Luce d'Eramo (1925–2001)

This is a hard book to read, both emotionally and just in terms of following the narrative and the ideas. It's good to know going into it that this will not be a straightforward memoir of experiences during and after World War II; it does contain very precisely observed events and people from Lucette Mangione's experiences between 1944 and 1979, but at the same time it's extremely subjective and introspective. The author is trying to understand not only what happened to and around her, but why she did the things she did, and even why she's writing the book the way she is. If that makes it sound like navel-gazing: first, if you'd lived through these things you'd probably need to spend a lot of time sorting out your thoughts too, and second, reality in this book is very immediate, more solid than the narrator. You could say that this is someone gazing at where their navel would be, except a huge hole has been blasted through their body so they're looking through it at the world.

The short(?) version is this. Luce, a wealthy teenage half-hearted Fascist in Italy, travels to Germany to become a volunteer factory worker (alongside prisoners), to see what Nazis are really like. She quickly becomes disgusted and radicalized but has no idea what she's doing, gets in trouble but is protected by her family connections, becomes obsessed with escaping her privileged identity, attempts suicide, is sent back to Italy, and then impulsively throws away her documentation and gets herself deported to Dachau. Those last five words, and the question of whether she did it deliberately and why, will haunt the author later in life but she can't afford to think about it now—she's in survival mode for the next two years or so—first in the camp, then escaping and living with displaced people and ex-prisoners in the margins of a crumbling Germany. Two months before the fall of Berlin she's nearly killed in an accident, becomes paraplegic, spends a long time convalescing, is stalked by her ex-lover, and tries to become a refugee again before finally accepting that she has to go back to Italy. Years go by, she marries and separates, she starts trying to write autobiographical fiction, and then her other troubles begin as she realizes that she's been lying to herself about parts of her life for years.

That's not how the book is written. We get pieces out of context—after the escape, in the camp, in the factory, in the hospital—each written at a different time of her life, in a different style, and sometimes with crucial differences in events (usually trying to make them sound more logical than they really were). Luce in the camp—and after escaping the camp, living in the underground-but-not-really world of people the Nazis simply lost track of or couldn't be bothered with—is an observer with almost no personality, totally devoted to staying alive and figuring out what's going on with all the people she meets. Luzia in the factory, written about in the third person, is a very specific character: an angry adolescent simultaneously learning to care about other people and hating them for not immediately accepting her. The narrator of the hospital story is literally feverish, emotionally all over the place (but discovering that compared to some people she's resilient—she gets called upon to cheer up other patients), and alienated from her body. Later she's alienated from her mind too, obsessed with sorting out the difference between choice and fate and which one of the many social identities she's had is real.

Through the whole thing, we meet a lot of people and they all feel very real. The prisoners and refugees aren't romanticized at all, they're constantly making horrible compromises and selfish decisions, but with very few exceptions the author doesn't analyze or judge them and the clarity of her descriptions has a loving quality. Nazis are a less immediate presence just because she usually doesn't have that much time to observe them, but she does have some thoughts about them, often from odd angles: for instance, she believes that when the agents of a cruel and insane regime go above and beyond their duty to be extra cruel and insane, it's because they desperately want to think they have free will, and also because making the prisoners not only fear but hate them helps to clarify their role. For obvious reasons, those parts of the book particularly feel like food for thought in 2019. There are also some more specifically political thoughts in her telling of the labor walkout she took part in with the prisoners at IG Farben, an action that required secretly organizing a huge number of people who in most cases didn't trust each other at all.

The last quarter of the book is relatively slow and repetitive, as the author has fewer external problems to deal with and more time to think. I still found it surprisingly dramatic just to see this person growing up and pulling together the pieces, watching Italy try to forget about the nightmare, and figuring out how to communicate with other people who lived through the same period in totally different ways and who don't see things as she does at all. I don't know if it could have been written any other way.… (meer)