The story of Vittorina, a Sardinian survivor of the concentration camps, and of her husband the painter Umberto

The story of the Shoah is truly an intricate puzzle. After 80 years from the events, there are still many events to be reconstructed in detail.

One of these is certainly that of Vittorina Mariani, the only one of the three Sardinian-Jewish women deported from central and northern Italy after 8 September 1943 to be back alive .

Until today, little is read about her, and little is known. A few lines, reconstructed above all by historians such as Prof. Aldo Borghesi in the "book of deportees" and repeated and remembered several times in various public commemorations and various appointments. Even the municipality of Porto Torres, where Vittorina was born in 1904, wanted to pay homage to her a year ago, as the mayor of the town Franco Mulas said, to remind us that "her story teaches us that no one can feel safe when they in motion the dark forces that run through history . Human rights and peace are values to always be preserved and not to be considered acquired forever. "

LIFE - Vittorina was born in Porto Torres on May 17, 1904 . She is the daughter of Eliseo Mariani and Sofia De Benedetti, a couple that we could define as "mixed", where only the mother has Jewish origins. However , Vittorina always grew up in the Catholic religion .

The father moved with his family to Porto Torres for some time because he was engaged in the "Ercole Antico", a shipping company in Genoa which, at the beginning of the century, will find itself involved in the whirlwind of the first trade union disputes on the island and above all of the port of the city of Turriano.

Reading the essay by Sandro Ruju "The first disputes of the port workers of Porto Torres (1906 and 1911)", it turns out that in 1905, the company for which dad Eliseo works will win the contract for the Bari aqueduct, and will in Bari that three of Vittorina's sisters will be born: Anita, Ida and Bettina .

However, relationships and especially life in Porto Torres, where the family lives in via Porto Antico, do not stop. We do not know exactly when the family, and therefore Vittorina, will leave Sardinia, to which, however, they always remain very close.

THE MARRIAGE - In 1929, at the age of 25, Vittorina got married with a character who became central throughout her life: Umberto Vittorini .

Vittorini is 14 years older than his wife, having been born in Bagno di Lucca, Tuscany, in 1890. He lives in Milan, yet he has spent most of his life in Pisa. Initiated into painting by Edoardo Gordigiani, he initially focuses in his works above all on the Tuscan countryside and Pisan exteriors. His debut takes place in 1910 in Florence with the "portrait of a young girl", and yet, far from any pictorial current, he always lived in seclusion in what was always called a close conversation with "his art".

But the true "inspiring muse" who immediately accompanied him in all his works, is certainly only one: his beloved Vittorina , who will be painted by him numerous times.

She also graduated in scientific subjects, like one of the other two Sardinian-Jewish women who will be deported, Zaira Coen Righi, since the 1920s she has been a mathematics teacher in high schools in the Milanese area, an activity that she will always lead with passion until retirement, and which will ensure that even at the moment of her death she will be remembered in the obituaries as "the mathematics teacher Vittorina Vittorini".

It will be that passion for teaching, perhaps, to be fatal to her .

THE ARREST - Despite the anti-Semitic laws (which nevertheless never affect Vittorina's family) and despite the war, Vittorina is continuing to teach mathematics, and in the height of the period of the Italian Social Republic, she is even traveling every day to go to a high school of Monza, where he holds the chair of mathematics.

He is there to teach his students and the few students who have not been recalled to the war, even until the day before his arrest, which will take place in his home in Milan on April 22, 1944 .

To date, there are various theses around the fact that Vittorina was probably preparing to flee to Switzerland with her brother and sisters, probably in a staggered way: her sisters and brother will also be arrested but in other areas of Lombardy.

However, a very precious source is constituted by the autobiographical book by Alba Valech Capozzi “A24029” published as early as 1946 , in which the latter, also a mixed Jew, recounts her story of deportation to Auschwitz.

The text: “'Who will it be today,' I asked, hearing footsteps and angry voices in the corridor. 'They look like women,' explained Trude, 'but they have to be brave to shout like that.' She was indeed an energetic woman. Her name was Vittorina. I met her in the evening when she came with her sister Ida and Marchesini to my cell. 'I'm Aryan,' she said to us, 'and I don't understand how that thug Kok arrested me.' 'Ariana? Trude asked in amazement. - But then why did they arrest you? ' 'Because my family is called Mariani and because that thug Kok says we look Jewish. They took me and my sister Ida, let's hope they stop. We are eight brothers and sisters. Kok is wrong if he thinks I'm saying where they are. ' He fell silent. 'But they will beat you,' said Trude. 'Will they beat me? Vittorina snapped. - I'd like to see this too! ”.

In the meantime Umberto Vittorini was informed by the neighbors of everything that happened. He too is very courageous, but above all he has in mind a person very close to him in the world of art: his friend Aldo Carpi, also a painter and draftsman, who suddenly disappeared after 8 September 1943 in one of the many roundups. and never seen again, and therefore decides to try everything to free his wife and family : he goes in person to the command of the notorious Pietro Koch, contesting the illegitimacy of his wife's arrest, but is beaten up and interned in San Vittore, in solitary confinement for a month .

Vittorina and her sisters and brother are also taken to San Vittore for a short period of time, and from there, probably through track 21 of the undergrounds of the central station of Milan , deported to the Fossoli transit camp .

Here, another important piece in the reconstruction of this biography is given by Ada Michlstaedter Marchesini, who tells of how Umberto Vittorini is inserted in a network that will bring in and out of the field of clandestine correspondence that will allow uncensored communications between family members and prisoners. . And it is precisely at this juncture that Umberto will be able to meet Vittorina during her internment in Fossoli.

After a period, in which false hopes were expressed for the certain release of the so-called "mixed prisoners", at the time of the closure of the Fossoli camp and the transfer of all the prisoners still present in the new transit camp in the Gries district in Bolzano, things changed radically also for the so-called "mixed" Jews such as Vittorina and family members, until then "parked" in a shack in Fossoli.

Friedrich Bosshammer, the man who has been the head of the IVB4 Office for Italy since November 1943, and who directs the deportations of Jews from our country, decides to literally act on his own with the mixed media, and instead of proceeding with a release , as it was rumored to happen up to that moment, organizes a very particular convoy from the Verona station, which travels in its entirety to Munich, and then from there it takes, after a subdivision into three different sections , three different destinations: Jewish spouses will end up in Auschwitz Birkenau, the children of a mixed marriage between Buchenwald and Ravensbruck , and finally in Ravensbruck a further selection takes place where the Jewish spouses of mixed marriage are put aside and also sent to Bergen Belsen , together with the Jews in possession of international passports and destined for this field from Fossoli.

Here Vittorina and all the sisters with her brother will remain until the liberation, April 15, 1945, then returning to Italy by means of the Red Cross.

THE ART OF VITTORINI - Something, however, will change forever in the art of Umberto Vittorini.

All this experience and the sufferings of his wife will forever mark Vittorini, frequently the victim of a form of post-traumatic depression that will inevitably affect his art . It is not possible to fully understand Victorinian painting of the Second World War, if its family history is not known. Those faces deformed by a nervous painting, which Umberto will continue to portray after the war, are nothing more than the cry of the soul of a person struck in the dearest affections.

The continuous portrayal of himself and above all Vittorina, will instead demonstrate a continuous desire to dig within himself, probably in search of a reason for what happened.

Vittorina and Umberto, after the war, will always be together . They are often filmed, photographed, and interviewed together. She is often smiling, with that corpulent and energetic verve of hers, she does not lack a smile, especially in the photos taken during the summer in Forte dei Marmi, in the company of her husband's friends and colleagues.

It will be inevitable, in Umberto's art, to refer to the Shoah, and to dedicate so much to the survivors.

It will be precisely in this sense that, in 1948, he will give his wonderful watercolor entitled "Survivors" to the "Ghetto fighters house" museum of the ghetto fighters built in Kibbutz Haogamei Laghetaot north of Haifa, a Kibbutz entirely built by ghetto survivors of Warsaw.

It will be inevitable that, when Umberto Vittorini leaves this world in 1979, his Vittorina, left alone, will die shortly after, on January 31, 1981, in Segrate. She was buried next to her Umberto in the small cemetery of Sommocolonia (Lucca).

Alessandro Matta

(director of the Sardinian Shoah Memorial Association)