He cleaned himself dressed himself poisoned

As a child I thought I was a gypsy, in twenty years I discovered I was Jewish. At least a little: just enough. I knew very little about my mother's family because they were poor, they spoke little and were dead. The few relatives still alive had no family trees or properties to which they could hook memories and stories, or they had dispersed, in their silence, to various parts of the world. One of the few ancestors that my mother evoked – but she didn't even know much about it – was a mysterious great-grandmother whose family she preferred to keep quiet about and of which she knew only the name and race: Virginia, gypsy. We would have known that it was a half-lie dictated by ignorance and fear, but also by the omen that fascism and the racial laws could return.

My grandfather was called Otello and my grandmother Tosca, like the works. They had met in the late thirties and in 1941 my mother was born. As a young Otello had had tuberculosis, but he was cured. Tosca fell ill in 1944 and died in October 1950, after much sanatorium, when my mother was 9 years old. It was also known that Otello had two brothers, Adolfo, who lived in La Spezia, and Norma – another work – who had married Don, a Scottish soldier known during the war, and had moved first to Edinburgh, then to Melbourne, in Australia. It was also vaguely known that Otello's family was originally from Ferrara, but that – as stated in one of the few remaining documents – "all the members of the aforementioned family are emigrated to Milan on 12/6/1911». My mother occasionally mentioned some uncle, including Aunt Amelia whom everyone envied because he had made a fortune by marrying "Brusadelli's chauffeur" (not Brusadelli, a well-known industrialist, his driver). It was like a dusting of names that materialized when an old photo came up or when my grandfather, already ill, seeing a TV documentary about baboons, exclaimed impassively: «The one who rules her, you who my sister»(« Here is Norma, here my sister is here »). Nothing else.

March 12, 1939. Otello, with the rifle of the dartboard, and to the right, Tosca. On the left, with eyes closed, Wanda, Tosca's sister, and behind, with the hat, Chermino Sturari, Wanda's husband.

Milan, 1952. Otello with a rifle and, to the right, Lina, his second wife (my grandmother). The target would take if you hit the target. The prize was photography.

Otello died in 1978. When Lina, his second wife, also died in 1991, my mother decided to write to Norma, the aunt she hadn't seen since she was a child, to warn her and recover some memories. A month later the first answer came, followed by others, one every month. In the letters Norma inserted documents and photographs, but above all she indulged in river stories, disconnected and almost illegible – written in the forgotten Italian of which an 84-year-old lady with the fifth grade can live who has been living and thinking only in English for decades. Norma complained about her husband, gave updates on Australian relatives, threw herself into complicated dollars, but above all told obscure episodes about the lives of people whose only name was echoed in my mother. In the space of a few ramshackle lines, from the past appeared the grandfather Primo and the grandmother Antenesca, the prozii Adolfo, Ettore and Amelia, and everything seemed immersed in a foggy Milan populated by seamstresses and workers, veterans, thieves, forgers, mutilated, whores and police: an age invaded by cold and poverty, and dominated by fascism, war and TB.

"Dear Nadia, your writing was sudden. Thanks. It was very painful. You're my niece and I always think of you – I've baptized you – even if Don doesn't let me call. It will be difficult to return. Too much money. Here everything is dear ".

And then scattered episodes, shadows:

"I walk up to S. Fedele, half-dressed, in a cold place open women street women and my father" (…) Robertino 18, doctor of agronomy, handsome – over 500 students – the only one Mussolini gave her graduated from doctor, but too much study, he was sick of tuberculosis, there was his mother Dina, Ferrarese, but uncle his father was not there, he was at the San Vittore hospital from the beatings because they wanted to know from where and who made them fake money – he didn't speak so he died, his grandmother Virginia was the greatest pain he felt ».

Milan, 1941. Norma in the center and Tosca on the right, with a friend.

The revelation on Virginia is in the letter of 17 October 1991, on page 5. They are a few lines.

"Then I worked in hotels then ran away 8 Sept. 43 – I hated the Germans knowing they tortured so partisans. The Germans knew that mother was Jewish – I was not baptized – luckily your father found those XX(1) – you must come with us – You are of Jewish blood. He said I am tuberculous, we do not care – to the Jewish blood – but I marry this – it was your mother – They wanted the name – if it is Jewish all concentration camps; cia other brothers? I don't know where they are. So every day out for grandma but Aunt Amelia took her to Tremezzo – she got tired «Bring me to Milan». He shut himself in the house he cleaned himself dressed and poisoned himself. The neighbor called Aunt Amelia. 3 days he spoke a language that nobody understood. He died. "

The letter of October 17, 1991 in which Norma, forty-seven years after the events, tells my mother the truth about her great-grandmother Virginia Pirani.

I never thought of writing Virginia's story until Friday 8 November 2019, when a small crowd gathered in front of the Milan Synagogue to bring solidarity to Liliana Segre and the Jewish community. I never thought of telling it because the fragment of identity and DNA that stuck an unknown woman on me – Virginia Pirani, born in Ferrara on 13 February 1871 and died in Tremezzo in 1944 – seemed to me an unimportant detail, something to be casually shared at dinner, as a minor curiosity, even if it had intimately struck me and, I would say almost, restructured. Discovering Jews – at least a little, that's enough – at twenty-three, is a small shock that forces us to imagine ourselves from the beginning, confusedly. I never wrote it because I never thought that the anti-Semitism that caused Otello to tell his daughter that his grandmother was a gypsy and not a Jew, as if to mitigate the guilt and cushion the future danger, could come back, not I can say in what form, with what intensity and gravity.

The reticence of my grandfather, however, is the same that I saw in my Roma opposite – fifteen years ago the apartment in front of mine was seized from the mafia and managed by an association that deals with nomads – who prefer that the son does not tell his companions where his family came from. Racism remains in the air even when it seems to have vanished, because it is elementary and primitive, a kind of instinct to blame for feeling innocent. Racism pollutes those who suffer it as well as those who exercise it. But Otello's reticence also resembles that of the many who failed to say what they had suffered in the camps, such as Piera Sonnino – the Auschwitz survivor whose diary was written in 1950 – who had chosen for fifty years to keep his testimony on the extermination of his entire family in a drawer, also to "not be recognized", as he repeated to his daughters.

Memory is another way of saying knowledge. Feeding it is the only possibility we have of knowing that in the past of each of us, within the existences that preceded and prepared us, there are victims and there are perpetrators, and that it is better to descend from the first because injustices acted and suffered, somehow, they continue to concern us. Virginia, at 73, decided to take the poison so as not to be taken away. I think it was the right choice. Things change, but men remain the same, come back the same, ready to forget what they never really learned. The past and future history – both faded like the photographs of my mother's family – is all we can hold on to. It is true for the descendants of the victims, but even more for those of the murderers.

Monday 11 November 2019 at 6.30 pm in Piazza Safra in Milan there is a demonstration for Liliana Segre, against anti-Semitism and racism.

Virginia Pirani, born in Ferrara on 13 February 1871 and died suicidal in Tremezzo in 1944, in the only photo that remained of her.

(1) The XX are curved, like two swastikas.