Experience the hardships of the camp in the garage. The experiment of the young Joshua in the new book by Mario Calabresi- Corriere.it

It all starts with the tattoo, the mark impressed by the tormentors on the grandmother’s forearm. Joshua is only four years old, but he is a very curious child: when he sees those numbers, he immediately asks what they are. Thus he discovers his Jewish descent on his mother’s side (his father is African American) and the tragic story of grandmother Andra and her sister Tatiana, deported to Auschwitz from Fiume when they were children. They had miraculously survived the extermination camp, where they had been mistaken for twins and risked being subjected to medical experiments on humans by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele.

The story of the Bucci sisters has been known since the 1990s, when the two interested parties began to talk about it. However, Mario Calabresi has chosen to tell it from a new point of view, addressing the children with the support of the illustrator Carla Manea, in the book I will be your memory, out on Tuesday 28 March for Mondadori. At the center of the narration the author, former director of «Stampa» and «Repubblica», now at the head of the podcast company Chora Media, places the personal experience of Joshua, Andra’s grandson, who lives in the United States, but goes to visit his grandmother in Italy every summer and as she grows older, she learns more and more details about her ordeal.

When he was still a child, the story of the capture in Fiume occupied by the Germans strikes him painfully: «Joshua listened to her and could not imagine a family torn from their home, which is dragged away and has to abandon everything. It seemed to him so terrible and unfair. The details of the dinner that remains abandoned, of the unmade beds, of them leaving without suitcases, shocked him». Gradually the boy realizes that he has “began to look at the world through his grandmother’s eyes”.

Time passes, Joshua grows up, he attends upper secondary school and at the age of sixteen he is asked to present an end-of-course project. He then proposes an experiment on himself. Experience firsthand for a week, as far as possible, the hardships that the deportees suffered in the Nazi concentration camps: staying without ever changing clothes, complete with a star of David sewn on; no shower or toilet; nights spent sleeping on the floor in the garage at home with no heating; manual labor all day; meals reduced to a bowl of broth with a slice of bread.

The teachers at first reject the project. They fear it could harm the boy’s health. But Joshua insists and eventually wins. The doctor consulted by the school certifies his good physical condition and only prescribes him a slightly less spartan diet.

The Christmas holidays are an opportunity to undergo the test, which Calabresi follows through Joshua’s diary. At the beginning boredom prevails for not being able to do anything but work. Then tiredness, hunger, cold take over. The wait for the seven days to pass becomes spasmodic. All that remains is to cling to the only permitted object: «I became super protective with my spoon – notes the boy -, after I thought I had lost it. So I constantly check that it is with me. I am convinced that this spoon, the only cutlery I have, is the most precious thing in the world, otherwise I would have to eat with my hands. I realized it last night when I woke up and couldn’t find it. I panicked and I burst into tears.”

Eventually Joshua is free to melt into an embrace with his grandmother, who welcomes him in tears: “Yours – Andra tells him – was the gesture that most moved me in my life”. She has lost five and a half kilos, but now the first shower and breakfast are a source of extraordinary happiness, to which is added the pride of having tidied up the garden of the house working hard in those seven days.

However, the research doesn’t stop there. It is now a mission for Joshua to study the Holocaust, delve into its aspects, preserve its memory for the time when the survivors will no longer be there. He himself bears witness to his schoolmates. And then he delves into the gruesome story of little Sergio, Andra and Tatiana’s cousin, who was also deported and then subjected to the heinous experiments of Nazi doctors. He and other children had been injected with the tuberculosis bacillus; then, when the war was almost over, they had been assassinated to hide the traces of the crimes committed on them. Today in Hamburg, where he was killed, a street is named after little Sergio and there are others around Italy.

It all starts with the tattoo and ends the same way. Joshua, now a man of twenty-eight, he has decided that when his grandmother is gone, he will get her same number tattooed on his forearm. «He will – writes Calabresi – because it is something that is worth more than memory, it will be a way to carry on her memory, keep it alive and to disturb. People will ask what that number is and he will tell the story, and he will continue to do so for the rest of his life.’

The presentation in Milan with Andra Bucci

Mario Calabresi will present his book on Monday 27 March, at 6.30 pm at the Shoah Memorial in Milan (Piazza Edmond Jacob Safra 1). Andra Bucci will be present with the author (information: [email protected]the meeting
admission is free while seats last)