Giuseppe Federici Study Center – For a new onset
Press release no. 7/19 of the 24 January 2019, Saint Timothy
The other lagers: the Titian fields
A page deliberately forgotten by official historiography is that relating to the ferocious communist regimes that settled in various European Catholic nations. Let's remember some of these censored pages to remember the victims of communism, including numerous members of the Catholic clergy.
Tito's extermination camps
A breath was enough, a gust of wind, who came from Fiume, has now permanently become Rijeka: many greetings, one was undone, thrown in the air like a rag, or a corn leaf. We lived day by day. Anything could happen." (Carlo Sgorlon, The large Foiba)
The Foibe are a sad reality which is unfortunately part of our post-war history and the long painful ordeal of the Julian populations – Dalmatian. But they were not the only instrument of repression and ethnic cleansing practiced by the Yugoslav IV Army, dall'OZNA (the Titoist political police) and by the Italian collaborators of communist faith who operated in Dalmatia and Venezia Giulia in the immediate post-war period.
In the occupied territories in the areas of the eastern border of Italy, Tito's partisans were guilty of crimes of unprecedented ferocity, not only against fascists, but also against Italians who had taken care "not to compromise themselves with fascism" and sometimes even against anti-fascist or even communist Italians, but not in line with Tito's political practice.
The long list of horrors seems to be endless and reading it cannot help but cause a strong sense of unease, especially in those who know nothing about that tormented period due to an official historiography that has been deliberately "distracted" and biased for too long.
It is enough to report only a few episodes, all extensively documented and such as to provide a sufficiently indicative picture of the tragic events that characterized the days of the Yugoslav occupation.
The crudeness of some descriptions must be justified: effectively, the history of the immediate post-war period in Venezia Giulia, Istria and Dalmatia is also made up of seemingly incomprehensible horrors, but in reality carefully planned in accordance with the perverse logic of ethnic cleansing and forced denationalization of the occupied territories.
Bearing witness to this means respecting the memory of the thousands of fallen and "disappeared" who have been deliberately and obstinately ignored for too long..
A Marshal of the MDT (Territorial Defense Militia) he was buried alive in Aidussina in June 1945 and left to die slowly with only his head above ground. A woman, arrested in May of 1945 because his brother had been a member of the Republican Fascist Party, was raped by 18 Slavic partisans who broke her arms so she couldn't defend herself; it was subsequently informed.
All the wounded from the “Seminario Minore” hospital in Gorizia were deported and made to disappear (about seventy on three trucks). The same thing happened in the Military Hospital of Trieste: once deported, they disappeared. And the same happened in the Marine Hospital of Rovinj and in the Civil Hospital of Pula. A massacre!
Eyewitnesses reported that several Italians, seriously injured, they were herded onto the stone floor of the so-called “hospital” of Skofia Loka and beaten savagely. This “hospital” had been created from an ancient one, dilapidated castle. Devoid of any real hospital equipment, it was actually just a sort of agonizing waiting room for death.
The macabre story of the "infoibations" was tragically complemented by a frightening one, shocking system of extermination camps, where people were dying of hunger, of cold, of dysentery, of typhus, but also following summary shootings, to atrocious torture or actual murder, carried out under the eyes of the internees to destroy their moral conditions and their physical and psychological resistance.
The crimes of the "Titoist" police and military were repeated starting from May-June 1945 and continued for years in the occupied territories. Clear minds in planning the extermination of the "Italians", they went so far as to study methods of "executions" developed to inflict maximum suffering and be an example to the survivors. As happened to the two hundred prisoners forced to go down into the Pozzo Littorio mine (Arsia) and left to die of starvation, of thirst, of desperation, in a tunnel from which no one returned.
Or how it was done for the over two hundred prisoners, military, civilians, donne, young, old, Italian and German soldiers, tightly handcuffed with wire and crowded into the dilapidated tanker “Lina Campanella” which the 21 maggio 1945 was blown up over a barrage of magnetic mines. Prima, the partisans on guard and the other Slavic crew had abandoned the ship, letting the old cart sink. Some prisoners managed to untie the wire ties and jumped into the sea. Partly, those who managed to reach the shore were summarily killed, while others were sent to prison camps.
It was precisely in these fields that the worst ended, heartbreaking, slow agony of Italians from Dalmatia, of Istria, of Venezia Giulia and other regions of Italy (especially public officials and soldiers), fallen into the hands of the Titos: they were real extermination camps, scattered throughout the territory of the former Yugoslavia. The "eliminations" began already from the sorting and proliferated during the translations from one field to another which often took place only to show the populations (according to the logic of regime propaganda) the value expressed by the partisans of the Yugoslav "liberation" army in taking such a large number of prisoners.
The “translations” took place in dilapidated trucks, but more often on foot, with prisoners forced to walk barefoot, deprived of clothes, fast, tightly tied at the wrists and arms with wire; the weakest fell exhausted and were finished with their skulls cracked by the butt of a rifle or with the classic blow to the back of the head. Who stopped to help a fallen comrade or friend, he was killed on the spot.
Ezio Sambo tells, a witness from Chioggia, that an elderly man from Cormons was struggling to walk and was therefore supported by his wife who had wanted to follow him at all costs. At a certain point the man collapsed to the ground exhausted: he was killed before the woman's eyes.
In Trieste in May-June 1945 the Tito gangs established a torture center where the Italian prisoners were subjected to the most brutal torture: they were savagely beaten, forced to beat each other, to put his head in the bucket of excrement, until they are reduced to lifeless rags; therefore they disappeared "into the foiba".
The uninformed survivors were locked up, among others, in the sorting field of the “Risiera di San Sabba” (already used as such during the German occupation), antechamber of a complex and shocking system of extermination, where people were literally starving; the prisoners, often without food, they were forced to collect the grass they found, e, when they could, they boiled it. The residues from the canteen of the Slavic partisans were poisoned and then fed to the unfortunate prisoners, with consequences that are easy to imagine.
A prisoner of the infamous Borovnica concentration camp had his eyes gouged out; in the evening, venne fucilato in quanto i suoi lamenti strazianti infastidivano i torturatori. Another Italian prisoner had strips of flesh torn from his thighs and salt spread on the lacerations.
In these conditions death was often a relief. The dead were carried away on a cart and buried in mass graves nearby: no register, no notes, no news for the families, who for years have been forced to live in uncertainty about the fate of their relatives.
The Red Cross did not exist. And those shot for disobedience, or for stealing a potato or an onion, they were thrown into the dung of the field latrines and were only allowed to be covered with earth while a new latrine ditch was dug nearby. The same thing happened to the body of someone, exhausted by hardship, he couldn't balance himself on the board placed across the ditch and fell into it and drowned, without anyone being allowed to help him. In the Borovnica camp they died, in media, six to seven prisoners a day, of hunger, of dysentery, of cold, of hardship, as well as following torture.
But in these fields one also had to work for 12 hours a day: exhausting work, cutting wood in the woods, with hatchets and hand saws, digging with hammers and hand chisels in quarries, to build roads, bridges and railways in the cold of the Balkan winter, just covered in shreds of summer clothes, very often without shoes, with your feet in the snow.
A true extermination "lager" was the so-called "Youth Railway", flanked by the graves of prisoners and "volunteers" who died of hardship and fatigue. Other gloomy camps were those of Maribor and Prestrane, and the prisons of Ljubljana.
It was a concentration camp system that was only apparently uncoordinated, but actually carefully planned, made up of slow labor and extermination camps – but not always slow – consumption, such as those already mentioned in Borovnica and Skofia Loka, a concentration camp "hospital" for the dying where a young man measuring six feet tall was reduced to weighing forty kilos.
In the "work" camp of Buccari, near Fiume, continuous and systematic torture was inflicted; this also happened in many other concentration camps located, in the number of a few dozen, throughout the territory of the Federal Republic. Just mention it, among the best known, those of Bistrica, Shares, The tomb, Karlovac, Pretty girl, Mitrovica, Split. No less unfortunate was the fate of the prisoners in the coal mines, where suffering and torture were similar.
The terror that reigned in these extermination camps also served as a deterrent for the ethnic groups that had always been struggling within Yugoslavia itself.. Therefore, right from the start, the maximum ferocity was given free rein.
The strategy of terror was supposed to keep the communist regime in place; it was the glue of Titoism born from the war of "liberation" and at the same time it contributed to quickly "denationalizing" the territories inhabited by Italian-speaking populations. The ferocity, essentially, brought concrete results to the communist regime which needed rapid consolidation.
Quite a few Italian prisoners who managed to survive hardship and atrocities were held until 1954 and in some cases even beyond.
As it had been cynically preordained, since the first tragic episodes of brutal persecution, terror had spread across Dalmatia, the River, in Istria. And it was the forced exodus that we all know: 350 thousand Italians left their native land, the properties, the work, the testimonies of their history, the monuments, the art opera, and the remains of loved ones in cemeteries that would desperately run out of crosses.
Milovan Gilas confessed: "In the 1945 Kardelj and I were sent by Tito to Istria. It was our task to induce all Italians to leave with pressure of all kinds. And so it was done.”
Communication by Michele Chiodi. This article is taken from the "Proceedings of the Historical Studies Conference" held on 28 January 2001 scroll the theme "Phoebe: history on its way towards the truth". We thank the Institute of Historical, Economic and Social Studies (ISSES) of Naples for allowing the reprint of the intervention, with some formal adjustments.
source – http://www.centrostudifederici.org/gli-altri-lager-campi-titini/
