Luciana Nissim was born in Turin in 1919 to a Jewish family. After graduating from high school in 1937, Luciana decided to enroll in medical school. She was in her first year of studies when, in 1938, the racial laws were enacted: Jewish students could no longer attend public schools, but those already enrolled in university were allowed to continue their studies until graduation in July 1943.
During her university studies, and more specifically immediately after graduation, Luciana had joined a group of young anti-fascists and hung out with the Jewish youth who gathered in the library of Turin’s Jewish school to discuss politics and plan resistance to fascism or emigration to Palestine. Among them were Franco Momigliano, who later became her husband, and Primo Levi.
A few days after her graduation, Mussolini resigned, but the anti-fascists’ joy at this news was short-lived. After September 8th, when Italy surrendered to the Allies, the country was occupied by the Germans. The Nissim family had to seek safety, taking refuge in Brusson, a small village in the Aosta Valley, where, among the many who had taken refuge there, they met their friend from Turin, Primo Levi. With him, her friend Vanda Maestro, and two other mutual friends, she joined “a small group of former soldiers who were gathering to begin the resistance against the Germans,” thus forming the first partisan formations. On the night between December 12th and 13th, the fascist militias, following a roundup, arrested the group of young men from Turin and took them to the prison in Aosta. After a month, Luciana was transferred to the Fossoli camp and from there, on February 22, 1944, to Auschwitz. Along with her on that tragic journey were her friends Primo Levi, Vanda Maestro, and Franco Sacerdoti; only Luciana and Levi returned. But it was thanks to her medical degree that Luciana Nissim was able to survive, because as a doctor, she lived in marginally better material conditions than the other inmates. When it was time to shave, a fellow prisoner suggested a phrase in German: “Ich bin Aertzin” (I am a doctor of medicine), which led to her being assigned to the camp infirmary. Luciana returned to Italy only in July 1945, after escaping from the Lichtenau labor camp, where she had been transferred.
Two months after her return to Italy, Luciana Nissim entered the pediatric clinic in Turin: “I had emerged alive from the extermination,” she wrote, “also thanks to the fact that I had a medical degree, but my internship as a young doctor had taken place amid the horror and absolute desperation of Birkenau. Now, however, the cruel war was over, and like everyone else, at least in those first months of peace, I was full of enthusiasm, hope, and the desire to rebuild.”
Luciana Nissim later moved from pediatrics to psychoanalysis, to which she devoted herself in the following years until her death.
In 1965 she became an associate member of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, in 1973 a full member, and in 1978 a training analyst and practiced psychoanalysis in Milan, carrying out intense clinical, supervisory, and research activities with particular attention to listening to the patient with respect and understanding.
Luciana Nissim Momigliano died in Milan on December 1, 1998.

Most of the information regarding Luciana Nissim is taken from “Raffaella Simili, Under a false name, Italian Jewish scientists (1938-1945), Edizioni Pendragon, Bologna, 2010 and from
https://scienzaa2voci.unibo.it/biografie/1215-nissim-momigliano-luciana