Liana Millu was born in 1914 in Pisa, into a Jewish family. Her father was a stationmaster whom she hardly knew and her mother died when she was one year old. Educated by her maternal grandparents and an aunt, at the age of seventeen she published her first articles. She also devoted herself to teaching, but the racist laws of the Italian fascist state removed her from her job in 1938. The following year, a new decree prohibited her from practicing journalism. In 1943 she joined the Resistance. Arrested by the Gestapo in March 1944, she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Miraculously he survived the field. In addition to the text that we present today (published in 1947, the same year that Primo Levi published If this is a man), she also wrote, between 1972 and 1974, I ponti di Schwerin. She died in Genoa in February 2005.