From an Italian Holocaust survivor, a Kafkaesque nightmare of imprisonment under fascism

By Julia M. Klein
April 4, 2025

Internee Number 6
By Maria Eisenstein; translated by Will Schutt 
CPL Editions, 321 pages., $20

The Italian internment camp of Maria Eisenstein’s 1944 memoir isn’t the hellscape of Auschwitz-Birkenau or Bergen-Belsen. In this former villa, no one is gassed or beaten to death or starved. “The days can be stomached,” Eisenstein writes. “I never have time to get bored.”

But Lanciano is a prison nonetheless, a place of Kafkaesque confinement and petty privations for foreign Jews and others targeted by Mussolini’s regime. Beyond quotidian discomforts, the internees live with uncertainty, fear and the looming threat of deportation to Nazi concentration camps. Meanwhile, they endure substandard food, broken toilets and lack of heat, while enjoying the pleasures of gossip and occasional brief trips to the neighboring town.

The original publication of Internee Number 6 underlined a complicity in Fascism that Italians preferred to forget. It was they, not their German allies, who administered this all-female camp.  Historian Carlo Spartaco Capogreco argues that postwar denial contributed to the book’s subsequent neglect.

A project of the Centro Primo Levi, this edition marks the book’s first English-language publication. A biographical summary, Donatello De Luigi’s introduction to the first Italian edition, explanatory footnotes and essays by Capogreco and Eisenstein’s son, Eric Feingersh Steele, all offer useful context. The historian details his efforts to track down Eisenstein, who was born in Vienna to Polish Jewish parents and eventually emigrated to California. He befriended one of her two ex-husbands, Sam Eisenstein, but just missed meeting her. She died of cancer in 1994, months after the 50th anniversary reissue of her book in Italy.

Steele contributes a rambling but informative reminiscence. His mother’s imprisonment and subsequent hardships transformed her, he writes, “from a Jewish Princess to a Jewish Warrior Queen.” A feminist before her time, she was charismatic and funny, “a little eccentric but stately and diplomatic as well,” a popular teacher who probably suffered from PTSD.

Internee Number 6 resists categorization. De Luigi calls it “neither diary nor novel” and compares it to a screenplay. We’re told that it is based on both “scattered notes” Eisenstein made at the camp during the summer of 1940 and on writing in Naples and Rome four years later. Diaristic in its immediacy, the book is filled with dialogue, recorded contemporaneously or remembered. But it lacks specific entry dates and, according to the footnotes, contains fictive elements — such as its description of the “dramatic demise” of the camp commissioner, Eduino Pistone, who in actuality simply received a job transfer. An epilogue, presumably invented, recounts the manuscript falling into the hands of an America G.I.

The narrative of Eisenstein’s confinement in Lanciano (which she short-hands as “L.”) is interrupted by a long flashback describing her brief, harsh prison stays beforehand. The interpolation contributes to the book’s fragmentary feel, adding to a sense of disorientation.

Highly educated and multilingual (her son says she was fluent in six languages and conversant in two others), Eisenstein writes with a certain ironic detachment, no doubt a survival mechanism.  “I write for the relief of transcribing a few small things that have happened in here. It helps to respond to them, to vent,” she says, adding: “Action is easier to represent than mood, and the camp is all mood and no action.”

She focuses mostly on her fellow internees, about 75 in total, while expressing frustration at her inability to render them fully. Unlike harsher prisons, Lanciano might not have shorn away all vestiges of reason or morality. But it still exacted compromises and illuminated character. “Here,” Eisenstein writes, “raw humanity, sometimes repugnant and frequently touching, has been laid bare.”

One prisoner, Natasha, gains special privileges by conducting an affair with the camp commissioner, a casual form of corruption. “You really are hideous in the morning,” Eisenstein thinks. The 68-year-old Pistone, Natasha’s lover, “has the vacant look of an old comedian or an old cop,” Eisenstein writes. “His senile passion for the thirty-year-old Natasha has put an extra spring in his step.”

Another prisoner, Sacha, a German-born Dutch citizen, identifies as a Nazi. She argues that, after Germany’s years of economic misery, Hitler “gave us back a spiritual identity, a political identity.” But Sacha rejects antisemitism and claims to be friends with many Jews. Eventually, she wins over the author, who describes her as “intelligent” and “humane.”

One of the recurring motifs of the memoir is Eisenstein’s grief at her abandonment by her lover, Franco, a lawyer. After his letters stop, she gets sick enough to be hospitalized and imagines summoning him to her bedside. Later, three postcards from Franco arrive, offering “reason to hope.” But not for long. She includes a heart-rending letter – it’s unclear if it was ever sent – lamenting his silence. His betrayal, whose rationale we never learn, may stand in for the larger betrayal of Italy, where she had been studying literature. But it was also devastating in its own right – forever tainting her view of romance, her son suggests.

Of herself, Eisenstein writes, “I wield great authority in the camp and am well liked.” She busies herself composing letters for her fellow inmates, and receives snacks and favors in return. But when night falls, she confesses, anxiety consumes her. She worries about the fate of the Jews under Hitler, and rightly so: Most of her extended family is killed, though her mother and maternal grandmother survive.

The narrative culminates in a quarrel and investigation involving Pistone, Natasha and the camp’s director, Mary Anna Fusco Marfisi, who is both Pistone’s assistant and his rival. Other inmates do their best to avoid the fray. The book ends abruptly but Eisenstein’s own ordeals, Capogreco tells us, continued, including further confinement, life under surveillance and flight across the mountains of Abruzzo.

Internee Number 6 is what Eisenstein left behind, a testament to the power of writing when nothing else seems controllable. “Words depend on us,” she tells Natasha. “At least they depend on us. Don’t you think that’s something?”

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