Il silenzio dei vivi

Memoirs of a Jew born in Vienna in 1918 to a family of Jewish merchants of Hungarian background. Shortly after the unification of Austria and Germany her father was deported to Dachau and to Buchenwald, where he perished. Springer married "pro forma" an Italian Jew and received Italian nationality. Together with her mother and other members of the family she settled in Budapest, but shortly afterward she left for Milano. In 1942 she received the last letter from her mother. The Italian resistance provided her with false documents, but in 1944 an informer betrayed her to the Gestapo. In August 1944 she was deported to Auschwitz, later to Bergen-Belsen, and in February 1945 to Raguhn, a subsidiary camp of Buchenwald. In March 1945 she was transferred to Theresienstadt. After the war she returned to Italy, married a Catholic man and settled in a small town in the south. Describes life in Vienna, Budapest, and Milano under the Nazis, the transports to the camps, and conditions of life there.