Foreword

Summary

IN THE BEGINNING: two names, two numbers. Nevio Vitelli—111,785. Mirco Giuseppe Camia—116,354. Two people who experienced Dachau concentration camp. One, Vitelli, still almost a child, wrote a poem after his liberation: “My Shadow in Dachau,” his only poem. It is the monologue of a victim condemned to death, addressed to his mother: “What have I done, Mum? Do you know? Tell me and kiss me in my sleep, so lightly, that I wouldn't even dare to kiss you back, like when you used to cry about me, the naughty boy.”

Nevio Vitelli, born 1928, died—as a delayed consequence of a disease contracted in the concentration camp—in 1948. He was twenty years old.

The other, Mirco Giuseppe Camia, born 1925, a survivor, walks through Dachau once more forty years after his liberation. In his briefcase, as well as his own poetry of remembrance, he carries the poem written by Nevio Vitelli, his fellow prisoner, at whose side he spent time in a hospital room after the camp was freed.

Two men, one poem, a few stanzas, and then one woman, Dorothea Heiser, whose anthology passes on to us what has survived: testimonies from Dachau and its external camps, collected in Europe, compiled with the help of survivors, to bring the past into the present, sensing that nostra res agitur, that what happened concerns us all.

The result is remembrance in many languages and the preservation of the indispensable.

Secret messages were scribbled on gutta-percha latex, scraps of newsprint, toilet paper, secret letters buried under a cement floor, hidden in a lock of hair, engraved on the brain; all in the hope that, one day, when the gates were flung open, they would be able to write down, with perfect recall, all that had happened in Dachau. Writing as a form of prayer, as Kafka put it. Poetry as an expression of the survival instinct; verse as testimony and tribute to the will and strength to resist.

In the midst of the throng in which the prisoners, dressed only in dehumanizing zebra stripes, were reduced to numbers, a single piece of poetry said: I am still me, I am still an individual. However faceless the guards might be, reduced to their sole function, to torture and kill—I am able to cry and suffer and pray, unmistakable and, as a unique being, irreplaceable.