by Daša Drndic
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 S
aturday, 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.
If he were alive, Haya’s grandfather Bruno Baar would probably have told her which of the Gorizia newspapers he read, what papers piled up in the house, which ones Marisa used to wash the windows or to wrap what was left of her set of drinking glasses as they got ready to evacuate the city, back in 1917. And Ada would be able to tell her, tell Haya, which magazines and newspapers she had sold at her tobacco shop before they left Trieste, before fascism dropped the curtain behind which it tapped out the first steps of its diabolic dance, still tentative at that point and with no musical accompaniment, the audience mostly sitting in the theatre and waiting (and finally watching) the beginning of the dramatic second act. But Haya did not ask, Haya does not ask, and Ada soon forgets not only her own life, but life in general.
Before the Great War they read Gaberšček’s Soča and Primorec in Gorizia and Trieste. There is a political paper called Gorica, and Primorski Gospodar, and weeklies such as Novi Šas and Goriški List, and were she to poke around her grandfather Bruno’s now abandoned wine cellar, Haya would find old issues of the monthly Cvetje among the dry barrels, with essays by Škrabec, the Franciscan monk, on the Slovenian language. She would find dusty bottles draped with sheets of paper from Naši Zapiski and Veda, crumpled vestiges, traces of a time that was only just birthing, as if that time were a premature infant which the war was compelling to rest, swaddled, waiting. And now here is another war, the campaigns follow one upon another like the seasons; the commands from invisible powers spurt in brief, sluggish sprays and well-worn history flows like lava down the streets and squares, seeping into rooms and turning people to stone. Like Trieste, Gorizia lives its maddened parallel lives again, careening along railway lines from which the rails have been stripped. In it, in that accursed blot on the three-way border, at the intersection of four languages and invisible pasts, carelessly buried, dispersed or swept aside like squandered alluvia, only occasionally does ordinary life gleam forth, like a flash from the sky that sticks to the windowpane and on it, dies.
The underground press printed illegally by the partisans is not, of course, delivered to Haya’s tobacco shop, so as far as Haya is concerned that sort of press, anti-fascist, focused on national liberation, in Slovenian, Croatian and Italian, does not exist. Had she by chance stumbled upon papers such as those, she would have learned that the German Army was suffering losses, that the German generals were gradually losing their patience, and becoming more strict and brutal. She would have learned all sorts of things. She would have read about horrors, and her civilian life might have stepped out of the ordinary, or maybe not. In any case, for Haya the only newspapers are the official press, the papers read by the German soldiers and the Italian soldiers, and the other honest folk who don’t ask about things that aren’t their business. Nevertheless, throughout the Adriatisches Küstenland, all through the war, newspapers circulate, song books, dictionaries, children’s picture books, poetry and prose, cranked out on Cyclostyle machines in secret, in homes, warehouses, bakeries, carpentry workshops, are distributed despite the life-threatening danger to all those who know of them and want to know. Slovenski Poročevalec, Zakaj je Propadala Jugoslavija, Morje, Snežnik, Ljudska Pravica, Mladi Puntar, Mladina, Mladi Rod, Il Nostro Avvenire, Bollettino, Naša žena, Il Lavoratore, Otroške Pesmi, a whole library of another reality that always exists, everywhere, at every age and time.
Sometimes there is no running water in town, and sometimes the electricity goes out, but good Lord, things like that happen in peacetime, too. Haya’s Aunt Letizia says that in October the previous year (in 1943, right?) she happened to be near the Casa di Cura Villa San Giusto and she saw the Germans firing at the train station, for no particular reason, as if they were having a bit of a lark, and she saw the large clock topple off the front of the building, and time simply stood still, and time dies anyway during a war, she says. The heart of time beats in secret, she says. Time isn’t going anywhere, she says, so they don’t need that clock up on the railway station building anyway. She says that she kept walking along the Corso and happened upon two Italian armoured vehicles that were shooting left and right, like crazy, Letizia says, though there was practically no-one out on the street, only me with my five fresh eggs, she says, and she saw another woman, over there by the Parco della Rimembranza, and how the woman did not have time to run into the nearest entranceway, because they shot her. Letizia’s husband Parigi Puhaz says that on 22 September (he remembers exactly when) a shell hit the Braunizer house on Piazza Vittoria, and the next day one hit the Vittoria cinema. Four people were wounded, he remembers that precisely. Four. Then he says, You, Haya, you don’t have to see every single show. After that short conversation Haya’s uncle Parigi Puhaz goes to Vienna, where he dies in a flower shop in 1945, no-one ever finds out how. Florian listens to these and many of the other little stories that find their way into the dining room of the Baar family home, where the Puhaz family and the Tedeschi family are now living. He listens to these stories, these tales, fabrications which take a seat, uninvited, at their table, while they eat their rationed meals, more often than not in silence.
Haya’s brother Orestes, who turns ten in 1944, goes out with his pals and collects bits of shrapnel on the streets and in the parks, and already has an enviable collection of metal fragments, the exemplars of which he trades and hoards on a shelf in the kitchen in the large apothecary jar, the same jar in which Marisa used to keep her flour, but this shrapnel has nothing to do with what is real, these are just children’s games, reason the members of the household.
In February 1944 Haya goes to see Mrs Donati, who sells “exclusive” caps and hats, cappelli di lusso, at Grosso Valtz & Co., her fashion salon at Via Garibaldi 5, because Haya would like to replace her black knitted cap with a little blue hat, or maybe even a red one. There she runs into two ladies who are whispering while she tries on the hats in front of a mirror, and she overhears what they are saying, she can’t help it. The older woman says that Rina Luzzatto, a teacher, has been forced, meaning prematurely, into retirement, which immediately reminds Haya of her school in Naples, but heavens, after all the times are grim, and she hears how maestra Luzzatto is in un stato deplorevolissimo, because nearly all the Jews of Gorizia, or so says maestra Luzzatto, including her brother and some others from nearby towns, are arrested at first, because there are suspicions they are in league with the partisans, and then, on that terrible night of 23 November, 1943, they are thrown into cattle wagons headed for Auschwitz.
In February 1944 Haya has no idea about the terrible night of 23 November, 1943, because at that point she was not in Gorizia. Afterwards, while the war goes on, Gorizia shrinks, because of nights like that, turns into a tiny ball wrapped in a membrane of silence, and then oblivion settles over it like sodden snow.
But Haya remembers 18 March, 1944.
What does she remember?
It is a Saturday. The snow is melting. Spring is on its way. She goes to the Ospedale Civile for a check-up with Dr Boschetti, who says, Everything is fine. Come back in a month. Airplanes buzz over Gorizia at about eleven o’clock. At 11.30 the bombs begin to fall. Haya huddles under the counter in her tobacco shop.
At dinner Florian says, At least one hundred and fifty people were killed.
Orestes says, Enzo blew up into thin air.
Ada asks, Enzo who?
Enzo, my eight-year-old pal, says Orestes.
Enzo Vida. The son of that Gigette, daughter of Luigi Spanghero, Letizia says.
He is in the partisans, Florian says.
Then Orestes shouts, Today I collected a whole pile of nifty shrapnel!
Haya says nothing.
This is the day.
Yes, Gorizia lives a parallel life, parallel lives, fractured, schizoid, from the inside.
In 1991 Haya finds a book, Un Altr
o Mare by Claudio Magris, in her postbox, sent to her by Roberto Piazza, a former student of hers. Roberto Piazza writes that he wouldn’t be surprised if she, Professor Tedeschi, has no memory of him, because he was an average student, in fact a poor mathematician, but that doesn’t worry him at all. He, on the other hand, remembers his teacher, whom he hasn’t thought of for years, probably because he was busy with other things that had nothing to do with mathematics. All the same, Roberto Piazza says, when he read the book he is sending her, his former maths teacher Haya Tedeschi, when he read the slender but powerful volume he is giving her, his former teacher, as a gift, through the mail, like this, it hit him that in all the five years she taught them (from 1971 to 1976, right?), she, their teacher Haya Tedeschi, never once spoke of the war, or of the people who disappeared in town during the war, World War Two, you know? writes Roberto Piazza. Also, he writes, he is surprised that she, their maths teacher, never spoke to them, her students, the class of 1971–76, of Renato Caccioppoli, the famous mathematician, especially since word got around school that she, Haya Tedeschi, attended the gymnasium in Naples at roughly the same time Caccioppoli was living there, in Naples, and that he was an anti-fascist, isn’t that so? And the fascists arrested him and he had to hide out in an insane asylum, writes Roberto Piazza, but since she, their teacher was just an ordinary schoolgirl at the time, who maybe decided to become a mathematician later, you know, because of awkward things going on in her life, perhaps, you know, maybe it isn’t so strange that she doesn’t seem to have known anything about Professor Caccioppoli. He, writes Roberto Piazza, lives in Rome now where he works in graphics, in a manner of speaking—he is a graphic designer, and he is now working on the layout of a book about Gorizia’s famous people, and so he came across names which none of his teachers at the Dante Alighieri Gymnasium had ever mentioned during his five years there from 1971 to 1976, you know, while he, Roberto Piazza, was going to the Gymnasium more or less every day, and, writes Roberto Piazza, he finds this very surprising. For instance, writes Roberto Piazza, only when he read the book he is sending her, her, his maths teacher, only when he read A Different Sea, Un Altro Mare, did he understand that there are threads interwoven in Gorizia, the beginnings of which are impossible to divine, threads that can no longer be disentangled, in whose snarl lies an entire cocooned history.