Frida Misul

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Frida Misul , stage name: Frida Masoni , ( November 3, 1919 in Livorno - December 6, 1992 there ) was an Italian survivor of the Holocaust and author of one of the first books about the Auschwitz concentration camp .

Life

Frida Misul came from a Jewish family from Livorno . Her parents were Gino Misul and Zaira Samaia. She had two younger sisters. Frida Misul studied singing. Even after the introduction of the Italian Racial Laws , she managed to continue performing - under the pseudonym Frida Masoni.

Her life after September 8, 1943, when the Nazi regime came to power in northern and central Italy, was marked by constant bombing, the rapid death of her mother and constant concern for the fate of her father and two sisters. Frida Misul was arrested by the Italian police on April 1, 1944 in Ardenza, a district of Livorno. She was taken first to the Livorno prison and then to the Fossoli transit camp . There she was subjected to brutal interrogations so that she could reveal the hiding place of her cousin Umberto Misul, who had joined the partisans. Frida was silent and was in the on 16 May 1944 Auschwitz deported . After arriving at the camp on May 22, 1944, the inmate number A-5383 was tattooed on her. The hard labor caused her health problems and she was taken to the hospital ward. Her beautiful voice saved her life. A doctor had heard them sing and eventually the guards also took notice. She then had to sing for the SS guards every Sunday and was transferred to the securities warehouse, where the conditions were far less brutal. However, this work was an enormous psychological burden for her, as she had to deal with the expropriated belongings of women, men and children who had just been murdered. It was called Canada by the inmates .

In November 1944 she was transferred to a camp in Germany, in spring 1945 to the Theresienstadt concentration camp , where she arrived a few days before the liberation by the Red Army on May 8, 1945. Physically and mentally exhausted, she spent the next three months in a Soviet sick camp, then one month in an American transfer camp. Eventually she returned to Livorno - to her family who had escaped the deportations.

In 1946 she published her eyewitness report on the National Socialist concentration camps in Livorno . The booklet has only 47 pages, is entitled Fra gli artigli del mostro nazista (Italian: In the claws of the Nazi monsters) and is carried by the horror of the death machines and the anger over the logic of annihilation. The work of Frida Misul is one of the ten most important commemorative writings written by Italian Holocaust survivors. The other texts come from Lazzaro Levi (late 1945), Luciana Nissim Momigliano , Giuliana Fiorentino Tedeschi and Alba Valech Capozzi (1946), Primo Levi and Liana Millu (1947), furthermore the testimony of 12-year-old Luigi Ferri from April 1945, the Conversation by Sofia Schafranov in an interview volume by Alberto Cavaliere (published 1945) and the memoirs of Bruno Piazza , which were written at the same time but were not published until 1956.

In 1980, Frida Misul - encouraged by the Livorno city council - published a significantly expanded new edition of her memoirs, this time under the title Deportazione: il mio diario (Italian: Deportation, my diary). The book was published by the Office for the History of Resistance of the City of Livorno.

Commemoration

Stumbling block for Frida Misul

The street Via Frida Misul in Livorno is named after the Auschwitz survivors.

On January 14, 2014, Gunter Demnig laid stumbling blocks for Isacco Bayona and Frida Misul in front of the house at Via Chiarini 2 in Livorno .

Publications

  • Frida Misul, Fra gli artigli del mostro nazista: la più romanzesca delle realtà, il più realistico dei romanzi (Livorno: Stabilimento Poligrafico Belforte, 1946) Under the claws of the Nazi monster: the novel of reality, the most realistic novel
  • Frida Misul, Deportazione. Il mio diario , a cura dell'Ufficio Storico della Resistenza del Comune di Livorno (Livorno: Tipografia Benvenuti & Cavaciocchi, Livorno 1980). Riedizione riveduta e accresciuta del volume del '46. III ristampa: Ospedaletto (Pisa) 2006.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Liliana Picciotto, Il libro della memoria , II ed .; Milano: Mursia 2001, p. 447.
  2. ^ Anna Baldini (2012), "La memoria italiana della Shoah (1944-2009)", in Atlante della letteratura italiana , Torino, Einaudi, Vol. 3, pp. 758-763.
  3. ↑ Frida Misul, Deportazione: il mio diario , supplemento a CN-COMUNE NOTIZIE n.52-53 (1980). III Ristampa, Ospedaletto (Pisa) 2006.
personal data
SURNAME Misul, Frida
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Masoni, Frida
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian Holocaust survivors
DATE OF BIRTH November 3, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Livorno
DATE OF DEATH December 6, 1992
Place of death Livorno