by Luce d'Eramo
I stare at those letters as if they were relics: they prove to me that at least on one occasion I broke away from my classist snake, discarding my social identity along with that duffel bag, so I wouldn’t be protected by it any longer.
I took the folder with me and hurried home.
My mother’s letters, on gray-blue linen stationery, are all stamped by the censors, with pen strokes here and there. The writing is large and distinct, the lines spaced. Her feelings are patent and proud, the phrasing lofty:
… remember never to do anything either in public or in private against your dignity as a girl and as an Italian, nor allow others to do so, to do anything against your dignity, that is. (April 1, 1944)
I wonder whether this interlude of yours wasn’t fated (since you certainly sought this fate). To learn about people and things and nations. I only pray that the Almighty sustain you and make you a serene observer. (April 27, 1944)
With respect to the reconstruction of my time at Höchst, recounted in “In the Ch 89,” I discover two repressions that I attribute to my mental snake, and which I intend to go back and reexamine more deliberately.
One concerns my correspondence. It isn’t true, as I said in “In the Ch 89,” that in March I stopped writing to my parents once and for all. I had resumed in early April, then stopped immediately afterward. In early May I’d written again, with another interruption toward the end of that month (the time of the strike, prison, and suicide attempt), and a new exchange of letters from the hospital, starting June 20, as shown by an appeal from my mother. I am reconstructing this writing with its fits and starts from salutations like “My dear silent daughter,” and from pleas such as “Let us hear from you, your mother is begging you.”
The other repression regards my intention to relocate to the Collis Metall Werke in Mannheim. From my mother’s letters it appears that, in early April, I’d asked her to procure a recommendation for me that would enable me to obtain a reassignment (it was the period of time when I was avoiding the comrades who had treated me as a “spy” and as a “provò,” provocateur).
I can’t remember the reason why I wanted to go to that factory and not another. In any case, I had completely forgotten the whole episode. At first, my mother had made another attempt to ask why I didn’t request repatriation from the Italian consul instead, then why I didn’t at least ask to be hired as an interpreter rather than as a worker; ultimately she’d suggested the names of senior officials to whom I might turn, to support my request for transfer. It seems I wrote to one of them and obtained what I wanted: the manager of the Collis Metall Werke had had me summoned but I turned the opportunity down (most likely when I’d linked up with Grùscenka and the Poles and reconciled with Martine). My mother was confused by my impulses.
Mainly she portrayed her days to me in great detail. Now I understand that she was trying to share their quietude with me, in part to raise my spirits and make me feel close to her, but I also know that back then her accounts had a chilling effect on me, and her anguish for her daughter and for “human suffering” sounded abstract to me. She spoke of her early-afternoon walks along Lake Como, her tone relaxed. In between the depictions of boat tours in Varenna, concerts, afternoon teas, and a visit to Villa Monastero—whose “paths and terraces and loggias and stairways” she described to me, noting the “marvelous view” they afforded—her anxieties for me cropped up in these terms:
You say you’re hungry and your work is exhausting and arduous. Can’t you find something else to do? (May 5, 1944)
You know, I don’t understand why you don’t find more intelligent work than that of a femme de peine. (May 10, 1944)
I must have responded with harsh words, because on May 15 she wrote:
Mothers understand that life often makes us speak and act angrily, in part due to a suppressed intolerance of life itself, too often onerous and déséspérante. We’d like to overcome all opposition and we can’t, so we rebel however and whenever it occurs. Yesterday we had a nice excursion …
And she spoke about the beautiful vistas to end on a hopeful note: “We’ll go back again together when you return.”
The following day she expressed concern about my health:
You wrote that you’re starving and meanwhile you’re gaining weight. It’s the bread that’s fattening.
And the day after she explained:
It’s the bread that makes your skin break out. If you ate more meat and more fruit instead, you’d feel better.
On May 19 she worried:
You write that you won’t return ahead of time, because you want to “acquire social experience.” But don’t you think six months are sufficient for that?
On May 20 she was distressed:
My dear little pupetta, I keep thinking about your hands since I know you’re not working as an interpreter and I’m worried about them. How is it that they still haven’t healed? Didn’t you get the cream I sent you? Show that not everyone is a traitor. Live in accordance with your own ideals. So many illusions and so much presumption in us poor atoms tossed about by the tempestuous winds of war. And Wiechert is right: start living a simple, solitary life among the fields and woods, gardening and reading books. The rest is vain agitation, pointless experience.
By then she no longer wrote a couple of times a week, as she had the first few months, but every day; she lived in a state of insomnia, and implored me to come back: “It’s your mother who is begging you.” She’d sent me one parcel after another (all arrived too late), and she harbored hopes that my father would forgive me: one night, hearing her crying, he’d allowed her to speak about me. On another evening “Papa” had let her read one of my letters aloud to him and had listened “with understanding.” She kept praising him to me, a man who lived for his family, a hard worker, generous (“What would we do without him?”). Now I realize that she had assumed the role of mediator, and was performing with me the same kind of conciliation toward my father that she performed with him toward me. At the time, however, I thought she had lost all critical judgment if she could be grateful to a man who even disapproved of her maternal love. At least in that regard, when I was back at home, I’d heard her exclaim, “Your father is a dear man, kind and amiable, but so vacuous at times.”
I probably felt she was insecure and I must have wanted to bolster her, because the letters show that I reassured her of my affection each time, and expressed my admiration for her “pureness of heart,” her “elegant way of dressing,” and she replied that she’d told “Papa” how much I appreciated her. Finally, it appears that I alluded to vague persecutions but had to then add that I was “strong,” because she wrote back that she’d been quite alarmed but was glad that I was “well-liked, respected by everyone,” and she immediately explained the importance of dignity. Now her writing was more agitated, jerky, the lines closer together; this reminder of the rules was now peremptory. After she learned that I’d been in prison, she wrote to me on June 28 (her last letter):
I thought that everything was settled and then that terrible misfortune happens to you and you go to the hospital. When will your trials end? Remember, my dear daughter, that I want nothing more than your physical, moral, social, and judicial well-being. You must not do anything against the laws, usages, and customs for any reason. Don’t smoke. Don’t give in to instinct. Exchange what I sent you, if you receive it, for food, but do so openly. Remember the words of Manzoni: “Never say a word that applauds vice and mocks virtue.” And obey my advice, I beg you. No one will ever love you more selflessly than your mother.
I reassemble the letters and am about to put them back in the folder when I see an envelope sticking out from the bottom of the cover flap, which I hadn’t noticed. I pull it out, feel it, it’s bumpy. I open it and find strange strips of paper covered with my dense, cramped writing, a spattering of marks crammed all around the pages (the scraps that remain), and four aerograms written in pencil, the words crowded together there too, as if there was never eno
ugh room to write.
Those irregular cut-up scraps are what remain of my letters from Höchst. As I read, I am unable to come up with an explanation for those cuttings. I seem to think (maybe I’m wrong) that censorship at the time was limited to drawing black lines through forbidden phrases and did not resort to scissors, let alone take the trouble to put together the saved fragments with Scotch tape. What on earth could I have written if even the preserved passages were an indictment? Why hadn’t they also censored snippets like these (undated among the clippings)?
I saw photographs of young German girls in a German magazine, volunteers employed as postal clerks or in other labor service jobs. Heroines. I felt bad. And to think that I would be terribly ashamed to be pictured there. [snip] How can they smile so impudently and confidently in those pages? So much rhetoric.
[snip] on this point: poor people, when they can, spend it all on food. Mama who is astonished and looks down on “instincts” doesn’t know what it is to live on rutabagas.
[snip] politically as well, even the letters from [censored] seem false and rhetorical to me.
And I confess: I hide the fact of having volunteered out of patriotism even from the Germans, from the SS. I’m ashamed of it. I’m telling you the truth, I’m ashamed of that. Oh, not of having done it: indeed I can’t even believe I was so serious, so steadfast in my impulses, despite having thought it all through. But no one can believe and understand it. A little like Papa [censored]. So I put up with it and keep quiet. I tell people: compulsory labor service for declared Fascists. But I’m ashamed of having been a declared Fascist. Genuinely.
On a scrap where the ink is diluted, as if stained by water (my tears or my mother’s?), I read a clear affirmation: “I don’t want to have an individual life or opinions anymore.” Further down, between strokes of the censor’s pen, this little phrase appears:
The Ighé [I meant the IG Farben] is independent and the Arbeitsfront bows to it.
So I had already sensed at Höchst the discovery, which I thought I had only made in Dachau, of the Nazi Party’s subordination to the economic power (of capitalism).
In a fragment that was obscure, too cut-up, I finally realized that I was replying to the letter in which my mother had written me that, other than a life in harmony with nature and among books, “the rest is vain agitation, pointless experience.” I copy it, again without piecing together the snippets:
The rest is vain agitation, true. But not pointless experience. That is, vain [censored] would and should achieve the intended purpose: yes. But not [snip] of the individual who experiences it. In fact, the more he [censored] experience, the truer and more considerate of others [snip] he will emerge from it.
The letters are postmarked from Frankfurt and not from the Lager; a nurse must have mailed them for me. In one of them I read:
[censored] a society that I had understood differently at the time of my blissful, untroubled studies. I’m in the hospital [censored]. Like in the Lager, like in prison.
There is another scissored scrap that seems to be on different paper from that of the camp. I read the fragment of a sentence:
rumors about my alleged spying activities for which I had been imprisoned [I note the historical past tense].
I had probably already intuited that the class struggle was the most forbidden topic, since, while I said too much about my political opinions (on Fascism and Nazism), I was careful not to mention our failed strike. At the time we workers didn’t know that the Nazis had been preparing for a mass uprising of foreign workers since ’42 by developing a plan called Operation Valkyrie, but even I with my individualistic upbringing had grasped the fact that, for me personally, rebellion could be overlooked, whereas if there were even a remote hint of a class action in concert with my comrades I was done for.
In another letter I describe vomiting, blood transfusions, hemorrhaging for six weeks. I write that I have a fever and am urinating blood as a result of the hardships I’ve undergone (I don’t mention the attempted suicide). I announce that “I will be officially repatriated.” Perhaps a few days later (the postmarks are illegible and I did not write the dates), I report:
The day before yesterday the consul in Frankfurt actually came in person with another man (his deputy) to visit me. He wants to have me return home and I am totally in agreement.
But perhaps the letter that strikes me the most is the one where I ask, “Do you mind if I come back?” Adding:
You’ll see, when I return you’ll tell me: “Well? You look fine. Where’s all the suffering you say you witnessed and endured?”
The scraps end there. Missing is most of the information provided in my mother’s letters, which must have gotten lost somehow, about my hunger, about the Collis Metall Werke, about my work as a femme de peine, about the lesions on my hands, which had actually lasted much longer than I remembered (another repression to bolster the memory of being much stronger than I was, physically as well). But there is, in these mutilated sentences, the social rage those letters hadn’t been aware of. Reading them, it appeared that I was speaking and acting “angrily” because of my rebellious nature. The only revolt my mother had been fervent about was the famous crusade for washbasins (I had told her about that too!), “in rightful defense of decency,” as she had commented.
XV
So, not only were the events true, but I also found everything I was looking for. I uncovered your most secret hiding place (I’m talking to my snake), now it’s I who will stifle you.
It was all true, I keep telling myself. It was even more true than I’d remembered because the exchange of letters represents an umbilical cord with the family that was not abruptly severed, and therefore the attempted suicide and the about-face in Verona appear less like the rash actions of a minor, prone to extreme emotions, than like virtually the last resort of a person acknowledging the state of things after having tried in vain to change them. There is an inaccessible divinity, a father awaiting the unconditional surrender of a daughter who dared to violate his law; there are the unbending principles of “laws, usages, and customs”; there is the frightened solitude of a girl who, from the depths of a Lager, expresses her convictions, declares her new political positions (even from those few snippets of words you can see that she persists in it, keeps returning to it), while at the same time pitying her mother’s vain anguish and reassuring her, “Don’t worry, I’m strong!” But bounced like a ball between her mother’s “finer things” and the filthy spoon of the lice-ridden man at the Lager’s canteen, that girl had been a lot less “strong” than I remembered her. No wonder I had omitted, in my reconstruction, the steady trickle of my sporadic correspondence. The fact that I constantly went back to writing showed that, in my heart, during those first six months of my volunteer experience, there had not been as clean a break with my environment as I wanted to believe. That’s where my classist snake had lurked: in the recesses of my feelings that resisted making an absolute leap to the other side.
Never mind that it may not have been easy; Dostoyevsky said that reality justifies everything, but that doesn’t change a thing. So don’t interrupt me (to my snake). Here’s the proof: if that girl preferred to die, seek asylum in a K-Lager, and disappear out of the country after being paralyzed, it means that, even when she was well, she had lost all hope of being able to continue the social struggle once she found herself back with her family. As a result, from the moment she returned to Italy on a stretcher, she was subconsciously resigned to giving up. She made the last wrench away from her surroundings with Gheorg the poet. But that split convinced her once and for all of the impossibility of reconciling private affections and the collective struggle. By then she was snared by the dissociation cultivated by those who do not struggle; namely, that fighting for social justice was incompatible with personal happiness. She was committed to finding fulfillment in the private sphere (with Domenico).
Added to that was the fact that everyone around her after the war—just like her
father, though for opposite reasons—expected her to regret her volunteer work in the Third Reich. But she’d already answered those accusations in her letters from Höchst, when she was ashamed of having been a Fascist but not of having left home; in fact, she couldn’t “even believe” she’d been “so serious, so steadfast” in her impulses as to enlist for the Lagers. The condemnation of those who had been part of the Resistance rekindled all the unpleasant insults, the mockery she’d experienced at Höchst, the arguments with her friend-enemy in the cattle car, the beating from the red triangles in the Dachau toilet. But it was there, in Dachau, that the snake had unquestionably settled in, when Lucia had chosen a solitary path of rebellion, which lasted thirty years … She’d fled from Verona but also from Dachau: from her privileged status but also from the fate common to those on the other side, who have no means of getting out, who lack the psychological resources that stemmed from her class and allowed her to address the guards uncaringly. You’re shriveling up, huh? (to my snake).
That girl, later woman, saw the ambiguity of her social consciousness as the objective impossibility of sharing what she had learned with anyone; consequently, as luck would have it, she forgot the actions by which she had personally gone to the other side. Rooted for half a lifetime on a pillar of silence, like an ancient anchorite …
And it never occurred to me (odd, don’t you think?) that this silence, which I had imposed on myself and which I attributed to social pressure, could actually be ascribed to me.
It isn’t true, I was well aware of it—even now I’m lying. The proof is that in ’54, referring to my escape from the K-Lager, I wrote in “Asylum at Dachau”: “I didn’t make it.” A judgment that was also appropriate later on. So I knew it even while my memory was silent regarding IG Farben, the repatriation, the redeparture from Verona, and being interned as an asocial, a black triangle. I knew it when I went back to Germany in the fall of ’54, one of the many events that I have not written about here (I couldn’t recount everything). But I can’t omit that: I wandered along the Rhine for a couple of months, with stops in Bonn and Cologne, never thinking of going to Frankfurt-Höchst though I spent several days in Mainz, thirty kilometers from my first Lager. I was convinced I’d gone back there to see Schwester Vincentia, as I’d promised nine years earlier in August ’45 when I left for Homburg with the Russians. I kept repeating that I’d been right to live.