Tastings It is not an essay, it is a nice novel freely based on a true story released for Feltrinelli in 2018 with the signature of Rossella Postorino and now became a film directed by Silvio Soldini, on the first TV on 29 September exclusively on Sky Cinema.
The protagonist of the novel Rosa Bauer is freely inspired by Margot Wölk, who did, despite himself, part of the group of people forcedly recruited by the Nazis during the Second World War, to taste the foods intended for Adolf Hitler in fear that the allies could try to poison him. The task of the tastings was, in war and hunger time, to eat before him the food destined for the Fürher, risking if the life of his own to save his.
The real story that has even more tragic and much, of that of the film and the novel, told it for the first time in 2013 in a dramatic interview with Der Spiegel the same Margot Wölk (1917-2014), breaking the silence with it closed it within up to 95 years.
While Europe in the middle of the war struggled to get the necessary and went on to Margarina and surrogate of coffee and files to the black market, at the table intended for Hitler ate true butter, sauces, precious dishes, never based on meat because Hitler professed vegetarian, but the satiety, in contrast with the rest of the country, brought the awareness that could be a synonym of death instead of life. For decades, the relationship with food to the only survivor made it difficult.
Margot was a twenty -four year old with studies as secretary, Berliner, as the protagonist of the novel and the film had had the house bombed in 1941 and had taken refuge at the home of the in -laws while the husband was at the front. When she was recruited, she too between 15 young women at the Hitler table, she had just arrived In the Gross-Partsch campaign, today Parcz in Poland, at the time Eastern Prussia. To determine the recruitment, the fact that a few kilometers from there was the lair of the wolf, the place that Hitler had chosen as headquarters on the eastern front And the coincidence that the mayor of the village was a convinced Nazi.
In that way a young woman who tells Der Spiegel “He had refused to join the League of German girls (BDM), the female version of Hitlerian youth, and whose father had been expelled for refusing to enroll in the Nazi party”, a Hitler’s Auler became the tasting of Hitler were awakened at 8 with a “raised”, (synonymous with the wstawać shouted every morning to Auschwitz remembered by Primo Levi), every time they were considered useful, since they were not needed if the Fürher was not on site. Like the other Margot women, however, he never saw him. For a period, women lived in their homes, then since 20 July 1944 the situation was no longer considered safe have been translated into a school.
So far the events of the novel and reality look very much but from then on they diverge enough. On July 20, the tastings, invited by some soldiers to see a film in a tent at the headquarters had been witnesses of the attack on Hitler hatched by Claus von Stauffenberg. “The explosion” said Margot, “he snatched us from the wooden benches,” but the attack failed. And the tastings became special supervised “as animals in cage”.
One night an SS officer entered with a staircase in Margot’s room using violence and leaving it petrified, without even taking the staircase away. All tastings were shot when the advance of the Soviet army was dangerous, Margot was saved thanks to a German lieutenant He put her on a train to Berlin and saved her life for a first time, while the red army was upon us. The second time did a Berlin doctor who assigned the SS with a lie.
When he returned to Schmargendorf, the Berlin district in which he lived before the war, Margot fell into the hands of the Red Army And he suffered violence for 15 days to the point of no longer being able to have children.
When in 1946 the scattered husband, who had believed dead, returned even if marked by the war, the couple recovered and tried to find a normality lasting another 34 yearI, made possible by the firm relationship between the two and by the sense of humor not lost despite everything, but became more caustic as she said now 95 years old and used as a makeup to survive, in spite of the fact that the past has never ceased to return to her dream. The decision to speak came when, despite the suffering of the memory, he felt the duty to testify to history, the only survivor, this part of the tragic and dark war.
