his starving and “millionaire” Naples, right after the war, and seeks, in vain, someone who will listen to him.1 The veteran’s tale is a literary genre.
For the survivor, bearing witness is an important and complex undertaking. It’s perceived simultaneously as a moral and civic duty, as a primary, liberating necessity, and as social prestige. Those who lived in the Lager see themselves as custodians of a fundamental experience, included in world history, witnesses by right and by obligation, frustrated if their testimony is not sought and understood, rewarded if it is. Therefore, the interview that preceded this anthology was, for many of us, a unique and memorable experience, the event that we had waited for since the day of our liberation, and that gave meaning to liberation itself.
There are many of us (but every year our number decreases) who remember the specific way in which we feared death down there. If we die here in silence, as our enemies would like, if we do not return, the world will not know what man was capable of, and still is; the world will not know itself, and will be in greater danger of repeating National Socialist barbarity, or some other, equivalent barbarity, regardless of its real or declared political origin.
In this urge to live to tell the story, this awareness of a clear historical obligation that surfaced in the rare moments of respite, many found the strength to resist, day after day. The idea for this book originated in the rational need to bear witness. To those who conceived, financed, and promoted it, to the young researchers who listened patiently to our reminiscences, often confused and upset by a renewed anguish, and to those who worked to reconstruct them, we offer our gratitude as survivors who are no longer young, who are not always heard, but who have not forgotten.
Foreword to La vita offesa: Storia e memoria dei lager nazisti nei racconti
di duecento sopravvissuti (Offended Life: The History and Memory of
the Nazi Lagers in the Stories of Two Hundred Survivors), edited by Anna
Bravo and Daniele Jalla (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1987)
1. Silvio Pellico (1789–1859) was a patriot and dramatist who was imprisoned for eight years in Spielberg prison in Brunn. Ruzante was the stage name of the playwright Angelo Beolco (1496–1542), whose dialogue Il parlamento de Ruzante tells of his return from the Venetian war front, only to find that he has lost his wife, his land, and his honor. Tibullus (c. 55 bc–19 bc) was a Roman poet. Napoli milionaria!, by the Neapolitan Eduardo De Filippo (1900–1984), premiered in 1945.