Transgender Holocaust survivor Lucy Salani dies aged 99

(ANSA) - ROME, MAR 22 - Lucy Salani, an activist considered to be the only Italian transgender person to survive the Holocaust, has died at the age of 99, Luca Paladini, a Lombardy regional councillor and founder of the Sentinelli minority-rights association, said on Wednesday.
    Born as Luciano Salani in Fossano in1924, she lived in Bologna as a gay man in her youth.
    She deserted the Fascist Italian army after the 1943 Armistice and was deported to the Dachau Nazi death camp in 1944.
    She survived for six months in the concentration camp and was reportedly found by American troops among a pile of bodies with a wounded knee after a massacre of prisoners by a Nazi firing squad on the day before the liberation.
    She had spells in Rome, Turin and Paris after World War II and underwent gender-transition surgery in the 1980s in London, before returning to Bologna. (ANSA).