Italy's only former Nazi death camp threatened with oblivion

Italy's only former Nazi death camp threatened with oblivion
AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE

TRIESTE, OCT 25: The stench of sulphur from Trieste Port's industrial park hangs in the air, making the area around Italy's only Nazi death camp all the more forbidding. Two towering concrete walls leave little room for visitors to enter what used to be a rice-husking factory on the outskirts of Trieste, Italy's northeasternmost city and gateway to the Balkans.

Nazi troops who occupied Italy after the ouster of fascist dictator Mussolini in 1943 turned the plant into a "police internment camp", a euphemism if there is one because internees -- partisans, political prisoners and Jews -- were facing death. The Risiera di San Sabba was to become Italy's only Nazi camp until April 1945 when German troops fled and Yugoslav partisans led by Communist leader Josip Tito occupied the Trieste region for a brief period.

Camp documents left behind were taken to archives in Ljubljana, Slovenia. "What a waste," 21-year-old Elena muttered as she visited the red-brick structure with a party of some 30 people. "If leaders in the Balkans had only come here to see that hatred kills, maybe it would have spared many people's lives," she added, referring to the inter-ethnic strife in the nearby former Yugoslavia over the last 10 years that left hundreds of thousands of people dead. "Didn't they used to say: `Never again!' after World War II?" she added.

Up to six internees were crammed into 17 small cells each before executions which followed generally within days after prisoners were taken there. Graffiti scribbled on the walls gave evidence of the horrors, but most were erased in the 20 years before Italy decided to convert the site into a national monument. As recounted by survivors, two of the cells were used for torture, within hearing distance from other internees.

But many of those, including Jews, who only passed through the camp were held in separate large rooms before being taken to death camps in other parts of Nazi-occupied Europe. Overall, up to 5,000 people are believed to have died in the camp by shooting, gassing in at least two specially-equipped vehicles, or after being clubbed unconscious.

An underground oven for cremation of bodies was set up opposite the cells. To leave no evidence of crimes against humanity committed at the Risiera camp, the structure housing the oven was blown up at the end of April 1945, only days before Germany's capitulation as Hitler was about to commit suicide in his Berlin bunker and Russian troops were entering the German capital. Ashes and human bones were found in the rubble.

The camp was used by Italian and non-Italian refugees after the war, as borders in the region were redrawn. When Italy decided in 1965 to declare the former camp a national monument, it was closed off by 11-metre-high grey concrete walls from the more squalid surroundings where housing complexes were to be built. As in similar projects carried out during that period -- such as Berlin's Maria Regina Martyrum church and memorial -- the courtyard with its massive concrete walls has a basilica-like feel. It took Italy 20 years to order the Risiera di San Sabba to be turned into a memorial and another 10 years to open its museum.

"You see, in 1945, the first thing people thought of was reconstruction, new infrastructures and economic aspects prevailed over everything else," Trieste region governor Roberto Antonione said. "Until the 1960s, other questions were considered more important. And today, people have little interest in that part of history, if not some schools, or associations.

"People want to move on, and I think the world should look to the future," added Antonione who leads a center-right coalition government in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region which borders on Austria and Slovenia. But still the camp memorial continues to make headlines as attention recently focused on whether Austria's controversial leader Joerg Haider should visit the Risiera on one of his repeated visits to northeast Italy.