War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges [55]
Trieste is a port city that for most of the twentieth century sat on the edge of the volcanic upheavals that tore apart the European monarchies and made up the front lines of the Cold War. It changed hands a half dozen times. James Joyce and Rainer Maria Rilke lived here. The notorious commander in the Spanish civil war, Commandante Carlos, came from Trieste, as did the writer Italo Svevo. The city, seedy, neglected, is no longer of any geopolitical significance. But the scars of its past infect the air. Old men with sad stories gather every afternoon in the seaside coffee shops.
In May 1945, Tito’s Communist Partisans in Yugoslavia, after a bitter guerrilla war against the German and Croatian fascists, pursued the retreating forces toward Italy. The Partisan army seized the Istrian Peninsula, in the northern Adriatic, and raced on toward Trieste. The Partisans’ forty-day occupation of Trieste and their hunt for German soldiers, Italian and Croatian fascists, and suspected opponents of Communism nearly led to a clash with Allied forces. In June, the Yugoslavs withdrew to the hinterlands, but Trieste was not handed back to Italy until 1954. Today the city has 230,000 people, many of them from Italian families who were forced out of Yugoslavia after the war.
Trieste in May 1945 was a chaotic city filled with cornered German, Croatian, and Italian soldiers who continued to fight despite Italy’s capitulation in 1943. Scores of accused fascists were paraded daily by the Partisans through the cobblestone streets to Yugoslav military courts. Most were quickly condemned to death and shot, or thrown alive into gorges and pits around the city.
Many Slovenes in Trieste at the time, ecstatic at the downfall of Italian fascism, greeted the Partisans as liberators and assisted in manhunts by the Yugoslav secret police. During the occupation, at least 3,500 residents of Trieste, along with an unknown number of Yugoslavs, Italians, and Germans who were trapped in the city, were shot and thrown into the fissures, or foibe, of the Carso mountain range, the eastern end of the Italian Alps. Thousands more were deported, and many perished in Yugoslav detention camps.
A secret British-American intelligence report of September 1945, made public just a few years ago, is filled with accounts by witnesses to partisan atrocities. A Roman Catholic priest, Don Sceck, told the investigators that on May 2,1945, a group of 150 fascists were swiftly sentenced and then mowed down by partisan troops with machine guns in Basovizza, a small Slovene-speaking village just outside Trieste. The corpses, he said, were thrown into the huge Basovizza caverns, now a memorial to the victims. The next day he saw a group of about 250 prisoners at the mouth of the Basovizza pit.
“These persons were questioned and tried in the presence of all the populace, who accused them,” the priest said in the report. “As soon as one of them was questioned, four or five women rushed up to them and accused them of having murdered or tortured one of their relatives, or of having burned down their homes. The accused persons were butted and struck, and always admitted the crimes ascribed to them.”
In war, death is often anonymous. When it is impossible to find out whether someone is dead or alive there is no closure, no way to fix the end of a life with a time and a place. The atrocity is compounded by the atrocity committed against memory. The lack of closure tortures and deforms those who wait for an answer. This sacrilege against memory gnaws at survivors. Regimes use murder and anonymous