FIRENZE – Eighty years have passed since that January 27, 1945, when Soviet soldiers of the Red Army entered the enormous Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz, in Poland, revealing to the world the horror of the Holocaust. A horror about which today, decades later, we know almost everything, but not everything. 

Little is known, for example, about the thousands of Italians deported to those concentration camps, with the complicity of other Italians: the fascists. Shedding light on this dark part – one among many – of Italian history is now the research project “From Prisons to Death” (the original Italian title is “Dalle Carceri alla Morte”), funded by the German Embassy in Italy, conceived and coordinated by the Italian journalist Francesco Bertolucci and created together with the National association of former deportees to Nazi camps (in Italian: “Associazione nazionale ex deportati nei campi nazisti – Aned”) with videos by director Victor Musetti and the consultancy of historian Costantino Di Sante.

It’s a multimedia documentary (with texts, videos, audio and photos, all available for free, online, at this link: https://dallecarceriallamorte.com) that tries to answer a series of very specific questions: what was the role of fascism in the deportation of thousands of Italians to Nazi concentration camps where many of them lost their lives? And the repression carried out by the regime, what role did it have in all of this? And, again, in particular, what role did fascist prisons in Italy have in the repression, deportation, killing of thousands of Italians in Nazi concentration camps?

The answers came thanks to field research that led Francesco Bertolucci (in the pic above) and the project’s creators and collaborators to travel over 10,000 kilometers in just under a year, from Italy to Germany, passing through Austria and touching concentration camps such as Dachau, Mauthausen and Ebensee as well as the prisons – in Italy – of Turin, Milan, Florence, Rome, Bologna, Trieste, Genoa and Sulmona: a huge job, as can be seen on the same website https://dallecarceriallamorte.com where almost eight hours of video and audio contributions – among them: Aldo Cazzullo, journalist and historian; Andrea Pennacchi, actor and playwright; Francesco Filippi, historian; and many others – have been uploaded and where, through a path divided into five pages, it is possible to learn why one could end up in fascist prisons during the twenty years, the role of fascist prisons in deportation, the stories of those who were deported, who was deported from Italy and why we know little about all this. All enriched by audio interviews with historians, an interactive map that will allow you to know the route taken by the approximately 40 thousand Italian deportees who left from each individual station towards the camps, video explanations of the most important prisons and documentaries that retrace together with relatives the journey taken by some deportees towards the Nazi camps, with the stories of those who made it and those who, sadly, lost their lives in the concentration camps.

Among these stories, there is the first transport of political deportees from Italy, or the story of those who ended up in the concentration camps because they had organized the first strike in Europe under the Nazi-Fascist heel, openly challenging the Third Reich, or the one of those who ended up there because they were relatives of partisans, were Jewish or, against their will, ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. For example, the story of Mario Piccioli, deported from Florence to the camps of Mauthausen and Ebensee after being arrested by the fascists in the old “Leopoldine” schools where he had gone to look for his mother, a worker in a paper mill, arrested because she had gone on strike: she was released, he was deported (in the video here below, the story told by Mario’s grand-daughter Laura Piccioli). One story among many. The stories of about 40 thousand Italians, betrayed by other Italians and handed over to what should have been their common enemy: the Nazi regime.

PS: the site is also designed for the deaf, thanks to the transcriptions of each individual interview and the subtitles (also in English) present in each video, and for the blind, thanks to the possibility of listening to the texts.

In the pic at the top of this article: Francesco Bertolucci and Laura Piccioli, grand-daughter of Mario, one of the deportees, in the Mauthausen concentration camp