I finished this unusual little book in less than an hour, partly because many of the pages are devoted to photos and drawings and partly because I read only half of it. That’s because the material in After Images, The Murder of the Einstein Mazzetti Family: Visual Resonances by Alessandro Cassin is presented in the original Italian and then in English translation.
This compilation, published in cooperation with the independent publishing arm of Centro Primo Levi, a research center focused on Italian Jewish history, adds to our understanding of just how far the Nazi tentacles of evil stretched.
The cold-blooded execution of Robert Einstein’s family at the Focardo estate near Florence on August 3, 1944, reached beyond the areas generally depicted in Holocaust literature and beyond the Nazis’ primary intended victims.
For although Einstein was Jewish, his wife and daughters were not. Neither were his wife’s twin nieces, who survived the bloodbath and are central to the book.
What happened to Robert Einstein?
We know that in the 1930s and 1940s, Italy, a member of the German Axis, persecuted its Jews. Roughly 9,000 Italian Jews (out of some 50,000) were deported to camps, while hundreds more were killed inside Italy.
Jewish-Italian chemist Primo Levi is perhaps the best-known Italian Holocaust survivor due to his many writings. Books and films such as The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and Life Is Beautiful further remind us that Italian Jews, and those they loved, suffered horribly under the Nazis.
Munich-born Robert Einstein, a first cousin of renowned scientist Albert Einstein, was living at Il Focardo in the Tuscan countryside. After hearing that an officer from the Göring unit was looking for him, he hid in the forest nearby. There are several theories as to why he was marked; it may have been believed that he had aided the partisans or the Allies.
German soldiers knocked on the door just two days before the Allies liberated Florence. Enraged to find Einstein gone, they ransacked the villa and machine-gunned Robert’s wife, Nina Mazzetti Einstein, and the couple’s two young adult daughters.
Before setting the house on fire, the Germans released other occupants of the home who did not share the Einstein surname: Nina’s sister, Seba Mazzetti; her niece, Annamaria Boldrini; and 17-year-old twins Paola and Lorenza Mazzetti, Nina’s brother’s daughters who lived with the Einsteins, as their widowed father couldn’t take care of them.
What Robert saw when he returned home broke him. He planned to commit suicide but waited until he could ensure the financial security of the twins for whom he was responsible. He also wrote to his cousin Albert on November 27, 1944, when the famed physicist was living and teaching in Princeton, New Jersey.
Typed in English, the letter relates Robert’s hope that Albert might help the American Inquiry Commission for Atrocities identify the murderers of his family. However, the men responsible were never found.
This letter is followed by Robert’s suicide note to his niece Annamaria Boldrini, dated June 16, 1945, less than a year after his family’s execution.
Despite the significant trauma they had endured, both Mazzetti sisters became significant cultural figures in postwar Europe. Lorenza directed award-winning films and wrote Il Cielo Cade (The Sky Is Falling), later adapted into a film starring Isabella Rossellini. Paola practiced her own brand of Jungian psychoanalysis and art therapy.
In his introductory essay, author Cassin explains that he “met the Mazzetti twins in Rome in the early 1980s… I was struck by their multidirectional vitality and joyful, inflexible non-conformity. Even while elaborating or keeping silent about their trauma, they chose paths that differed from conventional testimonial narratives.”
The translation of Cassin’s essay is flawed by spelling errors, but the story nonetheless comes through in all its poignancy.
“Eva Krampen Kosloski is Paola’s daughter. Bringing the elderly Mazzetti twins back to the places of their youth and their tragedy, she closes a circle, offering a poetic and evocative testimony… The outcome is a photographic work that springs from an authentic inner need to understand, see, and communicate.”
After Images combines Kosloski’s photographs with family letters, the sisters’ paintings, and reflective essays by Ali Smith, Sabina Loriga, Bianchi, and Carlo Gentile.
Bianchi writes of her visits to the Rome home of the twins, who died in 2020 and 2022, respectively, where Paola led workshops on her unique method of psychotherapy, called Creative Activation.
“Her weekly Wednesday meetings generate small miracles of creation and self-expression. Through acting out and instinctual painting, participants explore their experiences and emotions, giving them a voice and form. And at the end, they gather around plates of spaghetti and to the sound of ‘60s tunes. Lorenza and Paola are the first to dance.”
After Images was published by Sellerio Editore Palermo in collaboration with the Fondazione Memoriale della Shoah di Milano, Centro Primo Levi New York, Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea, and Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò NYU.
- AFTER IMAGES: THE MURDER OF THE EINSTEIN MAZZETTI FAMILY VISUAL RESONANCES
- Photographs by Eva Krampen Kosloski
- Curated by Alessandro Cassin
- Sellerio Editore Palermo/CPL Editions
- 167 pages; $30
