Escape to victory. Borrowing the name of the famous 1981 film, one can thus sum up the life Lucy Salani, the only Italian transgender woman to survive the Nazi concentration camps.forever on the run from your own life – first from the family and the army, then from the Dachau concentration camp, and then from all forms of discrimination to which it was subjected during its existence – in search of your identity. Disappeared yesterday, March 22, at the age of almost 99, Lucy was the oldest trans person in Italy, a testament to the resilience, courage, commitment to life and self-affirmation skills that have made her a symbol of the LGBTQ+ community for many.

Born in 1924 in Fossano under the name Luciano Salani, a name she never wanted to give up because, she explained a year ago in a wonderful interview with the magazine Open – “Calling me Luciano, of course, does not change my personality,” since childhood, she perceives herself as different. “My family prescribed me to have a childhood as a boy, but I did not feel understood. Even as a child I loved dolls: I remember one night I smashed the rocking horse they gave me. I have always felt like a woman”. This is the despair of her parents and her two brothers, who will always refuse to accept her. Having moved with her family to Bologna, at the age of 19 she was drafted into the Italian army in August 1943, Lucy tries to escape by declaring herself a homosexual, but they do not believe her: “Everyone says so.” Then she is sent to Cormons, to the artillery, but shortly after the armistice of September 8, she deserts, returns to Bologna and finds her parents displaced in Mirandola. Forced to join the Nazis or the Germans, she joins the Nazi army in Suvian, where she is assigned to anti-aircraft combat. But she deserts again, she dives into the icy water of the river and ends up in the hospital with subsequent pneumonia, from which she manages to escape.

Later, in order to earn a living, she begins to engage in prostitution: among her clients are also many German officers, and during a raid on a hotel, she is identified as a deserter. Clinging tenaciously to life, she flees, hiding in the basement of a farmhouse near Padua, shortly after being captured again in Mirandola, sent to prison, first in Bologna and then in Modena.before he was taken to Verona for trial against the Germans. She is sentenced to death but asks for and receives a pardon from General Albert Kesselring.: The sentence thus turns into forced labor in a labor camp in Bernau, in southern Germany. Incredibly, she also manages to escape from the labor camp along with another prisoner: “We attacked each other under a train going to Italy. Unfortunately, it was not like that: we ended up in Berlin, and he was killed. on the other hand, they were dragged and tied like an animal to a boxcar. Destination: Dachau,” she says in an interview.

It is impossible to escape from here, since she was interned not as a transsexual, but as a deserter soldier with a red identification triangle pinned to her tunic. “I had the task of putting numbers on the corpses. I saw with my own eyes how living people were thrown into furnaces.” She survives six months, before the arrival of American troops in April 1945, and survives a Nazi firing squad, during which she is shot in the knee. By some miracle, she is found among the corpses and rescued. After all the horror she experienced, which she recalled with tears 65 years later, her new life began at the age of twenty: “My mother and father did not accept me, and my brothers believed that their girlfriends would think that they would become like me. said: “I’m getting out of e …” And so I went to Turin to work. At first I slept in the car, then when I began to earn more I rented a house and lived there for unforgettable, free years. She works as an upholsterer between Rome and Turin, but also frequents drag queen cabarets in Paris.

In the mid-1980s, when she was already 60 years old, she left for London, where she agreed to a sex change operation.. “Before I close my eyes, I will never forget the inscription “man” on the screen. When I woke up, the words “woman” magically appeared. How exciting! Finally, I was able to become who I wanted to be. After the operation, my life changed. a lot”. But discrimination is hard to fight. “I tried to live close to people who loved me, remaining free, even if many did not like who I was.” A great consolation is the love of Patricia, an orphan girl whom Lucy welcomes into “I raised her. She called me mother and was like a daughter to me. In all these lives, I was also a mother.”

Many rich lives that would have been forgotten if by chance in 2010 some newspapers had not reported the news that Lucy was living in isolation, without a family and in poverty, after Gabriella Romano told her story in 2009 in My name is Lucy. Italy of the 20th century in the memoirs of a transsexual, for Donzelli Editore. With the support of the volunteers of the Trans Identity Movement, for whom he becomes an icon, Matteo Botrugno and Daniele Coluccini are filming a documentary between 2020 and 2021. There is only one breath of lifededicated to the life of Lucy Salani. The film follows her at the age of 96, in her daily life in Bologna and at some points in Dachau, where she was invited to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the camp’s liberation. The title of the documentary is taken from the last line of a poem written by Lucy herself, who, at the age of 98, felt as if she had already died at Dachau: “I was a child, a son and a daughter, a soldier, a deserter and a prisoner, a mother, a prostitute and mistress”. “The life I had the chance to live was still a miracle. We survive because there is no other alternative. And why always worth the fight to assert your identity. Life can also contain many pleasant surprises: love, family, friends that make you forget, even for a moment, everything that you have been through. “good and bad, and it’s time for me to explore other worlds.” So have a good trip, Lucy.