Yesterday we celebrated, albeit as recluses, the Liberation of Italy from Nazi-fascism, and today we want to talk about stories that are hard to find in books, stories that have been kept quiet for too long and are only coming to light in recent years.
The common denominator of these stories goes beyond the temporal contingency: there is a thread that unites the discrimination operated by authoritarian regimes against minorities and the later discrimination operated by official post-war History against the female gender and minorities persecuted by the Nazi-fascist delirium, that History that has made us identify the Holocaust solely as the genocide of the Jewish people and the partisan Resistance as a struggle of men in which the role of women was only accessory.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that some 15-17 million people lost their lives as a direct result of the “Aryanisation” processes promoted by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945.
In addition to the six million Jews, Roma and Sinti, people of Slavic ethnic groups (Russians, Serbs, Ukrainians, Poles, Slovenes), people of mixed ethnicity (the so-called “Rhineland Bastards”[1]), people with physical and mental disabilities (often used as guinea pigs, as is well illustrated in the book “Inhuman Medicine”[2]), political dissidents (communists, socialists, anarchists), Jehovah's Witnesses, prostitutes, asocials, chronic alcoholics, homosexuals and transsexuals.
It is common to refer to the extermination of homosexuals in Nazi concentration camps as the Holocaust. It is estimated that homosexuals interned in the camps numbered at least 50,000[3]. Male homosexuals were distinguished from other prisoners by a pink triangle sewn onto their uniforms at chest height, lesbians were marked with a black triangle.
The fact that little or nothing is said about these systematic exterminations and that they are only discussed in depth on the front of Roma and LGBTQ+ activism speaks volumes about the internalised homophobia and racism of post-war “democratic” countries. So much so that the “Day of Remembrance” established in 2000 to remember the Jewish victims of persecution, the extermination of Roma, Sinti, homosexuals was not even taken into consideration (apparently to get the right-wing vote for the law, which was passed unanimously in Parliament).
Similar to the oblivion of the silenced holocausts, the role of women in the Resistance has not been recognised by official Italian historiography for decades.
In 1976 Anna M. Bruzzone published the famous essay “La Resistenza taciuta. Dodici vite di partigiane piemontesi”[4] that collects the authentic testimonies of some protagonists of the Resistance and restores full dignity to their struggles.
According to ANPI figures, they have been counted:
35.000 women who acted as combatants 20.000 patriots, with support functions 70.000 women organised in the GDDs 4.653 women arrested, tortured and sentenced by fascist courts 2.756 the number of women deported to German concentration camps 2.900 women executed or killed in combat 512 the war commissioners 1.700 wounded women [5]
The Resistance was a season of emancipation for women, which began with the very famous “bread strike” of 16 October 1941 in Parma, when, exasperated by hunger and deprivation, women attacked a Barilla van and formed a large procession that was dispersed by fascist water cannons. Many of these women were arrested and locked up, branded as “hysterical”, “no good” and “antisocial”.”
This mass demonstration is considered “the moment of women's entry into the anti-fascist movement and prelude to the qualitative leap in their role within the clandestine movement. This qualitative leap was also due to the gradual maturation of a political conscience that among women was only possessed by those who worked in factories because of the trade union and anti-fascist propaganda activities that were carried out there. The moment they decided to be against fascism, they were obliged not only to take sides politically, but also to objectively break with the separateness of their traditional domesticity to project themselves onto the public scene”[6].
Just as the phenomenon of the many women locked up in asylums during Fascism because they were rebellious, subversive, lesbian, and did not correspond to the ideal of the “fascist woman” was also forgotten until recent years.
An essay by Annacarla Valeriano “Malacarne. Women and asylums in Fascist Italy”. investigates the use of asylums to repress the behaviour of «those women who deviate from the Fascist ideal of the exemplary bride and mother and whose intemperate behaviour, exuberance, and physical inadequacy risk undermining the biological and moral heritage of the state»[7].
To the psychiatric institution are consigned «those women who refuse to conform their lifestyle to the ideals proposed by fascism and who, for this very reason, need to be re-educated through asylum discipline in order to bring their conduct back within the fences of a biologically and socially constructed normality».
Fascism's greatest enemy, therefore, was precisely women's emancipation. Prostitutes, midwives and lesbians. In short, all those women who, in some way, did not think of motherhood as the sole purpose of their existence and, if by trade, they gave birth to children, they should not dare to terminate unwanted pregnancies.”[8]
It is obvious that the only choice for these ’rebellious“ and ”deviant“ women is anti-fascism, as Goliarda Sapienza also tells us in her novel ”The Art of Joy“.
Women's emancipation, strongly hindered by the Fascist Regime and the Church during the 20-year period, did not suffer a better fate in the following period. The woman, once again the angel of the hearth, wife and mother, had to contribute to the reconstruction of the country in more traditional guise, with the only advantage of adding work outside the home to domestic work.
Just as the role of women in the Resistance has long been misrepresented, so the story of the femminielli's contribution [9]. to the Four Days of Naples has even been erased from official historiography.
Antonio Amoretti, probably the last surviving partisan to have fought during the Four Days of Naples and secretary of Anpi Napoli, recalled yesterday [10] the fundamental role of the femminielli in this uprising that led to the liberation of Naples from the Nazi-fascists one day before the arrival of the Allies.
“When there was the barricade at San Giovanniello, the femminielli were in the front line, according to the logic that they had nothing to lose: they had no children, their families had repudiated them and society respected them culturally but still within certain limits,” he explains. “Used to facing the police and power, the femminielli did not back down in the face of the Nazi occupation”[11].
There are many, too many figures forgotten by the official narrative, who struggled, suffered and lived a life of hardship to advance the ideals of freedom and equal opportunities within a history and paradigm that did not accept them. Thanks to their struggle and sacrifice, we can now enjoy the civil rights that we have laboriously achieved and the opportunity to shout them out in the streets. That is why we have a duty to remember them, not just on 25 April, but always.
NOTES [1] The fact that there was no mass extermination programme for mulattos did not prevent them from being subjected to the worst tortures: used as human guinea pigs, sterilised, imprisoned and often killed. When the Rhineland was occupied by the Allied troops after the First World War, French soldiers from the colonies, who were black, also arrived: the children they had with German women were called "Rhineland bastards". - See more at: http://www.rainews.it/dl/rainews/articoli/giorno-memoria-porrajmos-omocausto-olocausto-a97dad1b-c8bb-4ffe-ba83-314e88ef5ac5.html [2] “Inhuman Medicine - Documents from the Nuremberg Trial against Nazi Doctors”, Editor Alexander Mitscherlich, Publisher Feltrinelli 1967 [3] Forgotten Victims, the Extermination of the Disabled, Roma, Homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses by Giorgio Giannini, p. 78, Stampa Alternativa, Viterbo 2011 [4] La Resistenza Taciuta: dodici vite di partigiane piemontesi, Turin, Bollati Boringhieri, 2003 (1st ed. 1976 ) [5] http://lombardia.anpi.it/voghera/donneresistenza/donneresistenza.htm [6] http://win.storiain.net/arret/num89/artic3.asp [7]https://www.corriere.it/cultura/17_dicembre_11/malacarne-annacarla-valeriano-ospedali-psichiatrici- [8] https://iosonominoranza.it/lesbiche-sotto-il-fascismo/ [9] https://www.wikipink.org/index.php/Femminiello [10]http://www.gaynews.it/2020/04/25/resistenza-25-aprile-comunita-lgbt-quattro-giornate-napoli-anpi-antonio-amoretti/ [11]https://espresso.repubblica.it/visioni/cultura/2017/09/27/news/quattro-giornate-di-napoli-la-storia-dei-femminielli-che-fecero-la-resistenza-1.309802
