A CAMP WITHOUT WALLS

As an international resistance fighter during World War II, Salvatore Lombardo risked his life to stop oppression so that others could live. This book tells the story of a man who was raised in Southern Italy, went to work in Turin, joined the Italian army, served in Africa, and fought with the Greek partisans. He was then captured by the Nazis and was imprisoned in a slave labor camp. He survived because of his will to live and because of the love of a Greek woman who bore him a daughter he would not meet for forty years. Through this great love story, the author includes various memories of her father's life, secrets he held within himself. One example, is the Friday ritual when hungry German shepherd dogs were put in an enclosure with Italian Catholic prisoners of war. The starving prisoners had to fight the dogs for scraps of meat, while the Nazis were entertained.

My father and 254 other inmates were told by the Nazis day after day that they were marked targets. Either they would die from the conditions of the camp or they would be blown up. The Nazis reminded them every morning, "You will die, whether we win or lose the war, you will die."

This book speaks of a man who did not physically die but whose soul was killed. A man who was removed from the camp, but the camp walls were never removed from his psychological being as he has relived the enslavement for the rest of his life through tormenting nightmares during which he begged God for mercy and relief from pain.

Hitler's devastating influence did not end when the war was over. It has resonated through subsequent generations. As a result, the fear of the night and of death has lingered in my throat and through my own actions, and I even inflicted these fears upon my own children. They, in turn, have found nights ominous and full of unknown fears of impending death.

REVIEWS OF THE BOOK

Dr. Maria Lombardo's clear and concise account about Salvatore Lombardo, her father's and the rest of her family's struggle to survive during WWII, is a remarkable story of a former Italian soldier. It retells his imprisonment by the Nazis, together with 254 other Italians, in a labor camp in Yugoslavia in subhuman conditions. Her book is intimate and enormously interesting, essential reading for scholars, teachers and students who want to learn about international resistance and the German treatment of POWs and ordinary civilians during the war years.

The book includes illustrations, chronology of events spanning from 1918 up to 1947, the history of Italian immigration to America, and the Italian language for the last two hundred years. It presents us with a creative blend of social history and family connections, past and present. " A Camp Without Walls" is written with clarity, vigor, thoroughness. It is an example of a daughter's love for her father. Maria deserves our gratitude for writing this book, which is a great contribution to the literature and history of WWII.

Herman Taube
Accredited Correspondent
The White House Press Corps

Review of the Book

Il libro parla di un uomo che non morí fisicamente, ma la cui anima fu uccisa allora. Un uomo che fu tolto dal campo, ma non dai suoi muri che rinchiusero per sempre il suo essere psicologico. Un uomo che rivisse la schiavitú per il resto della vita attraverso tormentosi incubi.

Dolce Vita Magazine

By Barbara Walsh

Salvatore remembered the dogs. They returned in his nightmares — the big German shepherd dogs that patrolled the camp, trained by the Nazis to attack and kill anyone who attempted to escape. He could never forget the night when the soldiers let them loose on an inmate during his hopeless bid to flee. The prisoners were ordered to drag the body, mangled and torn, to the threshold of the barracks, and there it lay. "We were forced to watch the body slowly decompose and to breathe in the nauseating odor as a reminder that anyone who tried to escape would meet the same fate." Salvatore Lombardo, from a poor rural village in Calabria, served in an air corps unit of the Italian Army during World War II, first in Africa and then in Greece. When the Italian government signed an armistice, surrendering to the Allies in September 1943, he, like so many others, found himself stranded, without orders or direction. Choosing to join local guerillas and fight against the Nazi occupiers, he became a member of the armed resistance in Greece and Yugoslavia. There he witnessed the barbarism of Nazi reprisals. Taken prisoner, he was sent to a Nazi labor camp where every day the Nazis reminded their prisoners: "You will die, whether we win or lose the war, you will die. Salvatore did not die. He survived the inhuman conditions and unbearable cruelties of the camp in Yugoslavia, returning to his village in Calabria, where he married and had children. But he remained a prisoner of his memories, a victim of his nightmares. In her book, A Camp Without Walls, his daughter Maria Lombardo recounts the moving, often adventurous story of Salvatore's life as a survivor and of how his never-voiced sufferings built invisible walls between her father, his family and the world.

The author describes how the family pulled up their roots in Calabria, had to adapt to life in industrial Turin and then faced the challenges of emigrating to the United States, driven by Salvatore's intolerance of oppression and dreams for his children's future. She tells of how, as a grown woman, she came by chance upon some hidden letters and Salvatore's wartime diary. In them she found some shocking revelations - of a secret sister in Greece and of the horrors of war that had branded Salvatore's mind and body. Slowly, she came to an understanding of his often-prickly character, his intransigent ambitions for his children, and his constant nightmares.

The author's analysis of Salvatore's physical and psychological ordeals and how they affected his tight-knit family is touchingly affectionate, yet surprisingly objective. It strikes a universal note, discerning the common bonds that unite all the victims and survivors of Nazi persecution, whatever the reason for their internment. The core of Salvatore's story is that of so many Holocaust survivors - the ineluctable tragedy, the irrepressible hope, the paralysis of emotion in those who survived.

The author weaves several themes into a strong fabric of words and pictures. From her description of life in a small Calabrian village, with its dialect, traditions and even a mystery or two, she takes readers on a journey to a third-grade classroom in Turin, where Salvatore's children have to learn standard Italian — overcoming the first of the language barriers that the family would have to conquer. The critical social and educational importance of language is one of the leitmotifs of the book, as Salvatore's family travels from southern Italy to Turin and then to the United States, where his children not only have to learn American English but also have to converse with newly reunited relatives in an archaic Calabrian dialect. The status of Italian immigrants in the United States in the 1960s, their expectations and frustrations, and their relations with the established Italian American community emerge in a lively, often humorous narrative. In a review of the book, correspondent Herman Taube of the White House Press Corps in Washington, D.C. called it "a creative blend of social history and family connections, past and present . . . intimate and enormously interesting, essential reading for scholars, teachers and students who want to learn about international resistance and the German treatment of POWs and ordinary civilians during the war years."

The many interwoven stories that make up the complex fabric are told in the words of the protagonists themselves, as the family follows a doctor's instructions on how to help Salvatore recover from temporary amnesia after a critical operation. By reminding him of their past life together, they would help restore his memory. This is when Maria, in a search for some documents, makes the jolting discovery of the letters and diary. They help her reconstruct the stories Salvatore could never bring himself to tell - the horrors of his experiences at the camp and the existence of a child, born of a poignant wartime love affair.

The picture is completed by Salvatore's wife's wonderfully wise recollections and by an account of Maria's own progress from a carefree childhood in Calabria to a career as a distinguished educator and scholar with a family of her own. Of special interest is the picture painted by the family's recollections of Martone, their village in Calabria, and of a simple way of life that has vanished, as the author found when she returned there in the 1990s.

The book includes a host of illustrations, both from the Lombardo family album and from historical archives. A chronology of related historical events from 1918 up to 1947 helps the reader focus on political and military developments of the time. A history of Italian immigration to America after 1800 provides some interesting background and introduces an overview of Italian language education in the United States.

The author explains that she chose the title A Camp Without Walls not only because of her father's experiences in the labor camp, where fear of fierce dogs built walls as effective as any concrete barriers. Her own intensive experience meeting and talking to Italian and Jewish survivors of World War II as part of a series of conferences on the Holocaust in Southern Europe confirmed her observation that even though the survivors of concentration camps had been freed, they still lived within walls that endured in their own minds. "I knew my obligation. I had to serve as a conduit for telling the story for a Jewish friend, for my father and for other survivors who so willingly entrusted me with their life stories. I knew that there were moral lessons in those stories that young people could learn."

Barbara Walsh
Editor, Italy/Italy Magazine

"Italians & Jews, Rescue and Aid During the Holocaust"

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