Farewell to Lucy Salani, the only trans survivor of the concentration camps

He would have turned 99 in August. Lucy Salani, considered the only trans person to have survived, in Italy, the Nazi-fascist persecutions and concentration camps, she died: the founder of the Sentinelli and Lombard regional councilor Luca Paladini announced it.

Born in Fossano, in the province of Cuneo, she was part of a anti-fascist family of Emilian origin, with whom she moved to Bologna. Her father and brothers, however, rejected her, perceiving her “otherness.” «My mother was desperate», Lucy said in her documentary about her life, «There is only one breath of life”, by Matteo Bortugno and Daniele Coluccini. “I always wanted to do what little girls did at that age: cook, clean and play with dolls. My father and brothers didn’t accept me. In the 1930s my parents moved to the Bologna area and so it was that I established friendships with various homosexuals in the city. What is my fault, if nature made me like this? I’ve always wondered about it and I’ve tried to make him understand».

Called up for service by the Italian army in August 1943, Lucy Salani declared herself homosexual, but was sent to Cormons, in the artillery. He deserted after the armistice of 8 September 1943, returning to Bologna and finding his displaced parents. Fearing that she had endangered them by desertion, she abandoned her clandestinity and she, forced to join the fascists or the Germans, joined the Nazi army in Suviana, but deserted that toothrowing herself into the icy water and escaping from the hospital in Bologna where she had been hospitalized for the pneumonia that had struck her.

She lived in Bologna as a prostitute, but was arrested for her desertion and locked up in a farmhouse, from which she escaped, and then in prison. Tried, she was sentenced to death, but managed to obtain a pardon and the sentence resulted in hard labor in a labor camp in Bernau, southern Germany.

Lucy also escaped from there, but later it was deported to Dachau. He survived six months in the concentration camp until liberation by American troops in April 1945, when he was twenty. His job in the camp was to take the corpses for cremation. She had been beaten, shaved, smeared with tar and humiliated in so many ways. “What I saw in the field was scary,” she told Al Courier. “They burned the dead and there were those who were still alive and moving in the flames. Terrible. In the morning when you looked at the electrified fence you found a bunch of boys attacked with flames coming out of their bodies».

After her release, Lucy Salani began working as an upholsterer, living between Rome and Turin (where she adopted a little girl, Patrizia). In the mid 80’s she underwent the operation of reassignment of the sex, but refused to change the name with which she had been registered at birth, Luciano: «The name is sacred, my parents gave it to me», she said.

Back in Bologna, she took care of her parents until their death. In recent years she lived isolated, receiving care and visits from volunteers of the Trans Identity Movement, who had become her friends. “I’ve seen and been through too much,” she said. “I’m really starting to feel like looking for lives on other planets.”

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