| Sumario: | Why did some survivors reject their homelands after liberation from the concentration camps, even when return was possible? This article examines the cases of Viennese survivor Elisa Springer and Polish survivor Dora Klein, both of whom settled permanently in Italy after the war. Drawing on their memoirs and oral testimonies, it argues that pre-Holocaust experiences of belonging and exclusion profoundly shaped their postwar conceptions of home, revealed through the presence – or absence – of nostalgia in their testimonies. Building on the work of Svetlana Boym and Sara Horowitz, this paper reconceptualizes nostalgia not as attachment to territory but as longing for community – the social world that renders a place meaningful. Springer, who recalled an integrated and secure childhood in Vienna, initially returned there after liberation, driven in part by nostalgia, only to discover that the community she mourned had been irretrievably destroyed. Klein, by contrast, experienced sustained antisemitic exclusion in interwar Poland and alienation from her family's Yiddish-speaking milieu, developing little attachment to her homeland and exhibiting no discernible nostalgia for it once she left. She therefore returned directly to Italy after her time in the Lager. Despite Italy's complicity in Fascist racial persecution, both women ultimately located belonging there, reinforcing and complicating the Italian brava gente ('good people') narrative. By tracing their divergent trajectories, this study demonstrates how nostalgia – understood as attachment to community rather than place – illuminates survivors' postwar migrations and redefinitions of home.
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