Fleeing for Safety: From Mantua to Switzerland

Description

The book combines two accounts, one picking up where the other leaves off, like the passing of a torch.

The son, Corrado Vivanti, opens with the period preceding passage of the Italian racial laws of 1938 and closes with his family’s flight to Switzerland, while the mother, Clelia Della Pergola Vivanti, begins with their traumatic border crossing and ends on the first days of January 1945. The two accounts differ greatly but have in common an absence of self-pity and a certain modesty when relating events that cut to the quick. That is a characteristic shared by many early accounts: those who suffered persecution often felt that sense of shame described by Primo Levi in the first chapter of La Tregua (The Truce).