by Luce d'Eramo
An hour later I had changed into Lidja’s coverall and clogs, with her scarf wound around my neck, tied under the chin like a Russian peasant girl.
“Ohhh,” Lidja starts moaning with shrill cries and I writhe as though having a colic attack. She makes a rude spluttering noise with her mouth: “I can’t hold it, I can’t hold it,” and I bend over double.
“Don’t stink up the guardhouse, you shitty Bolshevik, get to the latrines, go on,” the guard says, losing his patience.
And meekly clutching my belly and taking tight little steps as if to hold it in, I hurry out, go through the gate, straighten up and make a run for it. By the time he looks for me, sounds the alarm, and they unleash the dogs, I’m far away! Racing like mad.
Lidja was arrested as my accomplice and sent to Dachau. But as soon as they loaded her into the freight car, she jumped from the moving train and crawled to a bush with a fractured femur. She hid in a hayloft, living on chestnuts, tubers, and snails for three weeks, until the Americans arrived. I met up with her again in the transit camp in Homburg, in the Saar, when I arrived in a wheelchair with my Russian captain, six months later. She was completely healed and was dancing the Cossack, her beautiful face proud, her voice effusive: “See your gold chain? Spoils of war!” And she still laughed about the trick we’d played on the guard (she wanted to make me smile because it hurt her to see me in a wheelchair).
But I didn’t yet know any of this when I fled in her rags from the guardhouse of my old Lager at Höchst, crying from the pain of the Lagerführer’s blows, which the running aggravated. At the same time, like Lulù, I felt triumphant: finally, I thought (laughing through my tears), I myself, personally, have also been beaten. Now I’m truly like the others, thrashed, spat upon, just like them, I won’t revert back to my social class, and I ran and ran toward Mainz.
Rome, November 1977
TRANSLATOR’S NOTES
The page numbers for the translator’s notes that appear in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your ereading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.
“Arriva la banda…”: “Here comes the band, here comes the band of good-for-nothing scoundrels with the Duce as ringleader, the black shirts are all here…”
“experience human affairs sufficiently…”: From the free-verse poem “On the Death of Carlo Imbonati” (1806).
Ph 32: Though the terms Ch 89 and Ph 32 are not explained in the novel, presumably they are factory shops within the Chemical (Chemische) and Pharmaceutical (Pharmazeutisch) divisions of IG Farben.
“badogliani”: A reference to the Badogli partisans and the government of Pietro Badoglio. On September 8, 1943, Italy, formerly an ally of Germany, surrendered to the Allies (under the Badoglio government) and Italian troops ceased fighting; the fall of Mussolini had occurred in July.
maquisards: The Maquis were rural guerrilla bands of French Resistance fighters, called maquisards, during the Occupation of France in World War II.
Pétainists: After French marshal Philippe Pétain, chief of state of Vichy France, from 1940 to 1944.
the Iron Cross: A German military medal dating back to the nineteenth century. During the 1930s, the Nazi regime in Germany superimposed a swastika on it, turning it into a Nazi symbol.
KG: Kriegsgefangenen, prisoners of war.
Volksdeutschen: Ethnic Germans (excluding those of Jewish origin) living outside of Germany; they were considered German regardless of the fact that they did not hold German or Austrian citizenship. By contrast, Reichsdeutschen, or Imperial Germans, were German citizens living within Germany.
Nice and Savoy: A reference to Italian irredentism in Savoy. In November 1942, in conjunction with the German occupation of most of Vichy France, Italian forces took control of Grenoble, Nice, the Rhône River delta, and nearly all of Savoy.
Sicherheitsdienst: The Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers (SS or SD) was the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party.
“Piazza Venezia”: Mussolini talked to the crowds from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia, overlooking Piazza Venezia.
“the Na 14”: Here, “Na” stands for the element sodium, used in the process to produce a synthetic rubber substitute for the war effort.
repubblichini: The name given to supporters of the RSI, the Fascist Italian Social Republic (Repubblica Sociale Italiana), formed as a puppet state in northern Italy with Mussolini as its leader.
black triangle: The black triangle badge marked prisoners in Nazi concentration camps as “asocial” (arbeitsscheu); such individuals were considered a threat to the values of the Third Reich.
Strafbataillonen: Penal battalions in the Wehrmacht during World War II were brigades made up of military and civilian criminals; those sentenced to these units were usually made to undertake dangerous, high-casualty missions.
“über alles auf der Welt”: From the first line of the German national anthem: “Germany, Germany above all else, above all else in the world.”
“put himself out … for the sake of his art”: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead, trans. David McDuff (New York: Penguin, 1985), 244.
Hochdeutsch: Standard German.
“Work sets you free”: The slogan “Arbeit macht frei” appeared on the entrance to Auschwitz and other labor camps.
“non doma”: The phrase is from Garibaldi’s hymn: “Bastone Tedesco l’Italia non doma”: the German truncheon will not subjugate/crush Italy.
bersaglieri: The rifle regiment of the Italian army.
“A me piaccion gli occhi neri…”: From the song “Ma le gambe,” lyrics by Alfredo Bracchi, 1938.
the Todt: The Todt Organization, named for its founder, Fritz Todt, was a German engineering group in the Third Reich known for using forced labor.
Resistance merits: Surviving partisans were awarded gold medals as representatives of the Resistance.
“Le donne non ci vogliono … uno che non ha sangue nelle vene”: A Fascist song whose text was written in 1944 by Mario Castellacci.
Balduina … borgatari … San Paolo: Balduina is a modern suburb of Rome. A borgataro is an inhabitant of a Roman working-class suburb. Italgas is one of the gas refineries in San Paolo.
“look and pass on”: The reference is to a line from Dante’s Commedia: “Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa” (Inf. III, 51), “Let us not talk of them, but look and pass on.”
“humiliated and insulted”: A reference to a novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, first published in 1861, known in English by various titles: Humiliated and Insulted, The Insulted and Humiliated, The Insulted and the Injured, or Injury and Insult.
Henry IV: A reference to Luigi Pirandello’s 1922 play Enrico IV, about an Italian aristocrat who falls off his horse while playing the role of Henry IV during Carnevale and who, when he comes to, believes himself to actually be Henry.
“‘Never say a word that applauds vice and mocks virtue’”: From “On the Death of Carlo Imbonati.”
“Arbeitsfront”: Labor Front.
an ancient anchorite: The reference is likely to stylites, or “pillar dwellers,” solitary Christian ascetics who lived on pillars, preaching, fasting, and praying, in the belief that bodily mortification would ensure the salvation of their souls.
Sonderkommandos: Sonderkommandos were units composed of Nazi death camp prisoners, mainly Jews, who during the Holocaust were forced to assist with the disposal of gas chamber victims.
A Note About the Author
Luce D’Eramo (1925–2001) was born in Reims, France, to Italian parents. She is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including the novels Nucleo Zero and Partirammo. Deviation, a fictionalized account of her experiences during the Second World War, was an international bestseller. You can sign up for email updates here.
A Note About the Translator
Anne Milano Appel was awarded the Italian Prose in Translation Award, the John Florio Prize, and the Northern California Book Aw
ard for Translation (Fiction). She has translated works by Claudio Magris, Primo Levi, Paolo Maurensig, Roberto Saviano, and numerous others. You can sign up for email updates here.
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
PART 1: ESCAPE FROM THE LAGERS
THOMASBRÄU
ASYLUM AT DACHAU
PART 2: BENEATH THE RUBBLE
AS LONG AS THE HEAD LIVES
PART 3: FIRST ARRIVAL IN THE THIRD REICH
IN THE CH 89
PART 4: THE DEVIATION
TRANSLATOR’S NOTES
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR
COPYRIGHT
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
175 Varick Street, New York 10014
Copyright © 2012 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore S.r.l.
Translation copyright © 2018 by Anne Milano Appel
Translator’s introduction and notes copyright © 2018 by Anne Milano Appel
All rights reserved
Originally published in Italian in 1979 by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Italy, as Deviazione
English translation published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2018
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71706-3
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*Bia Sarasini, “Se scrivere è un viaggio nel tempo,” Il paese delle donne on line—rivista, April 22, 2017; http://www.womenews.net/se-scrivere-e-un-viaggio-nel-tempo/.
*William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” in Prefaces and Prologues, The Harvard Classics, vol. 39 (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909–14).
†From an unpublished letter dated April 5, 1979; quoted with the kind permission of Sapienza’s husband, Angelo Pellegrino.
*Goliarda Sapienza, Il vizio di parlare a me stessa (Turin: Einaudi, 2011), p. 89.
†Dante Alighieri, Divina Commedia, Inferno XXXIV:139.
‡Ibid., Inferno III:9, trans. John Ciardi.
*The name given by the French to the Germans during the Second World War, replacing the well-known “Boches” of the First World War.
*“All is well all things pass my husband is in Russia / my bed is still free.”
*“Malborough is off to war rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat-tat who knows when he’ll return…”
*“Dirty bastard.”
†“Feet down!”
*“I mustn’t die.”
*“So nice!”
*“Wait here, dear.”
*“Poor boy!”
*“Try to pray.”
*“If tomorrow war, if tomorrow battle, / be ready to fight today.”
*“A sense of humor is being able to laugh in spite of everything.”
*“As long as the head lives.”
*“Where the waves of the North Sea crash against the shore, where yellow flowers bloom in the lush green countryside and seagulls screech raucously in the storm, / there is my native land, there I feel at home.”
*“In the green forest where the nightingale sings and from the brush a sprightly doe leaps, where pines and spruce stand at the forest’s edge / I spent the sweet dream of my youth.”
*“The collaborators are taking a stroll.”
*Volunteer workers.
*Security service.
*The red alert.
*The all-clear signal.
*Filthy foreigners.
*Matter-of-factness.
*“Raise the flag! The ranks tightly closed! / The SA marches with calm, steady step.”