In this novel, whose author is the Croatian Dasa Drndic, many collateral themes converge, the epicenter of which is the Italian Holocaust, in which 9.000 Jews from this country and an undetermined number of gypsies, communists and partisans were murdered.
Trieste It is a work that abounds in the sense of guilt (?) of those responsible for the Shoah; in the via crucis of the victims of the same during their lives, fighting against memories and their own ghosts; in the terrible story of the children born to forced couples between sadistic Nazis and their victims, unwanted children condemned to silence and anonymity by society; and, among other matters, in the collective amnesia of Germans and Austrians after the war regarding the brutal genocide of millions of people.
But it is also a small story of the Jews of Trieste, a community that had just over 5.000 members in the 18s and that enjoyed a period of splendor and brilliance in those years, just before the great catastrophe of Nazism and Italy's alliance with Hitler's Germany arrived. . On September 1938, XNUMX, and precisely in the Italian Unity Square in Trieste, the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini proclaimed the “racial laws” that further suffocated Italian Jews after their citizenship had been taken away a few months earlier by the fascist regime.
With this background, the author, Dasa Drnic, weaves a story around a character, Haya Tedeschi, who seeks answers to events that may not have answers and explanations for tragic events that do not have answers either, such as the silence and passivity of thousands. of witnesses, in several countries, when the famous death trains passed by, in which thousands of gypsies, Jews, Serbs and partisans were traveling towards certain death. Drnic, who was born in the Croatian capital, Zagreb, masterfully exposes all these issues because, as the old Spanish saying goes, it is a matter of breed for the greyhound to have been born in a country so accustomed to oblivion and collective amnesia regarding the “peccadilloes”. ” of their founding fathers, among whom were some notable (and criminal) fascists.
It is easier to explain the reactions of those targeted by racial and ethnic hatred, such as many Jews who preferred suicide rather than being sent by the Nazis, or the Italian or Croatian volunteer executioners, to the extermination camps. They knew that they had already been previously convicted and that no one, absolutely no one, would do anything to help them, in the same way that people watched in amazement as the trains passed through the stations loaded with human beings who screamed desperately and asked for help without finding a gesture, a look or a few words of hope in the middle of that terrible night of anxiety and terror. To suddenly go from placid normality to being involved in an endless nightmare must be something terrible.
THE TRIESTE CONCENTRATION CAMP
Returning to the novel, to continue with what Drnic really tells, it must be noted that Trieste was the only Italian city that had the grim honor of having had one of the few concentration camps in Italian territory and the only one with a crematorium chamber. functioning almost until the end of the Second World War in the Third Reich. The prison facility for criminal use by its executioners was located in a rice field, called Risiera di San Sabba, just a few kilometers from the silent, tranquil and, I would dare say, even innocent city of Trieste. According to reliable estimates, between 3.000 and 5.000 people were murdered in that macabre place.
In 1976, as this novel tells, halfway between harsh reality and a fiction very close to it, the Trieste trials began, whose interrogations were an exercise in self-complacency and masterful cynicism, reaching surrealism in some interrogations and where the accused, as occurred in the Nuremberg trials, they ended up believing their own imagination and fictitious stories as if taken from the hat of a diabolical magician. In reality, Nazism became a political perversion and almost a pathological disease that affected millions of Europeans.
In short, as has happened so many times in other trials against those responsible for the Holocaust, it was about wrapping, not to say diluting, guilt in a kind of collective responsibility in which everyone, or almost everyone, followed orders without question or complaint. ask anything. This being the case, it was easy to wait for the sentence from submissive and obedient judges who also limited themselves to simply complying with laws, without expressing their feelings and feeling any empathy for the victims, for those who could no longer speak or moan from their oblivion. Impunity after the war enveloped everything and everyone, including the Nazis and their Italian volunteer executioners.
Then there are the silences, another collateral theme of this novel, well managed by many so as not to have to take sides and dirty their hands, to protect themselves under the protective mantle of shame and ignominy. The Church, with its Pope Pius 1938 and 1945. But there were other silences, very loud and well known, such as the German or Austrian silence after the war, trying to justify themselves and blatantly justify the unjustifiable.
The Germans and Austrians, along with other peoples, tried to justify themselves for their complacency in the face of crime with the alibi of ignorance, but the argument does not hold up and the evidence against them is too much to beat around the bush.
Hitler had publicly exposed, before and after coming to power, his genocidal plan that would lead to the extermination of all European Jewry. Then, the rest of the Nazi leaders would assume the criminal project as their own and execute it without question. But society was also a participant, with its silence, in this authentic orgy of blood, terror, death and passive complicity, as this novel masterfully reminds us. The same can be applied to Italian society, which tolerated and applauded Mussolini until the end of his days, until the dictator was executed by the partisans, on April 27, 1945, and humiliatingly exposed face down, for greater ridicule. , in Piazzale Loreto in Milan. This act was a simple Freudian exercise of the old tactic of “killing the father” to collectively exempt all blame in a kind of Italian-style collective catharsis after decades of passionate coexistence with the monster, with fascism.
However, as Dasa Drndic explains with great success in his novel, it is not so easy to engulf with silence the past that corrodes us and affirms itself with the tragic memory of episodes that cannot be erased from history and memory. “We have to look to the future, people say. They repeat it to themselves, to others, they talk this way everywhere, this is how parents, friends, politicians talk, this is how priests talk, especially those of the Catholic Church, And when I already lost all hope, the past caught me in an instant:”, writes Drndic in his work. The past never leaves you, it goes with you wherever you go, it sleeps with you in the same bed and looks into your eyes so that you never forget it.
For all this, one of the underlying messages of this novel by the late Drndic, perhaps her posthumous message for future generations, is that it is vital to keep alive the flame of remembrance and memory of the victims of the Holocaust because if we invoke silence to To wrap everything that happened in that terrible time in the cloak of opprobrium, we would be complicit in those crimes. “It is not legal to forget. It is not legal to remain silent. If we remain silent, who will speak”, as the Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi reminded us.