Vivere per raccontare: Lidia Beccaria Rolfi e l’esperienza concentrazionaria. Da ‘Le donne di Ravensbruck’ a ‘L’esile filo della memoria’

For survivors of extermination camps, narrating is a necessity as important as complex, it is a primary liberating need: those who experienced the Lager are witnesses by right and by duty. Lidia Beccaria Rolfi, a political deportee to Ravensbrück, the “Women’s Lager”, felt this need even as a prisoner when she found the strength to pick up a pencil and write down on scattered sheets of paper a tangle of thoughts, reflections and feelings that would later become the starting point for her two works, Le donne di Ravensbrück (1978) and L’esile filo della memoria (1996). Ravensbrück, for Lidia, meant several things: the daily offence to the body and to humanity, the violence, the ferocious exploitation of labour, but also the discovery of a female specificity through dialogue and possible forms of solidarity between women, the birth of an idea of Resistance as the preservation of one’s dignity. Starting from Lidia Beccaria Rolfi’s literary testimony this essay aims at bringing to light the experience of female concentration camps, from deportation to the dramatic return to freedom and the slow re-appropriation of one’s own identity