2023-06-25 13:25:28
EGI – “Tell my father that I had courage to the end and that I regret nothing”. With these words Vittoria Nenni, the third child of the socialist leader, took leave of this land on 15 July 1943. At the beginning of that year the number 31,635 stamped on Vivà’s armas the family members call her, is already a death sentence, but she faces the six months of detention in the Auschwitz extermination camp with a determination that to read it today seems possible only in the heroes of mythology.
His story, tragic and full of courage, is told by Antonio Tedesco, in book “Vittoria Nenni, n. 31635 of Auschwitz” (Arcadia editions), which comes out eighty years after Vivà’s death and which is presented in Rome, Tuesday 27 June, at 4 pm, at the “Bruno Buozzi” Convention Center in via Lucullo 6. An exciting volume, which narrates with unpublished details the courageous life of Vivà, in the context of the Italian and French resistance and the horrors of the Holocaust.
Vittoria was born in Ancona on 31 October 1915, while Nenni was fighting at the front during the First World War. Her daughter is called Vittoria, just as a wish for the success of the Italian troops and the allies against Germany and Austria. At the age of 11 you have your first direct encounter with fascism.
On his way home, he finds a team of blackshirts trashing the apartment. One takes her by the arm and he threatens to make his father end up like Matteotti. The fear is great and, after that episode, Pietro Nenni decides to go into exile. His wife and daughters will join him in Paris almost a year later, mocking the surveillance of the regime.
Deported to Auschwitz
When the Second World War broke out, Vittoria took part in the French resistance together with her husband. Discovered, they are imprisoned. Her husband is shot, she and her companions loaded onto a train for Auschwitz under inhumane conditions. Vittoria, in reality, could have saved herself by claiming her Italian nationality.
“She didn’t do it – underlines Tedesco – because she didn’t want to be transferred to Italy, she probably hoped that her husband was still alive and she didn’t want to leave that prison.
Then Pietro Nenni said that he hadn’t wanted favors and followed the fate of his fellow fighters. In all likelihood there is a bit of truth in this too”. However, an irrefutable element remains: “Vivà, Nenni’s least politicized daughter, the one who was least interested in her father’s battles, decides to help the Resistance French and ends up in Auschwitz”.
In the concentration camp life is very hard, you march or work for many hours a day, in a uniform that is too light for the winter snow and too heavy for the summer heat; the ration is absolutely insufficient and the beds are concrete blocks with bunks stacked on top of each other without even straw.
In those conditions, Vivà survived six months, then probably gave in to typhoid fever. “The few female companions who survived – says Tedesco – will remember her with affection and gratitude, because she saved several lives, curing those who had caught typhus. She probably died because of this altruism of hers”.
The agony of the family
After his agony, however, that of the family begins, who are unable to hear from him. Tedesco’s book also outlines the torment of Pietro Nenni, in seeking information on Vivà. The socialist leader only learned of his daughter’s death on May 29, 1945.
It was communicated to him by the Prime Minister, Alcide De Gasperi. The two melt in an embrace full of emotion and tears. In her diary, Nenni notes: “The word that goes most directly to my heart is that of Benedetto Croce: ‘Allow me to join you too in this highly painful moment that you will surpass but as only the tragedies of our life: by enclosing them in the heart and accepting them as perpetual companions, inseparable parts of our soul’”.
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