A moving book this one written in four hands by Gherardo Colombo and Liliana Segre:
La Sola Colpa di Essere Nati published by Garzanti.The ex prosecutor Colombo, in a long interview asks to Liliana Segre, one of the main activists in remembering the Holocaust and Auschwitz, where she spent several time during the last world war conflict and the only survivor of her family, of telling to all of us more about her family, the previous years that would have brought Italy at the racial laws, and at the heavy emargination experienced by the italian jewish community.
A community, this italian one, absolutely innested in the social tissue of the country. Jewish are in Italy from more than 2000 years! In this sense you can read the book by Bruno Segre called Gli Ebrei in Italia for more informations.
Not only there was a solidity of relationship, but the treats of faces and bodies absolutely italians, mixed; Liliana Segre remembers that some Italians don't imagine that there is jewish blood in their veins because of it.
They went to school in catholic school: there hasn't never been a cultural separation. There was strong solidity and a complete embrace of all italian values; you musn't think for a second that the advent of Mussolini, in this context, was considered from Jewish a terrible news; most Jewish, in particular the richest ones embraced fascism and not only; Liliana Segre remembers as his uncle was a great Mussolini's activist, in love for fascism and actively in the the movement.
The father of Liliana, Alberto, who had lost his wife prematurely, a great sadness for the same Liliana, was a man who didn't have any great consideration of Mussolini, and there were, remembers Liliana, big discussions at home because of it. You can just imagine what it meant for all of them the arrival of racial laws. Most of the Jewish who had been soldiers during the first world war appeared confused and insulted by what Mussolini had done to them because they had been great servants of the italian cause. Most of them wrote letters to Mussolini telling to him that this one was a big shame.
And one day, Liliana Segre was rejected by the school where she was studying; because Jewish.
She tried to understand why; but no one had to courage of telling her the reasl reason why she couldn't go at school anymore.
She was surrounded by many students who appreciated her, and she had many friends. After that, no one called her anymore, and she received many calls where anonymous people told her of dying.
In the family there was a maid called Susanna. She was catholic and a devoted of the Segre family. When they were all captured and ended in Auschwitz, Susanna was the only one who stayed at home preserving that few objects still remained there; she waited for the arrival of Liliana Segre, for giving her back what remained of the old world left behind.
For trying to change the course of the event, as many other jewish families did, Liliana Segre, her father and all of them received the baptism.
A conversion, sometimes could change the course of the event. Not in their case. And it was also difficult to find someone who baptized her father, because Liliana tells that Alberto specified that he wasn't a believer at all, and that he was doing this for saving the daughter. Candid soul, priests, hearing these words didn't want to baptize them. A priest of a countryside, understood that that gesture of Alberto could change the existence of the father of Liliana and of the same Liliana and agreed.
Because of the bad conditions of his parents, Alberto can't escape with all the rest of the family for other places more secure than his house in Corso Magenta.
Switzerland rejected Alberto and Liliana; with fury he threw away all his collection of stamps and three diamonds; arrested in the italian border, they were put in jail at Varese, then Milan and later via the railway track 21, Auschwitz.
Liliana Segre underlines that signing that racial law, Mussolini approved the disappearence in the italian soil of wagons and wagons of people.
That world became a non-world, described very well later only by Primo Levi, a person, says Liliana Segre, she has always admired so badly.
People became things; when they were still part of the social tissue of Italy, the existence of Liliana was a good one.
She remembers how she loved to do or receive calls because intrigued by the telephone; in her house there were many books; her quotidianity was beauty; once in the camp no one had any of the past facilities or also, let's use this expression, truisms that the normality brought with it; if a girl had a piece of paper and she could choose how to use it, if for cleaning the body or, more luckily or writing down her name, that could be forgotten considering the cruelties lived, commisurated at a miracle.
Colombo asks at Liliana Segre if Primo Levi killed himself or differently if he accidentally fell. A suicide is too controvertial sometimes and each of us; we would want that a disgrace would prevails.
Liliana Segre tells that to her point of view Levi killed himself, because Levi said her once, starting also a pretty hard discussion with her via letter that it is impossible to escape, mentally by a place like Auschwitz; not only...I am also sure of it; I read The Last Interview Conversations a book written by Giovanni Tesio published by Polity (but I heard that there is also an italian version) where at a certain point Levi will tell to the reporter that he wants to stay free that days, because he is waiting a lady that certain saturday.The reporter doesn't imagine who that lady could be. Substantially he was waiting for Lady Death. Plus he decided to kill himself during the day of feast, on Saturday; most people kill themselves the day of feast.
Most people, when they experience a horror like that one, once survived feel the sensation of being a survivor. It happened to Levi; he decided to tell his experience at school, writing powerful books, but at the same time remained trapped in Auschwitz, with his mind, with his feelings. Segre doesn't feel the same. She hasn't never felt that she was a survivor and she hasn't never experienced a sense of guilty because she survived and other people no.
Each of them once in the camp had a triangle in the uniform; pink for homosexuals, green for jewish people, green delinquents, red politicians, brown rom, black for a lot of categories of people: mentally sick, sometimes rom, but also lesbians and so on.
Liliana remembers the various jewish groups and she felt a special connections with the french jewish population so similar at the italian one.
What was systemic, Liliana Segre tells without doubts, is that people had to be reduced at a nothing; people had to be destroyed, mentally and physically.
Once arrived in the camp, they removed all the objects you had with you; then they rremoved all the clothes, and you were naked; then they cut hair, put on that uniform and before the tattoo tells Segre.
That number, adds Liliana Segre, marked who they were and their experience in Auschwitz. It's also thanks to that number that they know what happened, and they can tell their own history.
70 of the 600 people in that wagons that brought Liliana Segre at Auschwitz were choosen for surviving.
Liliana Segre tells that for pure case she was picked up for working in a factory, and she adds that she didn't have any kind of manuality; that job, indoor saved her existence under many ways.
They had just a dish a "gavetta" tells Liliana where during the morning they received a chai, as they called this beverage. It could be a tea, maybe. This plate served also for everything else. In the factory at lunch they ate a kind of soup where you could find everything in it. Once a dead mouse, another time a sole of a shoe.
The evening the best dish: black bread with some jam pretty acid or a sausage of undefined taste but the beat meal!
A priviledge she had was that she could take a shower because they worked in a factory where they made pieces of metal.
Liliana tried to obtain thanks to another prisoner in the camp from Tuscany, informations of his father, but then she lost that contact, and only later, once the war over, and thanks to a relative of her converted to the Catholicism, she discovered that her father was dead.
That hygienic conditions were also reasons for the birth of abscesses, and once was dramatically cut by her friends at the camp; for the rest all the parasites were lived like another consequences of that existence and she didn't mind at the end. The important was to save the existence.
Liliana tells also of the walk of the death, once the camp destroyed by the allies.
"You couldn't fall; they would have killed you" she remarks.
But it was a heavy, cold winter!
It is in this monent that Liliana discovsrs a big strength, a strength that won't never let her fall.
Liliana once set free and in Germany sends to a gentle lady called Corti a message: she is alive and she will return home. That lady calls all the remaining relatives of Liliana.
When they see her at Corso Magenta (but the house is not anymore her house and at first she is not recognized by anyone), the relatives finds a completely different girl; Liliana, desperate that that one is the rest of her family, remembers that in Germany she ate compulsively whatever she finds and that in the while became fat, ugly and a wild girl. These treats, so different from the elegant and educated girl that her relatives knew, at first shocked them.
Liliana admits that she was wild, she was ugly, she was rude, because she was treated with dishumanity. A psychological help would have been helpful but at that times it was uncommon and that uncle and that aunt didn't know how to treat anymore Liliana.
Seeing her contemporaries meant to Liliana another shock, because simply she couldn't recognize herself in the faces of that young people who hadn't passed a nightmare like that one experienced by Liliana.
What Liliana searched was not for a boyfriend, not becoming someone know, she searched for normality, because once you experience the life in a camp like Auschwitz, I think that the main treat that you want to restore is normality. And in fact, she tells to Colombo, she became a mother, she assisted her granny and she worked in the family activity.
Not only: Liliana admits that also now, at 90 years, she thinks that she is different, under many ways, if she compares herself with her contemporaries, because of what she saw, and what she lived.
Liliana looked at her contemporaries seeing their enthusiasm in buying new clothes or shoes, while she had experienced the uniform of Auschwitz, her nudity.
Clothes, dresses were not important to her: she didn't want anything new; not with the rapidity her uncle and aunt bought them to her.
Liliana adds that now she loves to be very elagant, but for sure she didn't mind when she was 15 years old.
The personal intimate reconstruction of Liliana Segre follows the one of Italy and also the one of the high school. Five years in one in a private school, for avoiding a return at classroom not anymore representing her as a person, slowly slowly and keeping tamed her demons, Liliana restart to establish good relationships with other girlfriends.
Much more old inside than her schoolmates and teachers, once she started to live with her grand-parents, she felt more relaxed, she abandoned her bulimic habits, she lost weight, She knows Alfredo her love of her existence in 1948 and since there they stayed together for more than 60 years.
Alfredo cultivated several political ideals. Communist when young, later he embaraced the Movimento Sociale Italiano, substantially the new fascism. Liliana tells that he made that decisions because he noticed that politicians were real burglars and so it was better to embrace a different party.
This idea put in a bad mood Liliana Segre. Also his husband made personal choices during the war; she helped Communists during the war, and ended in several camps: he had choosen, while she hasn't choosen of being deported in Auschwitz, but it was a consequence of the ratial laws: so, now why a return in the past with the enemy?
At the end his husband renounced at every political role but continued to tell her that Italy represented to him a great delusion and he couldn't imagine that the democracy would have brought at all of it.
Liliana Segre tells that she loved his husband so badly and that also if she would have broke-up with him, it wouldn't wanted to say that she didn't love him anymore.
At 50 years a severe depression at 60 Lilliana decides that it is arrived the moment of visiting schools, telling to students what happened to her when she was at Auschwitz, for remembering; for not losing memory, for avoid that a horror like that one could be perpetrated again.
There is a Time for everything, adds Liliana.
Moving beautiful buy this book for your children for yourself, for understanding better the darkest page of our history!
I thank Garzanti for the copy of this book.
Anna Maria Polidori
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