MILLU, Liana

Nationality: Italian. Born: Pisa, 1914. Career: Journalist before World War II; Partisan, arrested in Venice and deported to Auschwitz/Birkenau, 1944; worked as a teacher, journalist, and lecturer after the war. Address: Office: Via Trento, Genoa, Italy 16145.

Publication

Short Stories

Il fumo di Birkenau. 1947; as Smoke over Birkenau, 1991.

Novel (autobiographical)

I ponti di Schwerin [The Bridges of Schwerin] 1978.

Other

Dalla Liguria ai campi di sterminio, with Rosario Fucile. 1980.

La camicia di Josepha: Racconti. 1988.

Dopo il fumo: Sono il n. A 5384 di Auschwitz Birkenau. 1999.

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Critical Study:

"Many Bridges to Cross: Sex and Sexuality in Liana Millu's Holocaust Fiction" by Risa Sodi, in Nemla Italian Studies, 21, 1997, pp. 157-78.

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Born into a Jewish family in Pisa, Italy, Liana Millu was just 24 when Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini issued his first racial decrees in September 1938. Along with all other Jewish professors, instructors, and students in public schools throughout the country, she was promptly dismissed from the elementary school where she had found her first teaching position. She worked as a private tutor with an affluent Tuscan family for a short time, as was permitted by the new laws because the family was Jewish. In 1940 she moved to Genoa. There she published her first short stories under a false name, since the anti-Jewish laws prevented her literary works from being distributed or sold in Italy.

Mussolini declared war on the Allies on 10 June 1940. During the three-year period when their country was an independent partner of the Third Reich, Italian Jews were persecuted and harassed while Jewish refugees were often interned, but there were no deportations from Italy. The situation changed in 1943 when Marshal Pietro Badoglio, who had replaced Mussolini as prime minister in July, arranged an armistice with the Allies, which was announced on 8 September. The Germans immediately occupied Italy, reinstated Mussolini, and proceeded to arrest and deport as many Jews as they could find. Along with thousands of Italian non-Jews and a disproportionately high number of Italian and foreign Jews, Millu joined the resistance. She was arrested in Venice in 1944 and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. When most of those prisoners who had survived the gas chambers, hard labor, epidemics, and starvation rations were evacuated from the camp in January 1945 to prevent their liberation by the approaching Russian army, she was transferred to a succession of camps in Germany. She was finally liberated from a camp at Malkov, near Stettin, in May. She was so sick and weak that she spent three months in a hospital before returning to Italy in August 1945.

The main body of Millu's literary work revolves around her personal experiences as a Jewish deportee, Auschwitz-Birkenau slave laborer, and Holocaust survivor. Soon after her return to Italy, she wrote and published several stories and articles about the death camps. Her most famous work, Il fumo di Birkenau (Smoke over Birkenau, 1991), was published by La Prora in Milan in 1947 and republished by Mondadori in 1957 and La Giuntina in 1986. It has been translated into German, English, Dutch, and Norwegian. Another book, a novel entitled I ponti di Schwerin ("The Bridges of Schwerin"), appeared in Italy in 1978, was reissued in 1994, and has been translated into German. Somewhat like Primo Levi 's La tregua (1963; The Reawakening, 1965), I ponti di Schwerin describes a concentration camp survivor's harrowing journey home through war-torn, lawless, and chaotic Germany and the difficulties and despair of adjusting to "normal" civilian life in Italy after the Holocaust. In addition, Millu has written many other Holocaust testimonies, articles, stories, and even works of theater for young people.

Millu's work has often been compared to that of Levi. Like Levi, she has written in a lean, stark style, capturing the agony and desolation of the Holocaust simply by telling the stories of her characters. Unlike Levi, however, her characters are usually women. Her presentation of the special circumstances and sufferings of female victims is unsurpassed in Holocaust literature. Women in deportation are seduced, raped, lured into prostitution, torn from their husbands and children, and forced to undergo abortions. They are deprived of the minimal means of maintaining their self-respect as women—they have no mirrors, combs, soap, soft fabrics, pretty ribbons, or handkerchiefs. They yearn for the domestic niceties of home. In the camps they work as hard as the men and are just as cruel to each other. They are also occasionally kind and gentle. They are women in extremis, but Millu renders them profoundly moving and human.

—Susan Zuccotti

See the essay on Smoke over Birkenau.