The girl who went to Dachau – by choice

This autobiographical novel records an Italian teenager’s bizarre act of class war. Lara Feigel reports

IDEVIATION

368pp, Pushkin, £20, ebook £11.51

n February 1944, the 18-year-old Luce D’Eramo ran away from her bourgeois Italian home to volunteer in a German labour camp near Frankfurt. She was a zealous student enrolled in a university fascist group, determined to disprove at first hand the rumours about the Nazis. She was a rebellious adolescent, angry at her parents for their infantilisation of her and their snobbishness about the working classes. This was her way to shock them into recognising her as a grown-up. Now her meandering, bestselling 1979 autobiographical novel Deviation is published in English for the first time, translated by Anne Milano Appel. It offers a very unusual take on life in the concentration camps and then the postwar ruins.

The book was written over a 20-year period from the Fifties to the Seventies. It begins as a novel so overtly autobiographical that the heroine is known as Lucie and grows up in circumstances identical to D’Eramo’s own. In the second half, the tone becomes more that of a discursive, essayistic memoir. D’Eramo considers the faults of her own memory and the deviation of the title: a key plot point that she misrepresented both in the novel and in accounts of herself that she gave in the Fifties.

The opening sections take the form of vivid, set-piece accounts of days of imprisonment and escape. Arriving at the labour camp, Lucie is immediately disillusioned about the Nazis, horrified by the poor quality of food and the lice-ridden, starving inmates of the camp. Initially, she’s assigned light work, monitoring thermometers in the IG Farben factory, but when she complains to officials that the disgusting soup fed to the Russians contradicts “the Nazi-Fascist promises of civility”, she’s transferred to loading blocks of frozen sulphuric acid alongside the Russians. Her hands stinging and her body aching, she nonetheless enjoys feeling easily connected to her fellow workers, and sets about trying to organise a strike.

It’s at the point that she leaves the camp that the deviation occurs. In the first version of the account, D’Eramo describes being arrested for the strike organisation and sent to Dachau. In fact (and in the second telling), she is repatriated, on account of her father’s position as undersecretary of state in Italy.