Casa Museo Elisa Springer

In a quiet street of Manduria, the house where Elisa Springer spent her life after surviving Auschwitz holds photographs, objects and projections that carry her testimony forward. The writer of Il silenzio dei vivi made this Salento town her chosen home, and the museum keeps her appeal for memory alive.

Why it matters

Elisa Springer was born in Vienna into a Jewish family of Hungarian origin, the only child of Riccardo Springer and Sidonia Bauer. Deported to Auschwitz on 2 August 1944, she survived the camps, met Anne Frank at Bergen-Belsen, and was freed at Theresienstadt on 5 May 1945. After the war she chose Manduria, the Salento town where she lived with her husband Guglielmo Sammarco until her death, and where she is buried. Her autobiography, Il silenzio dei vivi, published in Venice by Marsilio in 1997, turned her private resolve — that the living must not stay silent — into a message followed well beyond Italy. The house museum preserves the domestic setting of that second life.

What to notice

The visit is deliberately intimate. Personal belongings, clothing and furnishings evoke fragments of everyday existence, while certificates, honours and recognitions displayed on the walls record a lifetime devoted to art, culture and civic commitment. Multimedia projections and installations punctuate the route, building what local guides describe as an emotional, reflective experience rather than a conventional museum display. The itinerary follows the decisive chapters of her life, including the years of deportation, and closes on the idea of memory as a living practice — her own formula, "not the rite of remembrance but the culture of memory".

Context and history

After the Nazi annexation of Austria, Springer fled to Milan in 1940 and worked as a translator. Betrayed by a spy, she was arrested in 1944 and deported from Milan to Auschwitz, where she received the prisoner number A-24020; she passed through further camps before liberation. She moved permanently to Italy in 1946. The book she wrote with the help of her only son Silvio appeared when she was almost eighty. Her family story carries a musical postscript: two waltzes composed by her maternal grandfather Elkan Bauer, who died at Theresienstadt, received their world premiere at the Politeama Greco theatre in Lecce in May 1999. The house in via Bizzarri was later opened as a museum and is also known as the Casa della Memoria, hosting school programmes, theatrical readings and Remembrance Day events.