Not Only Memory: Narrating the Camp between Reality and Fiction

Abstract

The year 1986 marked the surge of a strong reaction by Italian survivors against the revisionist wave of Historikerstreit.¹ This reaction was channeled in Italy via the organization of the conference La vita offesa: Storia e memoria dei Lager nazisti nei racconti di duecento sopravvissuti (Wounded Life: History and Memory of the Nazi Camps in the Narratives of 200 Survivors) followed in 1987 by the publication of survivors’ racconti (oral narratives) in a volume edited by Anna Bravo and Daniele Jalla, with a foreword by Primo Levi.² The necessity of situating the Italian voice of testimony within the international landscape of Shoah testimonies and studies is clearly and ubiquitously stated by the volume’s two editors. But La vita offesa tries to fill a void that concerns first of all Italian society, for awareness and recording of testimony were slow to develop in Italy, particularly when compared to the studies and research on the Shoah that were being undertaken internationally. The volume La vita offesa is divided into three sections: the antecedents to the camp, with facts and conditions that led to imprisonment; narratives focused on the deportation and time in the camp; and the return home. The paradox of the impossibility of language to render images collected during those moments emerges from all narratives. And yet, survivors entrust themselves with the duty to put limits on the discourse of incredibility and use of unreliable sources.