The concentration camp, the train with 2,500 deportees and the liberation: this is how the nightmare ended for the Sardinian Jew Vittorina Mariani
Born in Porto Torres, after a long period in Bergen Belsen was put on a train by the Germans with her three sisters and then freed by the Americans
There is news on the story of Vittorina Mariani , the woman from Porto Torres who until now was thought to have been liberated on April 15, 1945 in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp by British troops .
In the last hours, a substantial documentation recovered in the archives of the International Tracking Service of Bad Arolsen, revealed some letters sent by Mariani in the 60s to request compensation for his imprisonment in the German concentration camp , as well as all the documentation relating to the entrance and exit from the concentration camp.
The documents show that Mariani was not in the camp at the time of Bergen's release: he had already been out for two days, and like her the three sisters were deported with her.
It is in fact among the passengers of one of those three convoys that from Bergen Belsen, between 6 and 10 April 1945, was filled with 2,500 prisoners and prisoners of the camp , and destined by the Germans in the concentration camp and "ghetto with special status" of Theresienstadt, in Czechoslovakia, on the outskirts of Prague.
The convoy on which the four Mariani sisters were traveling, on the morning of April 13, 1945, was reached in Farsleben by the 723rd Tank Battalion of the American army led by Sergeant George Gross, and freed . Of the other two trains, only one reached Terezin, while a third was also joined by the liberators, in this last case by the Russian army near the town of Troebitz.
The circumstance of Mariani's liberation in Farsleben was also confirmed in a 1964 document countersigned by Mariani herself and kept in Bad Arolsen.
Of the liberation of the train at Farsleben , whose passengers were almost all Jews in possession of special international documents or of particular situations that had placed them in the sector of Bergen Belsen intended for Jews waiting to be exchanged for German prisoners in Allied hands, there is a series of moving photographs taken by American soldiers on April 13, 1945 and now preserved in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington .
Alessandro Matta
(director of the Sardinian Shoah Memorial Association)
