At eleven he wanted to follow his grandmother arrested in Trieste. Otto Wolken, an Austrian Jew serving as a doctor, hid him for weeks and passed him off as his assistant. In 1945 in Krakow he testified about the crimes committed in the concentration camp
Krakow, April 21, 1945. A child, born in Milan in 1932, appears before the Polish commission of inquiry into the crimes committed at Auschwitz, showing everyone the serial number, stamped on his arm: B-7525. This is a number intended for Jews arriving from Rhodes in the summer of 1944, when the gas chambers at Birkenau were operating at full capacity. His name is Luigi Ferri, for everyone, Luigino. «An Italian young man, intelligent and quick who became my friend» writes the lawyer Bruno Piazza, from Trieste, hospitalized for some months in the men’s hospital of Birkenau. «He was a beautiful boy, with long dark eyes and a nice smile, always on his lips. Indeed, Luigino’s was the only smile among those grinning faces.’
While the majority of the 232,000 Jewish or other children and young people had been murdered, Luigi Ferri remained alive thanks to the protection of Doctor Otto Wolken, an Austrian Jew serving as a doctor in the male quarantine sector.
“Today that I’m old, I know I’ve been able to live a normal life, happy and full of satisfaction because I pushed Luigino away from me, I locked him up in a dark corner of my mind – says Mr. Luigi Ferri -. In the post-war period it was not difficult for me. Nobody was interested in the extermination of the Jews. They wanted to forget the horrors of fascism, the hunger and misery that still raged in many regions of Italy in 1953. I had started going to school again and my companions did not ask me what the number tattooed on my arm meant.’ In his firm and very youthful voice, despite his ninety years, we capture a truth that reminds us of the refusal, even by the first historians of the Holocaust, to listen to the testimonies of the few Jews who survived the extermination. “When, after completing my studies, for work, I began to travel in Europe, I discovered that Auschwitz, as in Italy, had been forgotten”.
The story of Luigi Ferri has been at the center of attention for more than seventy years, for some reasons that make it unique. In June 1944, when grandmother Rosa Gizelt, a Jew from Fiume was arrested in Trieste and taken to the Risiera di San Sabba, it was he who asked to be allowed to follow her. Since his mother had obtained the cancellation of his paternal surname, the child, due to the racial laws in force, was no longer “of the Jewish race”. Terrified of being left alone, away from everyone, from her mother and her relatives, Luigi decided to follow her. Arriving in Birkenau, Saturday 1 July 1944, towards the evening, the child managed to stay with grandmother Rosa until the following morning, when he was dragged into the male quarantine camp, by dint of threats and slaps. Teased by the kapos, he turned to an SS doctor whom he saw entering the camp. It was SS Lieutenant Heinz Thilo, a man at least as cruel and bloodthirsty as Dr Mengele, who immediately asked his assistant, SS Karl Kurpanik, to remove the child from quarantine.
For Luigino, even if he didn’t realize it, that was a death sentence. “That was when I first met Dr. Wolken. Otto seemed tall to me at the time, but as I became an adult, I found he wasn’t tall at all; he wore glasses and often had a beautiful smile, even though I too sometimes read suffering and concern in it.’
Otto understood that he had to hide and protect that little deportee if he wanted to try to save him. Hidden by Doctor Wolken, after three weeks Luigino finally received a registration number and was thus able to carry out work in full light. «From that day, I was officially able to stay in barrack 16 with Otto. I was always with him and now he treated me like a son, a son he had in the camp told me. With him I felt relatively calm. Deep down, however, there was always fear, which turned into terror when I witnessed scenes of violence».
Luigino often saw dead children abandoned near the barracks and, being an aide to the doctor for the SS too, he could move around the camp and realize everything.
His name, after his long deposition before the Polish commission of inquiry, spread throughout Europe. “I had become a celebrity and in Kraków, people stopped me on the street.’
Back home, after a short period spent in Vienna with Otto Wolken, Luigi Ferri managed to completely disappear from the public scene. No one knew anything more about him, apart from a fleeting appearance in Auschwitz in 1967, for the inauguration of the international monument to the victims of the concentration camp. Returning to the places of imprisonment at the age of thirty-four strengthened in him the conviction that, in order to live again, he had to keep his identity hidden. “I always live in fear of being exposed.” For him, a silent witness to the horror of Auschwitz, the memory is like seeing himself again in an opaque mirror of death. His public silence tells us how great is the pain and wound of a saved person. Despite everything, the submerged of the camp still live inside him.
January 25, 2023 (change January 25, 2023 | 22:26)
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