Internee Number 6

Description

Published when the war was still raging north of Rome, Internee Number 6 is the first memoir of the fascist internment of foreign Jews. Although known to scholars, for decades it has remained buried in a few bibliographies, while nothing was known of its author. Maria Eisenstein’s authorship is elusive and ironic, worldly, and unapologetic. She wrote beautifully in Italian to the point that her diary, first published after she crossed the Allied line and fled South, was once considered fiction. For many years, the author’s fate remained the topic of speculation. In 1989, historian Carlo Spartaco Capogreco identified her and traced her story.

Eisenstein’s diary is an extraordinary document on the sudden incarceration of “foreign Jewish civilians” in fascist Italy. It paints a subtle fresco of the cultural and psychological atmosphere in which wellmeaning men and women performed the ideals of morality, strength, and valor that gave Fascism its foundation.