What does it mean to research the life of one’s own father, a survivor of the Nazi camps, retrace his life in the lager and then bring it to the stage? We talked about this with Andrea Pennacchi, actor, playwright and theatre director. Trying to understand also how important it is to talk about memory today.

QUESTION: Who was your father and what was his story?

PENNACCHI ANSWER: My father was a young hand printer, a printer, who at the age of 17, in ‘44, enrolled in the patriotic action squads, in the Sap. In reality he was born with Italy already fascist, but let’s say he also felt, like many other young people, that it was time to do something against this dictatorship. The anger wasn’t ideological, it was more against, let’s say, the regime that had wanted a devastating war and then basically ran away with it. They were in the Garibaldis, the Garibaldi Brigade, but they were not yet communists, in the sense that, for example, my uncle, my mother’s brother, who came from a long and articulate political tradition. My great uncle had been exiled. There was a whole series of different backgrounds, let’s say. My father was a young man who at one point said enough is enough, I too want to do something so that the Nazi fascist yoke on this nation, on our land, ends. Unfortunately it happens that one of the gang, of the group of which my father was a member, is discovered, he is tortured as was the practice and he is a young boy, so he also names the others. They are caught by the political police, among other things we also have the name of Brigadier Miniero of the political police of Padua, and tried. Tried in Padua where in reality the Public Prosecutor wanted the death penalty for them, not all of them, for my father he had asked for 15 years for the leaders he had asked for the death penalty. But things turned out differently because the group was then loaded onto a train in Verona and sent to Austria for forced labour because Germany needed men for its war effort and so they were more valuable that way than being shot. And they end up in Ebensee. Ebensee is a camp, as you probably know, a bit special. In the sense that first of all it stands in a beautiful place and I also tell about it in my show. Because it makes an impression and you find it hard to believe how often such bad things happened in such a beautiful place. I was struck by the story of the Ebensee camp, i.e. the fact that it started out as a concentration camp for politicians and what were called asocialists, but it became something else because someone, a high priest, convinced Hitler that Germany was in possession of American missiles, i.e. intercontinental missiles with which to strike the United States and thus end the war. Because of course the view was that the United States once hit on their territory would surrender. But these missiles did not exist. What’s even crazier, is that at a certain point someone says yes, eh, but these missiles, non-existent missiles, you can’t keep them in the Ruhr where they bomb us every other day. We have to find a secret place and there are the caves of Ebensee. They come to someone’s mind and the internees are put to dig tunnels to make them bigger to hold missiles that don’t exist. And for that they come from Mauthausen, prisoners are sent to Ebensee and then the camp grows enormously. Not only that but it is given to the SS and of course they are confused. Because a labour camp is one thing, a concentration and extermination camp is another, but here they had gypsies, Jews and all those things all those races that they wanted to massacre. And so it becomes a particularly refined hell Ebensee. There’s a beautiful book about Ebensee written by an Austrian researcher who also asked my father, I have the letter at home, he also asked my father to contribute his memoirs and it’s beautiful. In the sense that it shows hell but with a scientific, positivistic view of the old history of the early 20th century, therefore without any pathos, exaggeration, rhetoric. Clean, data, numbers, testimonies and you understand that that camp is truly hell on earth. Of course it is worse. There is Auschwitz where a horrible genocide was perpetrated, but that one is refined in that it unites all races, all what was called deviance by the Nazi regime and puts them there. To die of labour and mistreatment because of course they were extremely mistreated. I’ll tell you this, apart from the happy ending of my father coming home in July ‘45, there is another little happy ending. The group had arrived first at Mauthausen where there was to be the first quarantine, in which so many died, and then the branding with the number on the arm. Since Mauthausen had just been bombed, the train was sent directly to Ebensee so my father and his whole gang never had the number on their arm. Which meant that, for example, when I went to Milan, the ANED told me that your father’s case was always a bit dubious because he didn’t have… but thank God, because I insisted and knowing my father he couldn’t have invented this whole story, and I found documentation of my father at Ebensee thanks to the International Red Cross who sent me some documents. And the problem with not finding my father’s name was that obviously the German who took names had misspelled my father’s first name, the surname, which being Pennacchi was not exactly easy for a German. And so now my father is officially one of the internees

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: How did you approach this story, did your father talk about it willingly?

ANSWER PENNACCHI: Well, then no, as you can imagine. My approach is late. I at home consider that I lived in this sort of bubble. Because both the maternal and paternal branches of the family had stories of partisans, so I thought the whole of Italy was like that. Then I found out that it wasn’t like that, but in the meantime I lived for years with this stuff that, yes, my father was a partisan, as was my uncle, as was my aunt as… and so it was one of those things that they accepted and I said, I’m proud of my father. But it wasn’t like I was asking him for stuff. I thought it was normal stuff. My father almost never spoke of his imprisonment, except for two moments that I remember with some warmth, let’s say, but this says a lot about my father, he told me two positive things. He told me about the time that a German corporal, because they had made a load of wood in the snow, they had made a big effort, he gave them potatoes which was like a week’s meal,

practically. Or a poignant memory of when the captivity is over and a young Roma man can’t contain himself because for the first time in years he has a whole loaf of bread in his hand and eats it all and dies of indigestion. These are the two stories I got from my father before he died

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: Did he also tell you what it was like to live during the time of the regime?

ANSWER PENNACCHI: No, not this one. Occasionally, but you have to consider that actually my father was quite at odds with my mother’s family, where many of them lived in hiding, in short they were already enemies of the regime. My father was a normal person, my grandfather had a business, a small horse transport company in partnership with his brother, and they did small transports, so they didn’t feel the heel of the regime on their necks. In fact he used to tell me this, when I was a kid he used to see that when I went to do horse transports in the city centre, some shops would close. And they were shops that belonged to the Jews of the city and he couldn’t explain this because then he was such a little boy. Take into account that he joined the army when he was 17 and so he experienced fascism when he was in junior high school and basically his grandfather made a huge sacrifice to put him through junior high school and become a printer. So he has no stories of the regime before he took his stand. Just slowly talking about it with others, seeing what was going on around being an intelligent guy, he came to the conclusion that it could not go on like that. That it was wrong. The regime in which he was born and lived was wrong and that he wanted to oppose it. Obviously the moment he decided to oppose it he suffered the full extent of the repression, he finally understood why the regime was so wrong. Then this thing happens here. Unfortunately, my father dies and I realise that apart from all the little, let’s say, tricks that a son feels that he hasn’t been able to tell his father before, and a father that you love very much anyway, the biggest trick is that I didn’t let my father tell me anything, I knew very little about his story. And at the beginning I was afraid I had lost it because very few had any memory of what had happened. But then I investigated, thank goodness I did a historical thesis at university, so I developed a historical method, I found a whole series of documents and then I had the enormous good fortune to find my uncle, I call him my uncle but he is not by blood, but he is like a relative, the commander of my father’s group is still alive. He’s still alive and as often happens, maybe he doesn’t remember what he had for breakfast, but he remembers the 44th. And so I went, we had long talks about them as partisans about them, then interned in concentration camps, I supplemented that with books… also the luck to find for example a book written by the doctor of the third US Cavalry which is The Regiment that entered Ebensse for the first time. Which by the way confirms many of the things my uncle told me. Which makes me laugh a lot. My uncle, whose battle name was Vladimir, told me about the actual Liberation in a way that I thought was a joke, that he was trying to put an ugly thing in a cheerful light. Instead, much of the information he told me coincided with reality, so I also tested the reliability of the source.

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: But… like what?

PENNACCHI ANSWER: To give you an example, it’s something I tell at the beginning of the play. The wagon-master, let’s say, who arrives first inside the Ebensee gate is Sergeant Pomante. I find this out from the doctor’s diary. And my uncle told me about the fact that the sergeant who opens the gate and looks at them, these wretches who weighed 38 kilos, exclaims ‘Managgia’. And he, my uncle, in his joy turns to my father and says: ‘Ostia Valerio they have freed us Neapolitans’. Sergeant Pomante was an Italian-American, a veteran of the Normandy landings and the Battle of the Ardennes, so it suddenly becomes very likely that he exclaimed what many Italian-Americans used as an expletive ‘Mnaggia’. So suddenly my uncle’s tale, which seemed like a joke, becomes believable

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: Another question. You researched, wrote The Story of Your Father and brought it to the theatre. Did they criticise you for doing that? And what was it like from an emotional point of view to take it to the theatre?

ANSWER PENNACCHI: But then criticism I haven’t received any except from some fascist head who says that these are things that are no longer important. But we ignore these ones. Because forgetfulness does the work of fascism. On an emotional level it is a pressing trip. To think that when I was 17 my father went through certain things… in the play I only tell about the less terrifying ones, because I know that in any case the audience cannot be too oppressed. The audience must have the opportunity to reflect on things, but you must not show them the splatter, the horror… it is not by chance that the Greeks considered certain things obscene, that is, to be done off-stage. But my path was terrible. My wife saw how my face changed as I worked on this text. It was also nice, though, because in the end it is a story that ends well. A story that ends with my father coming home alive and starting a family, continuing his political activity, but in a more conscious way together with my uncle. Then there is an extraordinary character like Lieutenant Luconi who helped them both before and after and during their imprisonment. There are characters, in the end it becomes something that would also deserve a film but not because it is my father but because it is the story itself that is so even adventurous in the end… Take these words with a grain of salt, of course, but my father at a certain point, even though he weighed 38 kilos and had been in a concentration camp for a year, so hard that if the Americans had arrived a few months later he would surely have died, and he still decided to walk home and my uncle caught petechial typhus, my father picked him up and took him to an American doctor who dosed him with penicillin and saved him. As soon as he was freed, Lieutenant Luconi recovered for a moment and then continued fighting as an advisor. First Tito’s military advisor and then he goes to Moscow, then he goes to South America, there are characters… they are really heroic characters in a way. So there is enormous suffering, but it is redeemed in what is at least temporarily a happy ending.

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: Why is it important to talk about what has been? Why is memory important?

ANSWER PENNACCHI: It’s something I often ask myself. Let’s say memory is important for so many things, Then first of all, a well-kept memory, let’s say, tells you who you are. It helps you remember who you are. Then memory must also be operational though. Memory is that thing that tells you that certain things have happened and can happen again. But that’s also the beauty of memory, they can also be defeated. Periodically it reappears, let’s call it fascism, but let’s say also on a more cosmic level evil, it constantly reappears but can be defeated. I believe that this is also the meaning of remembering. Remembering for the sake of remembering is useless. Or worse still, memory to justify… For example, we now often see conflicts in which memory or recent history is used to justify acts of aggression. That is not the healthy use of memory. But used in a healthy way, memory is good for you. It allows you to have a political conscience and makes you warm, no? Because what memory does, memory is your personal thing, in the end it can also be a collective memory. But it’s still a hot subject, isn’t it? And it connects you to history. History in books, on the other hand, is objective but cold, not particularly inspiring. Instead, memory makes precisely the connection between you and the great story. And it does it through emotional material as well. For that is important to keep because otherwise what difference is there between the fight against Nazi-fascism and the conquest of the city of Ur in 4000 BC. It’s those things that I’m interested in anyway but it’s not so operationally on my horizon.

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: Is there something that stands out today compared to the past?

ANSWER PENNACCHI: But let’s say one thing, it is noticeable. That is that right now we are faced with a worrying denialism. But it does not deny, and this is what scares me the most, it does not deny, as it has for years, the existence of concentration camps or a policy. But it preaches, as they say, their irrelevance. That is, a denialism that says ‘But yes, well these are things of the past now, what do you want…’ And instead memory reminds us that these are things of the past but they can come back. Because memory reminds you that history does not have a linear path towards the good the beautiful. History is a meander. It goes back, it goes forward, it twists on itself and then it starts again… so it is good to remember that things can come back and that memory is extremely relevant today.