Questo [mio] povero corpo: povestind feminitatea chinuită

Giuliana Tedeschi, survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, repatriated in Italy after twelve months of internment, returns to “everyday life” through storytelling, seen as moment of sharing and, above all, of catharsis. On December 15, 1946, her first volume of memoirs Questo povero corpo [This poor body] was published. Breaking the silence that surrounds an unspeakable experience, Tedeschi fixes her memories on the page. Her own body is the absolute protagonist of the narration: instrument and object of torture, the last simulacrum of a lost femininity. The body, described here as an empty shell from the moment of entering the camp, loses any connection with the outside world, with its own past along with the loss of personal objects. The insistent return to the theme of the body, to nudity, to beauty and ugliness, to the violence endured and suffered, transforms the body from the object of the narration into a narrative subject, revelatory of defeated pain and witness of surviving beauty. In this kind of memoirs, published in Italy at the end of the 40s of the twentieth century, the body turns out to be a distinctive feature of the female memoirs. The body represents a distinctive feature also in the Romanian communist prisons’ memoirs, in authors like Lena Constante, Adriana Georgescu, Ana Maria Marin, or Ioana Berindei. The prisoners’ body is a repulsive enemy, a prison from which they must escape, a piece of flesh that anchors them to a terrible reality. Deportees and prisoners share the need to control expressions and emotions, dominating an angry, bent body, terrified of threats, of constant violence, of bone-deep fear. It is, therefore, a body violated emotionally and physically by poverty, deprivation, words, looks and violence. Hair and teeth suffered from malnutrition; nails broke – when they were not eaten to overcome the nervousness –, periods were disappearing. However, in a process of progressive uglification (and darkening) in which nature also played its part, the prisoners find the residues of a femininity and a grace temporarily lost but not forgotten. Many women don’t give up taking care of their appearance in the hope of reuniting with their loved ones, of a future “outside”. The simple fact of taking care of a body that borders on the image of weakness and manifests the suffering experienced is the expression of a tragic gesture, a last connection with the external reality. This contribution aims, therefore, to explore the role that the theme of the body acquires in female memories from Nazi concentration camps and communist prisons by investigating its multiple representations