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.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © Copyright ANSA
