Daša Drndić - Trieste

The station slumbers by day and by night it dies in the phantasmal light of the lanterns of the train dispatchers, which sway, so everything on the platform looks as if it is dancing, the tracks, the train cars, the hanging baskets with flowers, as if in a wild, musicless Tanz in which outlines twist and fracture, sliding along the entire fenced-in area, which turns into a gigantic human face contorted with pain, shedding no tears.

Transport 3

The train leaves Cairo Montenotte camp (Savona-Liguria) on 8 October. It arrives in Gusen on 12 October, 1943, and in Mauthausen on 23 January, 1944, whence it departs the next day for Auschwitz. On that train there are 999 people of Italian nationality from Gorizia, Trieste and Kopar.

Transport 48

The train leaves Trieste on 31 May, 1944—destination Dachau. It stops along the way in Gorizia and Udine, where new internees are boarded: civilians, anti-fascists who have been arrested, partisans and Italian soldiers. The train arrives in Dachau on 2 June, 1944, and there are between 342 and 352 “travellers” on board. Ten wagons leave Trieste, and the German authorities add another eight in Udine.

Transport 58

The convoy leaves Gorizia on 27 June, 1944, and arrives in Dachau three days later. There are 194 people on board; 190 of them reach the destination.

Transport 79

The convoy leaves Trieste on 29 August, 1944. It stops in Gorizia, where new internees and prisoners are loaded on board. Number of deportees: 289.

Transport 87

The convoy leaves Trieste on 2 October, 1944—and arrives in Dachau three days later. It stops in Udine and Gorizia to take on more people. Number of deportees: 289.

Transport 101

The convoy leaves Trieste on 15 November, 1944, and arrives in Dachau on 17 November. It stops in Udine and Gorizia to take on more people. Number of deportees: 42.

Transport 109

The convoy leaves Trieste on 8 December, 1944. It arrives in Dachau on 11 December, 1944. The train stops in Gorizia and Udine, where additional deportees are boarded. Four hundred and fifty people arrive in Dachau. There are 200 prisoners in the convoy from the Trieste Coroneo, as well as a group of Slovenes and Croats under S.S. guard. The convoy leaves Gorizia at about four o’clock in the morning.

Transport 120

The train leaves Trieste on 2 February. It arrives in Mauthausen on 7 February, 1944. New internees and prisoners are loaded on board in Udine and Gorizia. Number of deportees: 365. In this convoy is the youngest deported resident of Gorizia, three-month-old Bruno Faber. He is killed at Auschwitz on 26 February, 1944.

Of the 123 convoys that leave from Italy for the Nazi camps, 69 of them depart from Trieste, right here, next to Gorizia, practically in its immediate vicinity, not counting the 30 convoys that travel to the forced labour camps. More than 23,000 former soldiers are distributed throughout the camp factories in which they are bringing to life the light and heavy industry of the Reich. By mid-1944 half a million Italians are working for the German war machine.

The transports continue to run until the end of February 1945. The army and police of the Republic of Salò puppet state and the Third Reich transport to the concentration camps about 40,000 Italians, of whom 10,000 are Jews and 30,000 are partisans, antifascists and workers arrested after the massive strikes in March 1944. Of the 40,000 deported, 36,000 men, women and children are murdered or die.

So, this is the winter of 1944. Battles flare around Gorizia. A civilian is killed now and then by a German bullet. From time to time Nazis march small columns of dangerous partisan bandits through town, probably to a firing squad, or prison, or the former rice mill, but these are isolated incidents, or so Haya believes since she reads no newspapers. Had she read them, she would have learned that these are “great war victories for the Nazi Army in Gorizia”, because the Trieste paper Il Piccolo has a special page entitled “Cronaca di Gorizia”, and aside from that Il Piccolo has a local editorial board in Gorizia on the 1st floor at Via Crispi 9, where one can go to hear the latest news, or even to bring in an interesting news item, which the police are constantly urging citizens to do, to bring news in, to rat on each other. Haya, therefore, has no idea what is going on around her. While it snows outside, and while she waits for customers to turn up, she works on maths problems and keeps track of changes in the cinematic repertoire.

The high commissar of the Adriatisches Küstenland, Gauleiter Friedrich Rainer, has big plans for “his” district. After the war all of Friuli province is to flourish. Trieste, this “little Berlin” at the heart of Rainer’s future provincial paradise, is to spring to life, it will awaken and take flight (within limits). The artists and writers will come flocking back, except the Jews or decadents. The port within the structure of the new German empire will be a pure and virtuous port of a new age. The new man will work there in earnest. He will be supernatural, strong, robust. Rainer will not be able to separate all the ethnic chaff from the golden grain of his imperial periphery. The Slavonic, Slovenian and Croatian corncockle will linger; the Italian Friulians will linger; the rather crude Cici and Morlaks, with their unfortunate allies; the belligerent Cossacks, whom Gauleiter Rainer has compelled to come from the East, promising them the Heimat they never had, their own little Cossackland at the foot of the Carinthian alps in the rugged and impoverished area around Tolmezzo and the River Tagliamento, to which they drag their horses and their tents, their women and their children, until 1945 when nearly all 50,000 of them are repatriated to the Soviet Union and killed, without succeeding, as Gauleiter Rainer had hoped, in defending the Friuli-Venezia Giulia province from the incursions of crude partisan bands, unbridled bandits and infidels. But in 1944 Rainer is hard at work building a compact Furlanentum, carving out a Furlani nation in which Trieste is to become part of German territory, even though the entire province, this special sunny oasis on the edge of the empire of Mitteleuropa, is tainted by the inferior Slavonic race, which, thank God, is in the minority. The workers need better living conditions, Rainer insists, so he is particularly attentive to them. Even Florian, who is selling umbrellas, is not so badly off. Perhaps that is why he doesn’t complain. Rainer sees to it that Italian and Slovenian workers have new (workers’) clothing and new (workers’) footwear, since they are soon to become German workers. The clothing and footwear the workers have been wearing make them look like tramps, and the workers are the heart and soul of his (Rainer’s) project. Rainer has an almost communistic vision of how to set up his provincial realm. He establishes canteens and kitchens, Werkküchen, in which workers are to be given more generous and tasty portions than the rest of the non-working population, so they can bring verve and efficiency to their labours, with a song on their lips. Florian is satisfied. These shoes are excellent, he says, though I am not fond of brown, and he wears Rainer’s workboots when he has to and when he doesn’t, at home, for instance, while listening to Rainer’s radio broadcasts, while leafing through Rainer’s propaganda newspaper, and while smoking Rainer’s cheap cigarettes. We’re not so badly off, Florian says then, at least everyone has an umbrella . The office for labour, at an order from Friedrich Rainer, introduces a special supply of cigarettes for Rainer’s workers, because although some may claim that tobacco is not essential for life, as Rainer declares in his new newspaper, Deutsche Adria-Zeitung, cigarettes are certainly one of those little things that make our everyday life, especially this wartime travail of ours, more bearable, and bring it a touch of brightness, as Rainer says in Deutsche Adria-Zeitung . And aside from that, as a student of the Law, Rainer had undoubtedly come across the notion of mens sana in corpore sano , so he introduces numerous cultural and recreational activities, in factory halls as well as at stadiums, such as those Werkskonzerte of his that are held during lunch break, which all workers, the local managerial staff and representatives of the Nazi administration, are obliged to attend, charged with noting down who comes and who does not. Health matters. Gauleiter Friedrich Rainer knows that health is key: an ailing population becomes depressed and sluggish, productivity diminishes, and with it, patriotic fervour. That is why everywhere in “his” district Rainer has built playgrounds and parks. He organizes competitions and little local festivities, which are advertised along with the broadcast of marches and sentimental hits that alternate on the new hour-long local programme Die Stunde der Friulaner, so that the listeners can dream out their Austrian dreams and navigate the healing waters of saccharine nostalgia. Meeting the cultural needs of the working class is just as important as providing adequate compensation for human labour, Friedrich Rainer says in his Deutsche Adria-Zeitung, because man does not live by bread alone, Rainer says. Rainer’s paper, the Deutsche Adria-Zeitung, is delivered regularly after 14 January, 1944, to Haya’s tobacco shop and Haya takes the Zeitung home and Florian reads it, often aloud, so that everyone in the house can hear, so they will take note of what Rainer recommends and not forget their, his, Rainer’s, German language. In order to secure peace among the civilians, for he has enough headaches with the partisans (Italian, Slovenian and Croatian), Rainer starts a local, separatist weekly called La Voce di Furlania, co-opts Slovenian and Croatian collaborationists, and re-opens the Slovenian schools, so the Tedeschi family get a free set of fourth grade textbooks for Orestes, over which Ada then pores, searching for (and not finding) the lost, distorted time of her mother Marisa ( neé Brašić) and her grandmother Marija (neé Krapez). The final issue of Deutsche Adria-Zeitung comes out on Saturday, 28 April, 1945, but Haya doesn’t open up her little shop that Saturday, because she is already touched by a fate from which, as Saba says, one does not die but loses one’s mind instead.