Vittorio Benzi 1927 - 1945

Born 22.3.1927 in Vinchio
Died 22.3.1945 in Gusen

Biography

Vittorio Benzi (prisoner number 115373), marked as a partisan through his participation in a mission in Mombercelli and categorised as dangerous, was arrested by the Nazi Fascists on 3 December 1944 in Vinchio (Asti). Also detained at the same time were his brothers Biagio Benzi (prisoner number 43493), survivor of Flossenbürg concentration camp, Giovanni Benzi (prisoner number 7332), survivor of Bolzano concentration camp, and the fiancé of his sister Margherita, Natale Pia (prisoner number 115658), survivor of the Mauthausen and Gusen concentration camps.

The following is taken from the memoirs of his niece Primarosa Pia:

‘Those who didn’t come with us to Vinchio that day missed the drama of the dark clouds gathering over the ‘Fifty Years Rock’ and the untamed wind, which swept the terrace of the large and elegant white villa clean before the rain began.

And missed the thunder and lightening, the rain, as it finally fell, for once generously, on the parched vines and fruit trees … and Luciano’s voice [Nattino][1] as he read to us the words of Davide [Lajolo][2] who, at the age of fifty, came to these rocks of his childhood to see what was written on the palms of his hands, to take stock of his life.

And missed Laurana [Lajola’s][3] love for her father and for this stretch of land, described in many of his tales, which many a ‘city celebrity’ may mention today, but no one has time to listen to any more. As it is too for the stories of real and true events of two real and true deportees, who are too tired to go on sharing their real and true memories for much longer…

And the scenery of the 37 places, which lie around and about this terrace, crumbles away, the horizon shifts further back into the distance, to the sea.

Angelina was also on the terrace, on that day in Vinchio, to listen to Carlo [Lajolo][4] and Natalino [Pia], ‘Tarzan’ and the ‘little blond’: she listened to them as she sat on the stone bench with her back to the wall, with her tender shoulders in a light pullover and her lively, dark eyes shining as they filled with tears from the many memories, from the privations that grew increasingly heavy. She thought about her friend Margherita, my mother, who had departed from us for ever in January, but mainly about Vittorio, who found a crematorium waiting for him on his eighteenth birthday. I embraced her and asked her to tell me something of him, at which she smiled: “We were classmates, played together, came up with pranks … he was a lively boy, always cheerful, wild, and he did one thing very well, it was the favourite pastime of the village boys: imitating the few street artists who made it up here, or people with mild handicaps, meaning he limped, stuttered or felt his way along. But his true passion was for motorbikes, which he could only see in his imagination, instead of being able to see them and grasp them in the real world.

And one day he had an actual motorbike. He had “peeled” a long reed, i.e., he frayed about 30 cm at one end and rode around on it, running through the village with the frayed end on the ground, making the sound of a motorbike at full throttle, how it accelerated, braked, took tight corners, and he kicked up so much dust that the butcher came out of his shop, furious, and threatened him with his knife …”

Ah, the wild ‘Toju”, who was probably delighted when the chance came to go along with the big boys to fight the Fascists and Germans, and who was probably the least shocked on the day they arrived with so much noise and shouting to fetch them out of their hiding place and take them away. A true round-up, which must have been so terrible that I could hear the terror in his mother’s stories and his father’s, Camillo’s, memories, who only lived for a few months following this great anguish.

Something very different from the amused fury of the butcher awaited Vittorio at the end of his journey, he was greeted by a slaughterhouse for people.’

Primarosa Pia

 

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