Occupied Italy

Luca Castiglioni The Italian administration of the Dodecanese (1912–1945) remains a contentious but marginalised subject in European colonial and subjecthood studies, while its ending is still being a sensitive topic in Greek and Turkish political framework: this time has been often dismissed either as a temporary foreign occupation delaying Greek unification or as an eccentric, quasi-colonial……

Charles Sabatos Yeditepe University Compared to the Czech experience of wartime occupation, which inspired a number of novels and films that gained international acclaim, the Slovak experience remains relatively little known.  Among the most notable works by Slovak-Jewish survivors of World War II, both recently published in English translation, are Leopold Lahola’s short story collection The Last……

Konstantinos-Michail Foteinis University of Ioannina. This paper examines how Jewish survivors from the communities of Epirus (Arta, Preveza, Ioannina) and Corfu experienced and narrated liberation through their testimonies. Drawing on Tony Judt’s notion of Europe’s “double occupation,” it approaches liberation not as a clear endpoint but as a transitional and contested process shaped by contradictions,……

Rosanna Rizzi This study examines the Spomen Kosturnica of Barletta (1970), designed by the Yugoslav sculptor Dušan Džamonja, as a case study of the “incomplete” and contested memory of Liberation in post-war Europe. Dedicated to Yugoslav Partisans who died on Italian soil during the Second World War, the monument embodies a transnational narrative of Liberation that has……

Fani Oflidou University of Patras This presentation examines the linguistic features and narrative dimensions of the testimonies of two female survivors of Auschwitz–Birkenau, Sephardic Jews originating from Thessaloniki, Greece. The testimonies were delivered in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) and form part of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. The corpus of Judeo-Spanish testimonies included in the……

Lydia Vlasidou – York University in Toronto..  Lida Maria Dodou – University of Vienna The Ladino-language testimonies are a small and understudied subset of Holocaust survivor narratives. Unlike testimonies recorded in other languages, these interviews were often conducted in a language was no longer the survivor’s primary language of everyday expression. This linguistic displacement shaped……

Alexios Ntetorakis Exarchou Charles University  For millions of deportees to Nazi Germany, liberation was not a single moment but the beginning of a new and often chaotic struggle. This paper examines that experience through the case of 282 Greek prisoners deported to Brandenburg-Görden penitentiary in 1944, following their paths beyond the prison gates into the……

Tatiana Liani School of Drama at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.  In 1939, Renato Mordo, the Viennese Jewish artistic director of Deutsches Theater in Prague, arrives with his wife, actress Trude Wessely-Mordo, and his son Peter, in Athens. The forgotten Greek citizenship that his father had retained saved him from the fate of countless other Jewish……

Andrea Cominetti University of Verona. This paper analyzes the figure of the Protagonist in The Card Index (1960), examining it through the lens of traumatic memory and the complex psychological legacy of the Second World War. The play, which marks Tadeusz Różewicz’s theatrical debut, stands as one of the most significant documents of the impossibility……

Barbara Meazzi Université Côte d’Azur The archive of Ada Prospero Gobetti Marchesini preserves, among other materials, the papers related to the writing of her book Camilla Ravera – Vita in carcere e al confine (Life in Prison and in Confinement/Internal Exile), published in 1969 thanks to her tenacity. The book is now almost completely forgotten, partly……

Daniela Vitagliano  Aix-Marseille University. This paper approaches the liberation of occupied Italy from the perspective of Southern Italy in order to examine it as a historical act that generated new tensions, contradictions, and asymmetries of power. At the moment of liberation, the South was marked by profound social and economic inequalities. On the basis of previously unpublishedarchival documents by Rita Majerotti, a militant deeply rooted in the South and……