The testimony of Nella Mascagni, ex deportee in the Lager
“For years I have relived the nightmare
of the torture in those cells”
Those are experiences that one never forgets, they come to life incessantly in every single detail, actually, in even the slightest nuance that would otherwise go unnoticed. There was killing, although it wasn’t systematic killing in the camp of Bolzano. It was a transitional camp, the human cargo was destined to end in the centers of scientific criminality much more perfected in the techniques of the utilization of the human body, whether it be alive or dead. But the most extreme hunger was hunger here, too. The torture meted out to those considered the most dangerous or the most likely to disclose information that was precious for the Nazis, was torture here, too; savage, unspeakable.
A poem that Mario Tobino dedicated to the heoric Mario Pasi comes to mind. Pasi had arrived at his execution by hanging, perhaps already dead due to the ferocious torture he was subject to, 10 May, 1945 at Belluno: “They hanged him – Tobino says, – after torture that I would rather not have others know.”
It was the barrage of torture that made him write to Pasi, on a scrap of paper that confides, “Companions, send me some poison, I can resist no more.” I too would rather that this torture remains unspoken, I simply can’t utter their details in words. I was beaten, many times. I remember the companions of the cells I occupied after they returned from the interrogations with the militia, how they were mortally exhausted, their bodies swollen and broken, unable to open their mouths, unable to even tremble anymore.
And I remember the paralyzing fear, infinite, uncontrollable, all too favorably fueled by the state of total prostration, nothing more than the natural consequence of hunger. A fear augmented in the presence of that terrible psychological maneuver: the unpredictability of that which could happen, of the reactions of our jailers, able to conjure up enjoyment in the most unlikely tricks, the most unthinkable. How could I forget the capacity for invention of Major Schiffer, head of the Gestapo, ready to offer a cigarette, to make a compliment, to beat to the pulp, to order that the torture begin? How can I not have before my eyes the tall, blond Stimpfl, SS grouped with the Gestapo, whose ferocity is well remembered by our dear Luigi Emer, the comandante “Avio”? It is impossible to erase from the mind the two criminals Otto and Mischa, who behaved like the masters of life and of death to the poor souls confined in the cell block. They returned each night in total subjugation to the effects of alcohol, and for every one of us, they were indescribable nightmares; it could happen to any one of us to know the depths of their violence, which was entrusted to an enormous club or to whips.
They were very young, Otto and Mischa, asocial beings recruited by early experiences of perversion. Did they prevalently act according to their own initiative, or were they easy instruments in the hands of a will driven by a more refined perversity? How can one respond to questions of this nature, especially at that moment, in the state of profound anguish in which we found ourselves, we didn’t even bother to ask.
Naturally, the criminality didn’t stop with the two bestial guardians of the cell block. It’s sufficient that I mention a single episode among the many that flood my consciousness: the excruciating encounter that I made with Teas Palman of Trecchiana, in the province of Belluno. I was transferred into her cell the day after Tea returned to the camp following several days passed in the dungeons of the militia: lengthy interrogations and torture had reduced her to desperate condition; her body was tormented by the brutality inflicted upon her. I did my best to alleviate, more with kind words than by other means, her suffering. We became friends, we shared our battle experiences.
And how can I forget the saddening condition of Quintino Corradini. He was wounded in combat at Molina di Fiemme. He suffered terribly from a broken leg. He was only able to bandage it in a summary manner. Nothing else was possible for Quintino. I spent days and days sustaining him in the brief daily moments when we were allowed to be out in the open air, trying to help in the only way I could. “Fagioli” &emdash; this was his battle name, &emdash; he bears on his flesh even to this day the signs of those wounds which may only have had the chance to heal for the simple reason of his youth.
I came to know that in the cell block, some time before my own arrival, that a Jewish mother and her daughter whose names were Voghera, had been killed with brutality beyond all imagining, having had gushes of ice cold water being thrown upon them (all this in the dead of winter). The day of Easter, a young Friulian, Bortolo Pissuti, was executed with cold ferociousness. To him, Egidio Meneghetti had dedicated verse in dialect, teeming with emotion: “Don’t want to die, don’t want to die” Bortolo implored for three full days “three days spent beckoning his mama.” This is how his camp companion Meneghetti recalls the night of Easter, remembering that he heard “a single, suffocated rattle”, “It’s Easter. Morning. And he’s down on the ground, stretched out, long, hard as ice, eyes open wide, wide and staring in a blackened face, belly naked, with the flesh underneath all covered in red, caked blood. In the peace of Easter, all are quiet. Still, and in the black sky, was forever quieted the cries of Bortolo Pissuti.”
These are the words of Egidio Meneghetti, who loved me as one loves their very daughter, and to whom I have remained loving as one does to a father.
I remember Dal Fabbro and Gilardi, who had undergone such torture, that once again, I can not express, because I’d rather not speak of it. Ada Buffulini, always calm, so generous with care for everyone. He who would have become my father-in-law, about to be killed because in the incredible confusion of the last days had been confused for the man who at war’s end, was to become my husband. And Senio Visentin, such valor and character as I had come to know him, so strong-willed in his behavior as a resistor. Father Daniele Longhi, serene to the point of being able to utter a calm and heartening sermon as a good pastor does the very day that they made us line up along the walls with the machine guns pointed at us, and we, waiting, without a thought in our brains, the fatal moment.
And “Avio”: during an action in the Val di Fiemme, was seriously injured, captured, tortured. They beat down upon the open wounds of his body, and he has most likely kept the terrible signs of this maiming. Enrico Pedrotti, the unforgettable “Marco”, composed and dignified, without yielding once. I never met Longon. I made my entry to the camp after his assassination, which occurred 31 December, 1944 in the cells of the Gestapo at the militia; and still, I remember Mario Leoni, Aldo Pantozzi, Loew the Lawyer.
My impressions, my memories are copious with tension. The anguish and the terror that I endured at the camp, at the cell block, they were so hard, lacerating. These memories must be made known especially for the sake of the younger generations. These things must not become forgotten.
I am not as controlled and detached as Ada Buffulini. For long years I have had nightmares of the SS, of the ferocious faces of the Gestapo, of Major Schiffer who beat us to senselessness while their secretaries smoked cigarettes with complete indifference to it all. How could it have been possible! When my mind wanders from one cell to another in which I’d occupied, I feel the inexpressible nightmare of the three by one and a half meters, approximately the dimensions of their fearful narrowness. To be inhibited to move, to remain for endless hours, by day and by night, confined to a squalid cot, with the thought of that which could happen to you the next day, or from one moment to the next, with the agony for the suffering of my mother, of my father. In 1944 they captured me and confined me to the prisons of Trento: it was certainly a negative experience, I was very afraid, but I didn’t know, didn’t have the palest idea, of the awful things that went on in the cell block.
What is the reason that I have accepted to speak with utmost simplicity of these facts, giving voice to the memories in the same manner that the thoughts flood my mind? It is because I felt a sort of moral duty. I have always tried to make these things known to as many young people as I can, tell them what Fascism and Nazism has brought about to us. I have recounted over and again my own, modest, limited, but intense experiences because I know that as all of those who have had the venture of participating in the Resistance, can and should serve as the support, the foundation, the fulcrum for reflection. To allow us to think through those events; understand their implications, to comprehend the forces that in that moment were in conflict. They were the forces of barbarism, of inhumanity, of terror being brought to an art scientifically, in the service of interests that were well-constructed. But, fighting against these forces, the classes, the political, ideological and religious movements who knew how to keep the sense of life elevated. They made their own the concept that every man is equal to every other, and with this, they constructed their own destinies in the exaltation of creative, not destructive, values: the values of freedom, of culture, of research in the service of humanity.
Nella Mascagni
