Milano, house of memory, the exhibition “Minstrella nel lager” drawings and nursery rhymes of the partisan Aura Pasa in the Bolzano concentration camp (1944/45)

Milano, house of memory, the exhibition “Minstrella nel lager” drawings and nursery rhymes of the partisan Aura Pasa in the Bolzano concentration camp (1944/45)

The exhibition will be inaugurated today, Thursday 11 January, at 18 pm, by the Councilor for Culture Tommaso Sacchi “Lager Minstrel”, set up in the spaces of House of Memory from 12 January to 25 February 2024, with free admission. The exhibition is an unpublished testimony on the Bolzano Concentration Camp, set up and managed by the SS between the summer of 1944 and the spring of 1945, and illuminates the extraordinary spirit of a partisan woman: Aura Pasa.

The Bolzano concentration camp, despite having represented, together with the Risiera di San Sabba, the main place of Nazi detention and torture in Italy, it has been the subject of an authentic removal since the months following the Liberation.
In the early sixties, in place of the barracks and cells, a dozen residential buildings stood in the Camp area. It was only at mid 70s that the work of memory recovery began and the first important studies were published, but still in the 80 years it was difficult to find anyone who could point out the wall surrounding the houses at number 80 via Resia, the only remaining trace of the Lager.

Since then, much research has been done, work has been done to track down documents that would allow us to reconstruct the organization of the camp and above all the stories of the approximately 11 thousand men, women and children who were detained there. Now the installation “Passage of Memory” along the external side of the wall in via Resia he remembers all their names.

The notebooks that Aura Pasa wrote in the Bolzano concentration camp, with its drawings and nursery rhymes, tell much more than names: they tell the times, the organisation, life and relationships within the Camp. An unpublished testimony to date which, in addition to telling us about the "physicality" of life in that dramatic context, transmits to us an incompressible will to resist.

The Bolzano Camp was a transit camp, where the Nazis gathered, between the summer of 1944 and the spring of 1945, the prisoners destined for subsequent deportation to the great Lager in the territory of the Third Reich. Several dozen killings of prisoners are documented, sometimes with particularly brutal methods. It is estimated that on average one person was killed every four days among the camp's prisoners. Whippings, beatings and harassment are the order of the day.

In this climate of violence and death, Aura Pasa tries in various ways to exorcise a destiny in which prisoners are reduced to numbers, at the mercy of their jailers, also drawing on the strength of irony. A capacity which, as Debora Villa underlines in her comment on the exhibition, is a purely feminine trait: “Women are capable of turning mountains into hills so that you can climb them. They create oases in the desert, rainbows in the night. They give life even in times of death. They manage to laugh at misfortunes."

The exhibition, designed and created by the National Association of Former Deportees in Nazi Camps at the House of Memory of Milano, presents an extensive excerpt from Aura Pasa's notebooks, alongside objects, original documents and videos.

Who was Aura Pasa: graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, she teaches drawing in lower and higher schools. She is liberal and democratic, in September 1943 she began her activity as a partisan fighter. On October 12th she was arrested following a tip-off from a spy who had infiltrated the partisans. After eight days of interrogations in the Roman Theater of Verona, she was handed over to the SS on charges of being “anti-fascist, anti-German and relay of the Pasubio Division” and locked in an underground cell. On 28 October she was transferred to the Bolzano concentration camp, where she remained until 29 April 1945.