Les femmes qui furent les premières à raconter Auschwitz à l’Italie

In the Italy that came out of World War II in 1944  partly because of the liberation by the allies, partly because the liberation struggle of the partisan, there was little room for the voices of Italian-Jewish deportees to the concentration camps  after the war. Their deportation experience challenged  and tarnished the dominant heroic postwar narrives. The seven Italian women presented in the book  recount their story of their path to Auschwitz. They  bore witness after the war and shared the stories of their companions who had not returned, their loved ones who had not survived, and their friends who had been murdered. Two of these women, as seen in notebooks collected from the rubble of Germany, which they crossed on their return journey, started writing as early as May 1945. Some found their homes and loved ones, others had to start afresh. They all chose to publish their writings immediately after thexy returned some through small publishing houses, in which they addressed some of the major themes of the genre: the central role the body holds in describing the experience, the relationship to literature, the delegated narrator, the collective autobiography.