2024-03-28 00:21:58
Bolzano. Was she beautiful Laura Conti. And after September 8, a partisan. Training: Justice and Freedom. Her group thinks of putting the two things together and entrusting her with a dangerous task: wandering around in front of the barracks of the Republican battalions in Milan and then smiling at those boys in black shirts, exchanging a few words, becoming familiar with each other and finally, if she understood that there ‘It was the way to make them desert. Come one day, come another, her beauty attracts the attention of even the officers. Someone from the police follows her, sees where she enters, breaks in and surprises her and her companions while they prepare the leaflets. It’s the arrest. The prison is San Vittore.
In the cells, the resistance often sees the last days of its fighters. Laura Conti suffers the fate of many, the transfer to the Bolzano camp, the Durchgangslager Bozen, the antechamber of Auschwitz. She arrived there in September ’44, at 23 years old. Trains occasionally leave from nearby for Germany, maybe tomorrow will be her day. Her “commander” goes up there in Milan, destination Revensbruck, the women’s concentration camp. On the entrance it wasn’t written “Arbeit macht frei” but rather “we will break your will”. But Laura doesn’t. On April 25, 1945, you saw her thin but alive. Valeria Fieramonte says: «It was the Nazis’ diet, so strict that, according to their calculations, it led to death after a year. Without effort for them.” Valeria Fieramonte Laura told it all (“The way of Laura Conti”, Women’s Encyclopedia) and the reason is that it was a standing woman. Not only a partisan but a doctor, scientist, convinced environmentalist. Her research anticipates the environmentalist certainties of today by decades, precedes the awareness that is now taking root almost everywhere, opens the way to the new science around safeguarding the planet. And again the battles for human rights which are finally connected with those for the earth and all its inhabitants, men and otherwise. You write and publish 26 books, with an immense quantity of articles and essays.
How many months in Bolzano for Laura Conti?
«Eight months in the concentration camp. He was skin and bones at the end.”
Does he survive and what does he do?
«Go back to Milan. In the last few days she has met a boy. They get engaged. But here you get caught up in the new politics of free Italy.”
Were you a socialist?
“Certain. But little by little the communist choice matured. Oh dear, always on the side of the party.”
What does it mean?
«Who was, as they said, a heretic».
Outside the official “church”…
«Not out but very critical. And therefore viewed with suspicion. Long marginalized. She is a doctor, very close to the world of healthcare, given that she works at Inail. Well you write a book, it’s called “Treatise on social assistance and security”. She puts into her all her beliefs, research and experiences on the new way of supporting the weakest, workers in difficulty, including health problems.”
What happens to it?
«Destroyed. She allowed herself to criticize the Soviet system where production was increased but costs were not reduced. It highlights the economic oppression of the system. In short, he didn’t tell them.”
And in the party?
«It supports thesis that today we can judge well ahead of its time».
An inconvenient one, Laura…
«But he spread optimism and enthusiasm around him. In the PCI it was a sort of separation at home. But she was still a resister. Everyone knew her story, her actions as a partisan, her imprisonment. For this reason, she was also held in the palm of the hand.”
Is it in these years that the ecological choice matures?
«Around the 1980s his medical research connected with interests around sustainability. It starts from the human body: it studies the consequences of bad industrialization on the skin of the people it observes and treats, the damage caused by chemistry, the possibility that the use of certain substances in manufacturing can also affect the genetic heritage, producing irreversible damage.”
But she didn’t join the ecology movement.
“No. She could have joined the greens. But he remained in the PCI. To do his battles there, in a large party. Obviously his cultural, scientific and political point of reference passed from communist countries to the United States. Because it was there, in the America of the movements, of the universities, that the new sensitivity towards the planet and the risks it ran had made its way.”
Was it an already structured debate?
«Here I am. Today we look at the environmentalists’ protests as if they were recent phenomena. In reality they come from far away. From research and studies and publications like those of Laura. Her approach was scientific and human at the same time. I remember when I saw her for the first time…”
Where did it happen?
«At a meeting of the Fgci, the communist youth, in Milan. I was sixteen. She was a person who fascinated everyone who listened to her. She dragged.”
How?
“Her words. He gave concrete examples. He always started from human beings. For example, his dialectical shots. He blurted out and gave examples that would make you smile but above all get to the point.”
For example?
«The risks faced by our sea. Not only for plastic but for the infinite harmful substances that we pour into it. At a certain point she says: guys, where can the sea go to pee, it doesn’t have kidneys… This is Laura Conti: scientist, doctor, woman.”
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2024-03-28 00:21:58