Nevio Vitelli, Italy, biography

Summary

Nevio Vitelli was born in 1928 in Fiume, then Italy. In April 1944, at age 16, Vitelli arrived alone in Germany, and in September of the same year attempted a risky journey to return home to his parents. It was during this attempt that he was arrested by the Gestapo and, owing to the antifascist propaganda he was carrying with him, sent on September 27, 1944, to Dachau (prisoner number 111,785). He lived to see the liberation of the camp in April 1945, returned home in spite of illness resulting from his imprisonment, and died in 1948, after almost continuous hospitalization, at barely twenty years old.

In his short life, Nevio Vitelli wrote only this single poem, “My Shadow in Dachau,” in a hospital in the town of Dachau, which he was taken to after the liberation. In 1989 Mirco Giuseppe Camia (biography, pp. 56–57) recalled his encounter with Nevio Vitelli in that hospital:

I became acquainted with Nevio in the hospital at Dachau, where we shared the same room, together with others, for no more than twenty days…—Twenty days that were so important for me, like an entire lifetime… We didn't speak of much during this time, the most important things of suffering, nothing more…. Anyway, nothing about our future: Where was this future?

We were both badly wounded inside …

He with his seventeen years, even more than me: behind us the knowledge of things that we wanted to repress, but couldn't, just like we couldn't prevent them. There were all the terrible memories with all the open wounds of the soul, which no one could heal. Wounds that were deeper than the ones that afflicted our bodies…. Human being … is this the human being?…

During our stay in the hospital, he never talked to me about his poem. I first heard about it three years later, printed in his obituary, which his parents sent to me when they wrote to inform me about his death….”