Mirco Giuseppe Camia, Italy, biography

Summary

Mirco Giuseppe Camia was born in 1925 in Milan, Italy. While a student of classical languages, Camia was arrested for membership in a resistance group. He was sent to a prison in Milan, transferred from there to a camp near Bolzano, and then deported to Flossenbürg concentration camp. On October 10, 1944 he was transferred to Dachau and registered as prisoner number 116,354. Camia was then transferred to the external camp of Dachau, Kempten-Kottern, and finally liberated from Dachau on April 29, 1945. He returned to Italy in June 1945, still seriously ill. Following his recovery, Camia completed his studies. He settled near Milan and died there in 1997.

In the 1980s, Camia returned to Dachau for the first time and the past confronted him anew. In 1989, he spoke about this experience: “My return to Flossenbürg and Dachau was one of the most significant experiences of my life: victory in the war I waged against myself for many years; meeting people, friends, who had driven out the spirits who dwelt there, who existed, in such a confusing way, where death has its dominion….”

On his return to Dachau for the fortieth anniversary of liberation in 1985, the poems Camia had brought with him provided the inspiration for this anthology. These were his own poetry and the sole poem of a former fellow prisoner, the seventeen-year-old Nevio Vitelli. Speaking about the young Vitelli's poem, which he had preserved for almost forty years, Mirco Giuseppe Camia said: “The discovery of this poem was undoubtedly one of the most significant experiences, or rather the most significant experience of my life, an experience of the kind that leads one to steer his future on a better course. Nevio enabled me to rediscover myself in his unknown poem ‘My Shadow in Dachau’” (see pp. 175, 177).

Mirco Giuseppe Camia, who was already writing poetry before his deportation, recounted that he never had any opportunity during his incarceration to put his thoughts into writing. He recalls his personal experience of that time: “I knew only one prisoner in the camp who was actually able to use a pen: the block clerk, who registered new arrivals and deleted the names of the dead….” Nevertheless, these are precisely the thoughts and emotions, the impressions of that time, that recur in Camia's poetry, written during various spells in hospital after his liberation.