2023-10-16 13:41:00
Time.news – October 16, 1943 is known as “Black Saturday” the day in which more than a thousand men, women, children, old, healthy, disabled, poor, rich, street vendors, teachers, professionals, with the lowest common denominator belonging to the “Jewish race” were taken by Nazi soldiers from their homes in Rome, destination Auschwitz. At the end of the war only sixteen, fifteen men and only one woman, Settimia Spizzichino, returned from the extermination camp.
An accounting of evil that fuels the tragic total of the six million Jewish victims of the Shoah but fails to describe the individual sufferings of many erased existences, perceived as a single great collective pain.
Eighty years after that tragic Saturday, Lia Levi has thought of making those private pains resurface with a new valuable literary operation with ‘Together with your family (16 October 1943, the great raid in Rome)’, E/ editions OR. Collects the pages that the writer of Jewish memory dedicated to October 16th of the protagonists of her many novelswith a title that reports the incipit of the mystifying mimeographed note delivered by the SS to the heads of the families of each household destined for deportation.
Levi also chose it for the cover: that note, twenty minutes after receiving which the families had to be ready for the departure towards the horror of Auschwitzdictated six instructions to bring with them ration cards, suitcases, linen, glasses, money and also ordered not to leave even the “very seriously ill” at home because in the camp they would find not an immediate end as it was, but “the Infirmary”.
“Why this sadistic farce, this semblance of normality? – asks Levi – the SS wanted to reassure the victims so that there would be no disturbances or escape attempts. But does such a strong charge of evil really respond only to reasons of public order? “.
© Pierpaolo Scavuzzo / AGF
Lia Levi
An evil that the writer today links to that carried out by Hamas terrorists in the October 7 raid in southern Israel: “Until today, even in the face of great massacres, I had always refused to make comparisons with the Shoah – she clarifies to Time.news – but that of October 7, with the terrorists who entered the homes of Jews killing, humiliating and ruthlessly taking away even old people and children, was an action that closely resembles the Nazi fury and methods”.
In Levi’s book they move submerged and saved by imagination. “Daniel Mendelsohn wrote that truth needs imagination to manifest itself” the writer clarifies that she knew the real victims of October 16th, starting with Settimia Spizzichino: “Extraordinary figures of survivors who made the Holocaust go beyond the incredible to place it in the visible”.
‘Together with your family’ takes a path complementary to that of the stumbling blocksa literary operation that tells of invented characters (Lucilla the sick woman, the lovers Ferruccio and Colomba, Elisa the waitress, the rebellious teenagers Corrado and Graziano) but plausible because their stories are all possible.
And then there is the true story, hers, with its October 16th told in her debut novel ‘A little girl and that’s it’. On that indelible day his mother, having managed to escape the Nazi raid, showed up distraught in the Roman convent where she had sheltered her three daughters and little Lia, as well as realizing the Nazi ferocity against the Jews, she also understood that from that moment onwards she would no longer be able to trust in the protection of adults: those parents she had trusted when they told her that going to the convent was just “an extra precaution” had been wrong. Theirs had only been a “hopeful, miserable lie”.
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