Re-narrating trauma in a transnational context: testimonies about Nazi concentration camps by women deported from the region of the Adriatisches Küstenland

The article discusses two frequent assumptions concerning women’s testimonies of Nazi concentration camps: a) that there is an emphasis on bodily experience: is it, as some authors would maintain, necessarily characteristic of all women's testimonies? and b) that women’s testimonies are of a supposedly more private, less political nature: what exactly is the relation between women’s individual memory and the collective? Since the politics and ideologies that influenced the testimonies were in most cases grand national narratives, these assumptions are examined using examples of women’s testimonies from Italy, Croatia and Slovenia, and in particular their borderlands. The atmosphere of the cold war made women’s testifying in Yugoslavia extremely difficult: it was strictly controlled, and survivors of the camps had to be presented as fearless partisans rather than suffering victims. By contrast the political context of Italian women’s testimonies in the seventies was that of the feminist movement, which aimed at creating a new, anti-heroic model of active women. Finally, the article examines recent accounts by women survivors belonging to the Slovenian national minority in Italy, paying special attention to the case of Savina Rupel, who testified several times to different media, and in different languages. As her case shows, even when the testimony eschews the official national narratives, it is nevertheless inescapably affected by the complex social and political contexts of the acts of remembering and testifying.