"Ten biographies of San Marino emigrants who span the twentieth century, passing through Europe, the United States, and South America, offering examples of courage, sacrifice, and solidarity." With these words, Patrizia Di Luca, director of the Emigration Research Center at the University of the Republic of San Marino, describes the book "Ten Stories of Emigration," which she authored for the Rimini-based publishing house Bookstones Edizioni.
Interviews and documents allowed her to reconstruct a series of experiences, some individual and others family, "which testify to strength of spirit, determination, and generosity, values that I consider very important in the current historical period," the academic explains. Among the stories is that of a Polish-French Jewish girl who entered the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II with documents from San Marino and was liberated in 1945. She married a San Marino citizen in Paris in 1942, the day after a raid. They hoped that thanks to her San Marino citizenship, she would be considered Aryan and this would protect her from deportation. The considerable efforts of the republic's consul in the French capital were to no avail. The letters written by the diplomat to the authorities are among the documents I was able to rely on in writing the book.
Published in Italian and English thanks to the support of the Interpreters' Office of the Department of Foreign Affairs of the San Marino Republic, the book is available online and in bookstores. Among the lives recounted are those of people who emigrated to Belgium to work in the mines, as well as to Brazil, Argentina, France, and the USA. These are stories of commitment and hard work, in agriculture, on construction sites, and in factories. The choices, the reasons, the consequences, the journeys, and the challenges create a book that, thanks to its international edition, is also aimed at the new generations of San Marino citizens living abroad who do not speak Italian.
