After sixteen months, Giuseppe returns from the concentration camp and remains silent for the rest of his life about what happened to him

On May 6, 1945, two days before the end of World War II, American troops liberated the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz. The day before, reconnaissance patrols had sighted the concentration camp, which, after the SS troops had fled, was still guarded by the Volkssturm and the Vienna Fire Department. Around 40,000 prisoners were held at the camp at this time. Among them was the Italian carpenter Giuseppe Vaglio from Cremenaga near Varese.

That day, Giuseppe and another Italian prisoner were in the sawmill, where they had been taken to work as carpenters for forced labor. When they noticed that the guard had been withdrawn, they fled. They sensed that American troops were approaching, but they couldn't possibly know that the camp's liberation was imminent. Did they have any idea that the Wehrmacht was collapsing? Probably not. They only knew that they were in Austria and free. And that they had to head southwest to reach Italy.

No one knows how or by what route Giuseppe made it home. Presumably, he and his companion made the journey on foot. They avoided settlements and people, subsisting on whatever they found and caught.

All that is certain is that Giuseppe, then 36, was registered and given medical treatment at the former Bolzano transit camp a month later, and arrived in Cremenaga with his wife and children a month later, on July 6, 1945. Sixteen months have passed since the Sunday in early March 1944 when Giuseppe was arrested and deported around noon.

His wife, Concetta, knew nothing of his fate. She had only received a short letter from him once. In it, Giuseppe wrote that he was destined to work in Austria. He asked them to rest easy and not think too much about him. The letter was addressed in an unknown hand and mailed to Modena, where Giuseppe had been taken after an odyssey through Italian prisons. From there, he was deported to Mauthausen three months after his arrest.

The Ticino writer Fabio Andina is the grandson of Giuseppe Vaglio. He has reconstructed the story of his maternal grandfather and tells it in his novel "Sixteen Months." He draws on the few documents that have survived in Italian archives, and uses literary invention to depict what he can only guess at. Giuseppe and Concetta remained silent about the events throughout their lives.

Concetta may not have known the exact reasons for Giuseppe's arrest, but she must have suspected what he occasionally did at night. As an escape helper, he accompanied Jewish refugees across the rugged terrain down into the Tresa Valley and across the border river into Switzerland.

He wasn't caught by the SS; rather, as the novel suggests, he was betrayed to the Germans by a villager. The villager, as a supposed escape helper, is said to have earned double the profit: by taking money from the refugees and then handing them over to the SS, where he collected it a second time. Since Giuseppe refused to participate in the dirty business, he had to be eliminated.

Born in Lugano in 1972, Fabio Andina emerged from nowhere in 2020 with his fabulous novel "Days with Felice," which has since been translated into numerous languages . Since then, he has demonstrated his enormous talent and versatility with each new book: from the lyrical notes in "Ticino Horizons" to the art of the inner monologue of a crisis-stricken man in "Getting Away" and now again in "Sixteen Months." Andina finds his own tone for each subject, a suitable narrative style for each book.

Fabio Andina knows that he cannot tell his grandfather's story, which he largely invents, in embellished detail. Yet he must still make it vivid; he must accompany Giuseppe on his journey as an escape helper. He shows him at the moment of his arrest and during the interrogations in the SS prisons; he follows him on the transport to Mauthausen and later on the long journey back to Italy.

At the same time, he must describe the events in Cremenaga, the shock in the village and in Giuseppe's family, the increasing brutality of the Wehrmacht, which dismantles the village near the border and resettles the inhabitants to a more distant alpine pasture. And he conveys impressions of Concetta's despair in the face of the uncertainty as to whether her husband is still alive and whether they will ever see each other again.

Andina overcomes these difficulties in a paradoxical way: by diverting the focus away from Giuseppe wherever possible and instead depicting what is happening around him. He depicts the arrest from Concetta's perspective, revealing dismay and fear in her face. In the cells or on the prisoner transports, the focus is not on what happens to Giuseppe, but on what he sees: terrorized people or the shooting of a prisoner. And the depiction of the long march back to Italy is most intense when Giuseppe accompanies his exhausted companion to his death and gives him a makeshift burial.

The sixteen months of this ordeal are shown alternately from Concetta's perspective in Cremenaga and from Giuseppe's perspective in prison and on the escape home. Andina intersperses fictional letters in which the couple write to each other about their despair and never-ending hope.

The juxtaposition of settings and ways of speaking thus creates a multifaceted story, which Karin Diemerling translates into German with confidence and precise diction. The novel's attempt at something impossible is always present in the background: the grandparents' silence is to be broken so that the narrative imagination can touch on the hidden things Concetta and Giuseppe had forbidden themselves to talk about.

Andina writes gently yet movingly, without exposing the horror, respectfully reticent about what the two suffered. Was it like this? Or did everything happen quite differently? No one knows, and it doesn't matter, because the truth here lies solely in the poetic imagination of the narrative.

Fabio Andina: Sixteen Months. Novel. Translated from the Italian by Karin Diemerling. Rotpunkt-Verlag, Zurich 2025. 216 pp., CHF 31.90.