23/04/2023
LGBTQIA people, human rights campaigners and anti-fascists have united in paying tribute to transgender pioneer and survivor of Italian fascism and Nazi Germany, Lucy Salani, who has passed on to the realm of our honourable LGBT+ ancestors at the age of ninety eight. Lucy was conscripted into the fascist army of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in August 1943. She repeatedly escaped and helped other anti-fascists, but by 1944, Northern Italy was directly under the rule of the German Nazi state and she was deported to the infamous Dachau death camp, made to wear the red triangle of political prisoners. Amazingly, Lucy survived a mass shooting by Nazis and was found alive by the Americans who liberated the death camp on 29th April 1945, just a week before the final defeat of the fascist powers and the end of the European war. After the horrors of the war, Lucy worked in the textiles industry but travelled extensively and visited the trans scene in Paris, which was thriving with newly found gay abandon after the nightmare of fascist occupation. During the nineteen eighties, Lucy spent a spell in London and had gender affirmation surgery. She returned to her home city of Bologna to care for her parents and spent the rest of her own life there, speaking out occasionally on anti-fascism and making explicit the links between the movement against dictatorship and for LGBTQIA freedom. In January 2018, she was invited to take part in a demonstration organized by LGBT rights associations Arcigay and Arcilesbica for the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On that occasion, she said: "It is impossible to forget and forgive. Some nights, I still dream of the most horrendous things I saw, and I feel like I'm still [trapped] there, and so, I want people to know what happened in the concentration camps, so that it won't happen again."
