Lucy Salani: A Trans Woman Against Fascism

On the morning of April 29, 1945, the guards at Dachau were killing prisoners as fast as they could. The Americans were close. The SS wanted fewer witnesses.

In the chaos of a mass shooting, one prisoner was hit in the knee. She dropped, lay among the bodies, and did not move. Hours later, U.S. troops walked through the camp. They thought she was dead until she twitched.

Her name, at the time, was Luciano. The world would later know her as Lucy Salani, one of the very few openly transgender women known to have survived a Nazi concentration camp, and the only one documented from Italy.

Lucy Salani was an Italian transgender woman, born in 1924, who deserted both Mussolini’s army and the German Wehrmacht, was sent to Dachau as a political prisoner and deserter, and survived the Holocaust. Her life story ties together fascism, war, gender nonconformity, and the long silence that followed.

By tracing her path from Piedmont to Dachau and back, you can see how an ordinary working-class kid became a living rebuke to fascism and to the idea that queer and trans people only recently entered history.

What was Lucy Salani’s story in simple terms?

Lucy Salani was born on 12 August 1924 in Fossano, in Italy’s Piedmont region, into a working-class family. Assigned male at birth and known for much of her early life as Luciano, she grew up in a country drifting into dictatorship under Benito Mussolini.

As a child and teenager she was gender nonconforming. Later in life she described herself as always feeling different, and as someone who loved men. In fascist Italy, that already put her at risk. Homosexual acts were not explicitly criminalized in the same way as in Nazi Germany, but queer people were surveilled, harassed, and sometimes sent to internal exile or psychiatric institutions.

By the early 1940s, Italy was at war on Hitler’s side. Like other young men on the rolls, Luciano was called up for military service. That call set off a chain of desertions, arrests, and escapes that would eventually lead to Dachau.

In plain terms: she was a conscript who refused to fight for fascism, tried to survive by any means in a collapsing wartime society, was punished as a deserter, and ended up in one of the most notorious Nazi camps. She survived through a mix of nerve, luck, and sheer stubbornness.

So what? Starting with this clear outline matters because it shows Lucy not as a symbol floating above history, but as a specific person whose trans identity, politics, and survival were all tangled up with the machinery of fascism and war.

What set it off: fascism, conscription, and a double desertion

When Mussolini came to power in the 1920s, he promised order, empire, and a reborn Italy. For kids like Lucy, born in 1924, there was no “before.” Fascism was the air they breathed. Youth organizations drilled boys in obedience and militarism. Gender roles were rigid. Dissent was dangerous.

By 1943, the war was going badly. Italy had invaded Ethiopia, joined Hitler, and then watched its armies collapse in North Africa and Russia. The regime needed bodies. Military service for young men was mandatory, and Luciano’s name was on the list.

She did not report for duty. That was not a small act of teenage rebellion. In a fascist state at war, refusing conscription was a political crime. When she failed to show up, she was arrested and forced into service.

She deserted. That first desertion was a direct refusal to fight for Mussolini’s regime. But the story did not end with a clean escape. Italy in 1943 was a maze of collapsing authority, German occupation, and civil war.

After Mussolini was briefly overthrown in July 1943 and then restored by the Germans in the north, the situation became even more dangerous. Lucy feared reprisals against her family. So, later that year, she made a desperate calculation: she re-enlisted, this time in the German army, the Wehrmacht.

It was not an ideological conversion. It was survival math. She thought that by putting on a German uniform she might protect her relatives from punishment for her earlier desertion.

So what? The double desertion shows the trap many people were in under fascism. Lucy’s story makes clear that “collaboration” and “resistance” were not always clean categories. For a queer, gender-nonconforming person, every choice was shaped by both politics and the fear of exposure and retaliation.

The turning point: sex work, arrest, and the road to Dachau

Lucy’s time in the Wehrmacht did not last long. She was stationed in Bologna, a city that would become a center of Italian resistance. At some point she ended up in a hospital there. She saw a chance and took it. She escaped.

For months she survived in Bologna as a prostitute. She had German officers among her clients. In her later accounts, she did not romanticize this. It was survival sex work in a city under occupation, with bombs falling and food scarce.

One of those officers eventually recognized her as a deserter and had her arrested. That was the turning point. From that moment, she was no longer just a draft dodger. She was a German soldier who had deserted and then gone underground.

She was sent to prisons in Modena and Verona. There, according to her later testimony, she was sentenced to death more than once. The record is patchy, but her own account is consistent: she managed to get her death sentences commuted by bribing or persuading German General Albert Kesselring, the top German commander in Italy, or at least someone in his chain of command.

Exactly how that happened is murky. Some sources suggest she used charm and nerve. Others mention a literal bribe. What is clear is that she did not go before a firing squad. Instead, she was sent to a labor camp in Bernau, in Germany.

Bernau was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz, but conditions were brutal. Prisoners did forced labor for the German war effort. At some point, Lucy and another prisoner escaped. They made it as far as the Austrian–Italian border before they were caught.

This time there was no more Italy. She was sent into the core of the Nazi camp system. In 1944, she arrived at Dachau, near Munich, one of the first and most notorious concentration camps in Germany.

At Dachau she was registered not as a “homosexual” prisoner but with a red triangle or red star, the mark for political prisoners and deserters. The Nazis had a separate category, the pink triangle, for men imprisoned under anti-homosexual laws. Lucy’s trans identity and sexuality were not recognized in the way we would describe them today. To the SS, she was a political problem and a soldier who had refused to fight.

So what? This turning point, from sex work in Bologna to Dachau via prisons and a labor camp, shows how the Nazi system treated deserters and “unreliable” soldiers. It also shows how queer and trans people could be swept into the camps under different labels, their identities erased even as they were punished.

Who drove this story: Lucy, the fascist state, and the camp system

Several forces shaped Lucy’s fate, and they were not abstract.

First, there was Lucy herself. She refused to fit the roles assigned to her. She deserted twice. She escaped custody more than once. She used sex work, charm, and quick thinking to stay alive. Later in life, she would transition socially, take the name Lucy, and speak publicly about her experiences. Her stubbornness is the through-line.

Second, there was the Italian fascist state. Mussolini’s regime built a culture of hyper-masculinity and militarism. It criminalized dissent and made military service a test of loyalty. For someone like Lucy, who did not fit the masculine ideal and did not want to fight, the system offered only two options: submission or punishment.

Third, there was Nazi Germany’s military and camp system. The Wehrmacht conscripted or accepted foreign volunteers and auxiliaries, including Italians. Desertion was treated as treason. The SS ran a network of camps where political prisoners, Jews, Roma, queer people, and many others were worked, starved, and beaten to death.

Dachau, where Lucy ended up, opened in 1933. It was originally used to imprison political opponents of the Nazis. Over time it expanded to include Jews, clergy, Roma, gay men, and many other groups. By 1944, it was overcrowded, disease-ridden, and fed by a network of subcamps.

Inside Dachau, prisoners were sorted by colored triangles. Red for politicals. Green for so-called criminals. Pink for men convicted under Paragraph 175, the anti-homosexual law. Black for “asocials.” Lucy’s red marking placed her in the political category, but that did not mean the guards were blind to her gender nonconformity. She later recalled harassment and abuse.

Finally, there were the Allied armies. As U.S. forces approached Dachau in April 1945, the SS began death marches and mass shootings. On the day of liberation, SS men shot groups of prisoners. Lucy was among those hit. She survived by playing dead until American soldiers reached her.

So what? Naming these actors matters because it keeps the story from collapsing into a single heroic narrative. Lucy’s survival was shaped by her own decisions, by fascist ideology, by the bureaucratic logic of the camp system, and by the timing of the Allied advance. It shows how individual lives were caught in the gears of very specific institutions.

What did this change: from silent survivor to public witness

After the war, Lucy went back to civilian life in Italy. She worked for years as an upholsterer. For a long time, like many survivors, she did not speak much about the camps. Being a deserter and a queer, gender-nonconforming person in postwar Italy did not make you a celebrated victim.

Homosexuality remained stigmatized. Trans people had almost no legal recognition. The story of the Holocaust that took shape in the 1950s and 1960s focused on political resistance and on Jewish suffering, which made sense given the scale of the genocide. But it left little room for people who did not fit neat categories, especially queer and trans survivors.

Lucy’s life changed again in old age. In the 1990s and 2000s, Italian LGBTQ+ activists and historians began to seek out people like her. She transitioned socially, took the name Lucy, and started speaking publicly about her experiences in fascist Italy and in Dachau.

She gave interviews, appeared in documentaries, and became known in Italian queer circles as a living link to a past that many had assumed contained no openly trans figures. She was, as far as researchers can tell, the only known Italian trans woman to survive a Nazi camp.

Her story did not change the past. But it did change how people understood it. It forced historians and the public to widen the frame of who counts as a Holocaust survivor and who was targeted or swept up by fascist systems.

So what? Lucy’s later life as a public witness shifted the narrative. It showed that queer and trans people were not just modern identities projected backward, but real individuals who lived, suffered, and survived under fascism, even if the records labeled them differently.

Why Lucy Salani still matters today

Lucy died in 2023, in her late nineties. By then she had become a kind of reluctant icon in Italy: a trans woman, a deserter of two armies, and a survivor of Dachau who refused to be quiet.

Her story matters for several reasons.

First, it complicates the usual picture of the Holocaust and fascism. We are used to categories like “Jewish victims,” “political prisoners,” “gay men with pink triangles.” Lucy’s life cuts across those lines. She was punished as a deserter and political enemy, but her gender and sexuality shaped every choice she made and every danger she faced.

Second, it reminds us that trans and queer people have always existed, even if the words were different. When people say that trans identities are new, Lucy’s life is a direct counterargument. She was born in 1924, survived a concentration camp, and transitioned decades before the current debates.

Third, her desertions speak to a very specific kind of resistance. She did not join a partisan brigade or write manifestos. She refused to fight for regimes built on violence and hatred. That refusal nearly got her killed. It also saved her from being a cog in the machinery of war.

Finally, Lucy’s survival and late-life visibility have helped historians and activists recover the stories of queer and trans people under fascism. Archives often erased or misclassified them. Personal testimony like hers fills in some of the gaps.

So what? Remembering Lucy Salani is not about finding a feel-good hero. It is about recognizing that the history of fascism and the Holocaust includes people whose identities did not fit the categories of their time, but who were still targeted, punished, and, in rare cases, survived to tell the story.