On the 23rd of May 2022 a seminar on the Italians interned in Auschwitz was held in Rome at the Department of Political Sciences (Sapienza, University of Rome).
The seminar was attended by students and PhD candidates, who had the opportunity to learn about the latest research results of Laura Fontana, a historian who has been dealing with the history of the Shoah for years and is currently representing Italy at the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris. In her book “Gli Italiani ad Auschwitz (1943-1945). Deportazioni, «Soluzione finale», lavoro forzato. Un mosaico di vittime”, published by the Auschwitz Museum, Laura Fontana describes not only the situation of the Jews under Mussolini’s regime, but also reveals the personal stories of the Italian citizen deportees, both Jews and non-Jews. These prisoners were adults and children, men and women, and, as has been plainly revealed by archival sources, they were forced to work for German industries or were forced to undergo to medical experiments. One topic debated by the author with the students was the deportation in 1944 of 1200 non-Jewish Italian citizens, predominantly women, punished for being partisans or factory workers who had gone on strike. Many of them were nationally Croats or Slovenes, and they were arrested on the Eastern Adriatic coast and deported to Auschwitz, where they often became subjects in gynaecological experiments. Laura Fontana highlighted that their depositions at the end of the war were often not acquired because of linguistic barriers. Therefore, the survivors’ accounts have been a useful tool to reconstruct the story of those deportees. The deportation of non-Jewish Italians is a topic which is still underexplored, but the study of the author has been providing many innovative insights for the students, who discovered unknown facts about the situation of the victims of Nazi-Fascist regimes.