by Daša Drndic
By car along State Highway 202 (exit Valmaura, Stadium, Cemetery) or, as Haya goes in 1976, taking bus Number 8, 10, 19, 20, 21 or 23 from Trieste, one arrives at the Ratto della Pileria 43. Every day (except 1 January and 25 December) between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. (admission free) one can step into the well-washed, indescribably quiet past; the barking of dogs does not reverberate; the oven has been demolished; there are no soldiers’ boots marching; the cells are empty: there are no groans, no ash; in the late evening hours no music swells; there is no licentious women’s laughter; no-one is dancing; it’s only shadows that flicker. History is served on a platter in a tidy fashion, sifted, polished, compressed into the grains that roll around noiselessly on the stone floors of San Sabba.
So, in 1976, when the trial begins to prosecute those suspected of committing crimes at San Sabba. Haya says, It is time, yes, and with a camera around her neck, in October 1976, she goes for a
Visit to the rice mill of San Sabba
In 1943 the Nazis move into a plant for husking rice, which at that point was empty, built in 1913 on the outskirts of Trieste, in the town of San Sabba. Inside the walls of the former factory compound stands a complex of buildings, a little city, architecturally almost entirely preserved. So with minor adaptations the Germans change the buildings into a prison, a camp, a “transit camp” from which people travel a long way by train to Auschwitz and Dachau, then briefly, with speed and efficiency, from their cells to the crematorium ovens, right there, not ten metres away. In San Sabba about a hundred and fifty people, Italians, Slovenes, Croats, Jews, Roma, partisans, children, homosexuals, age makes no difference (the Nazis don’t split hairs, everything and everyone gets a pass when the S.S. police and S.S. troops lay their hands on them), about a hundred and fifty people disappear daily in the spanking-new oven, the work of the skilled and proud mason Erwin Lambert, the designer of crematoria. The oven at San Sabba is still there on Saturday, 28 April, 1945, but on Sunday, 29 April, 1945, the Nazis blow up the chimney, demolish the crematorium building and remove all traces that can be hastily removed. On Monday, 30 April the detachments vanish—heading for Carinthia. Between three and five thousand souls are killed, following rules and regulations, in a tidy fashion; the job is done. Perhaps it could have been done better. Perhaps there could have been more incinerations, but, heavens, war is unpredictable. The liberators find three paper sacks for cement under the rubble of San Sabba, and in them human bones and ash which the fugitives have not had time to transport to the San Sabba docks, they are in such a hurry to flee. The little collective grave of the nameless shoved into these paper sacks is therefore saved, because the pelting rain of April 1945, perhaps intending to rinse clean the earth before the advancing summer, to set it to rights for a new age, decides suddenly to stop, as if it has had a change of heart. So, thanks to the heavens, the ashes of the last to be incinerated at the San Sabba rice mill are not turned into grey, squeaky mud from which children would make patty cakes had they passed through there, but instead become a burden few know what to do with, even many years later, some fifty years down the road.
I used to work at the rice mill. During the war I’d stop by the landing stage, partly out of nostalgia, partly to pick up an odd job. The Germans brought sacks of human ashes there. I saw. The sacks were bursting, the ash was leaking out. Charred, halfburned human bones floated on the sea. I saw them. I am Luigi Jerman from Kopar. I live in Trieste.
The Allies manage to catch the occasional fugitive; most elude their grasp. The Allies do, however, find trunks and jute sacks full of stolen goods, which the fugitives have not had a chance to cart off with them, and which they had spent two years eagerly collecting, because the Nazis are racing off to Carinthia. The Allies then send the stolen goods to Rome, where the sacks and trunks languish for fifty years in the cellars of the Ministry of the Treasury and Finance, waiting for someone to discover them again. Oh, there are all sorts of things in these sacks and trunks: watches, spectacles, combs, jewellery—rings, brooches, chains; there are powder compacts, pipes, beautiful pipes; there is money and bonds, furniture, bank books, insurance policies, silver; there are paintings, carpets, clothing, a lot of clothing, bedding, bicycles, typewriters, cameras; there are large wheels of Parmesan cheese, toothbrushes, tableware, fine porcelain—all of it nothing more than patches, debris, shreds of lives no longer living, of lives of those deported to Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, Ravensbrück and San Sabba. There are documents, photographs, camp uniforms, passes; there are drawings, maps and charts with locations where the inmates were buried before the oven started working at San Sabba. Something of this is preserved today at the Ljubljana historical archive. Some of it is at the San Sabba museum along with graphics donated by Zoran Mušić, originally from Gorizia, a Dachau prisoner, a student of Babić’s in Zagreb, who died a natural death, thank God, in Venice in 2005.
Rainer is a big honcho in the Adriatisches Küstenland—THE honcho. He controls all the regional heads and mayors, and determines the rules of behaviour for the collaboration armies, Italian, Slovenian and Croatian, and they obey him, these armies, humbly. Entire fascist military units enter into service in the S.S. forces, various police squads, the Special Inspectorate of Public Security under the command of Giuseppe Gueli, who lives well in lively Trieste, in a large villa on Via Bellosguardo and helps Rainer nab Jews and partisans. Rainer visits San Sabba often. Rainer loves going to San Sabba. A visit to San Sabba is like a little holiday for Rainer, a way to relax. Rainer’s buddies live at San Sabba, his companions from the camps, closed by then, in which they used to party after their hard labours. The central, six-storey building at San Sabba is a barrack; on the upper floors are the quarters of the German, Austrian, Ukrainian and Italian S.S. men, all of them small fry, and Rainer does not linger there. The kitchens and mess halls, clean and aired, are on the lower floors; the staff smile and Rainer is pleased. Outside, a small building is visible from the road, housing the sentries who guard everything and everybody, especially Commander Josef Oberhauser, whose flat is on the ground floor. Friedrich Wirth most often escorts Rainer on the rounds. After Wirth is killed by the partisans in May 1944, Rainer is accompanied by August Dietrich Allers.
The camp has a large yard. To the right of the entrance stood a building, no longer there. It housed the offices and flats of the officers and the Ukrainian women. Today there is a green lawn with trees and flowers. From the building that is gone there runs an underground corridor to the death cell. From the death cell captives exit quickly; to torture, then shooting, then the oven.
A bus arrived one Sunday crammed with people from, I think, Trieste. They were pushed quickly into that cellar there with the bricked-up window, the death cell; that same night all of them were shot. I believe they were hostages the Germans had rounded up in Trieste raids; there was an underground in Trieste. From my cell I witnessed an old man being savagely beaten, who, whilst sweeping up the courtyard had failed to put the rubbish in the exact place he had been ordered to by the S.S. officer. During a bombardment two prisoners managed to escape from their cells, while the Germans took refuge in the bunkers. By way of revenge they shot all the companions of the two prisoners. It was June 1944 when I realized what was happening. They were killing victims in the garage that one entered through a secret door in the kitchen, which led to the crematorium. One evening we saw a lorry arrive loaded with soldiers. We saw only their boots; their bodies were covered with blankets. When the lorry entered the garage they made us carry in all the wood we had previously sawn up. From the courtyard at night we could hear people coming and going, people screaming, crying and begging for mercy, uttering heart-wrenching pleas. The Germans turned up the volume on the music from their entertainment hall. Then the lorries turned on their motors and this incited the dogs to bark and growl, and we knew that the Nazis were killing people, we just couldn’t tell how. Only when we found the clothing of the people they’d killed and it wasn’t at all bloody, hardly a single dr
op of blood, did we realize. It was mostly the Ukrainians who did the killing, because by early in the afternoon they were already drinking, so by evening they’d be in good shape for killing. And the Germans took part in these orgies. One night they pulled five men out of our cell who never came back. I am Giovanni Haimi Wachsberger from Rijeka.
To the left of the entrance was a building which still exists. On the ground floor were workshops for tailoring and cobbling in which the prisoners must have done sewing; they were up to something there, repairing the officers’ shoes, just to keep busy, passing the time. The prisoners did not sew much nor did they fix shoes for long, because they hadn’t the time; they were soon replaced. In the building where the sewing was done and the shoes repaired were the halls for the S.S. officers and soldiers. In those halls the S.S. officers and soldiers drank a little, played a few rounds of cards; listened to the radio. There were seventeen small prison cells in that building, with six prisoners in each. In those little cells partisans, Jews and political prisoners had no time to relax. They stayed in the little cells for a few days, several weeks at most, and then they left, they were gone.
I was in cell Number 8, alone in the dark with the rats. There was only a tiny vent in the ceiling where air and light could filter in. Our food was passed through a little window in the cell door, which was otherwise always shut. During the afternoon and evening you could almost always hear people crying out in Slovenian, Italian and Croatian, then a truck would come into the yard and the driver would leave the motor to rumble to cover the wrenching screams. It was then we knew our companions had been dragged off to their deaths in the crematorium. When the sirocco blew, smoke with an unbearable stench seeped into our cells, the smell of burned human flesh. It made all of us vomit. I am Ante Peloza from Velih Muna.
The outlines of the demolished crematorium
The prison building from which camp inmates were taken who were targeted for transfer to Dachau, Auschwitz and Mauthausen
We were afraid of spies. We didn’t ask questions, we didn’t talk. A certain Kabiglio, a Jewish shopkeeper who was from Mostar, said, Look, that is an oven. They are burning people. Then I looked and I saw people disappearing beyond the door. Everything was happening at around ten or eleven at night. I heard the footsteps of the prisoners dragging on the stone paving, I heard women’s sandals, they made the loudest noise. The S.S. would turn on the engines of their lorries or the music way up, as if they were partying. Sometimes I heard cries for help. Sometimes I didn’t. I began to scribble down notes on the goings. There were no comings. One night I counted the footsteps of fifty-six people who went from the courtyard to the entrance of the crematorium; another night, seventy-three. Then I stopped counting, I stopped keeping track. My fourteen-year-old daughter was with me in the cell. They were killing children. I heard children calling out Mamma! Mamma! I am from Trieste. My name is Majda Rupena.
I am Albina Škabar from near Trieste. I was stripped bare, strung up to a beam by my plaits and beaten until I passed out. Then I was shoved into cell Number 7. At night I remember hearing terrible screams, horrible screams, coming mainly from the first few cells. Those people were taken away first. I can remember a woman who screamed, I am from Grabovizza! I am from Grabovizza! and she screamed, The S.S. killed my baby in its cradle! There was also one Olga Fabian from Slovenia there. I remember a 67-year-old woman from Trieste, from Via Milano. She kept saying, I am innocent! I am innocent! The smell of burned hair was the worst. After the war, I went back once to the rice mill and immediately fainted.
The S.S. officers dragged in all sorts of stolen goods along with the prisoners. Through a hole in the wall I saw soldiers pulling people across the yard, clutching them by the shoulders, and the people weren’t moving. One day a group of Jews interned on the island of Rab arrived. Most of them were from Zagreb. I remember a beautiful girl, they told me she was Greek. The whole group was transported to a German concentration camp, to Auschwitz, that is what they told me. Before they loaded them onto the train, they took everything from them, all their money and jewellery; we watched through a crack in the door. They knew where they were being taken. They told us, Lucky you who are staying here. They knew they would never come back.
Branka Maričić from Rijeka
I saw a tall, heavy S.S. officer, he told me, holding a little boy by the hand, barely more than an infant, he said, and leading him to the prison. The boy had black, curly hair and waddled. He was so small, he said, that he could barely walk. Then, suddenly, the infant, barely more than a infant, he said, the infant suddenly tripped and fell and the S.S. officer began kicking him furiously and he kicked the little boy, he kicked him and kicked him, and all the while he shouted and cursed and kicked him, he told me, until the little boy’s skull cracked open, then he stopped, he said. My name is Carlo Schiffer. I am testifying on behalf of my friend.
I am from Rijeka. My name is Dara Virag. I spent a year at the rice mill. They tortured me terribly. Till this very day I shiver at every sound. The sound of boots on the paving still makes me start and think, They’re coming!
In 1976, before and during the trial of those suspected of committing the crimes at San Sabba, lists of the accused are printed, their biographies are published, or rather summaries of their lives, because many of the people who were milling around the Adriatisches Küstenland between 1943 and 1945 have fat criminal dossiers, interesting and dynamic. Some of them have already been tried in Germany and are doing time for the monstrosities they committed in mental hospitals which were turned into euthanasia centres throughout the Reich, or at the camps of Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and beyond, the list is long, there were many concentration camps; some are dead (of old age, illness, execution, suicide), some have been released (most of the accused are released), some escape, some change their identity and vanish without a trace, most of them live here, there, everywhere, until today, until tomorrow. Christian Wirth, Gottfried Schwarz, Franz Reichleitner, Karl Gringers, Alfred Löffler, Karl Pötzinger, Kurt Richter, a crowd of companions, pals, old buddies, rests there in the German war cemetery on the slopes of Monte Baldo in picturesque Costermano, between the eastern shore of Lake Garda and the tourist town of Verona. Surrounded by vineyards and olive groves, the German war cemetery in Costermano lies in the shade of old cypress trees and is described as an attractive site by tourist brochures. There are more than eight hundred German war cemeteries the world over, in which tens of thousands are buried. Costermano is host to 21,972 German graves. So when the trial begins in April 1976 in Trieste against those suspected of being responsible for the crimes committed at the San Sabba rice mill during the German occupation of Italy, the bench for the accused is empty—the bench for the accused is empty—and the trial ends before it starts.
Haya deciphers her past. She builds a file of her past. From a newspaper she cuts out an incomplete list of S.S. men, incomplete because there are more than a hundred of them with some sort of rank and terrible power from 1943 to 1945, when they are dispatched to the Adriatisches Küstenland; more than a hundred of them saunter around the unrealized dreamland of the fictitious Adriatisches Küstenland, yet the list published in the papers gives barely fifty names. Where are the ordinary soldiers? Where are the German police officers? Where are the Ukrainians? Where are the Cossacks? Where are the women and the members of their families who spend their summers and winters on the shore and in the mountains, from 1943 to 1945? Where are the Italians in the service of the Reich? Where are the civilians, the silent observers, the invisible participants in the war? And Here, too, am I, Haya says. This list should be endless. This list is endless, she says.
In the newspaper cutting Haya finds names of people she met, at whose table she ate, with whom she shook hands (not often, thank God, she adds), and she searches, and researches, and arranges, and stops sleeping, staring instead into the yawning jaws of the Hydra, waiting for the poisonous fumes to spew forth, and Hercules is nowhere to be found. Oh, this eternal repetition
, she says, can it be cut short?
Shortcuts, Saba tells Haya’s mother Ada at the Gorizia psychiatric clinic, shortcuts are the shortest way to get from one place to the next. But shortcuts are often impassable, impassable . . . Saba says.
And Ada, until her death repeats—Behind every name there is a story.
An incomplete list of the former members of Aktion T4 1943 transferred to Trieste and the surrounding areas (O.Z.A.K.)
Gottfried Schwarz, also known as Friedl, S.S.-Hauptscharführer (head squad leader), promoted after Aktion Reinhard to S.S.- Untersturmführer (second lieutenant). Date of birth unknown. Works in mental hospitals—euthanasia centres, at the Grafeneck Castle, in Bernburg and Hadamar as “cremator”, as deputy camp commander at Belzec, as commander of Sobibor. Dispatched to Einsatz R in Trieste in 1943. Killed in Istria. Buried at the German war cemetery in Costermano (grave No. 666).
Gottlieb Hering, born on 2 June, 1887, in Warmbronn, Württemberg, dies in hospital on 9 October, 1945, in unexplained circumstances. Serves for twenty years with Christian Wirth in Stuttgart criminal police, then on Aktion Tiergarten 4. Succeeds Wirth in 1942 as commander of Belzec camp. Like Wirth before him, at Belzec Hering gives himself free rein, indulging a variety of eccentricities, such as shooting at internees while galloping on horseback. About 601,500 people die and are killed at Belzec, most of them Jews. As far as anyone knows, only Rudolf Reder and Chaim Herszman survive. Like Wirth, Hering takes part after 1940 in the Nazi euthanasia programme. While Wirth supervises all six euthanasia centres in the Reich, Hering is in command “only” at Sonnenstein and Hadamer. Promoted to S.S.-Hauptsturm-führer in 1943 and made commander of the San Sabba camp, where he lives in small separate quarters with his secretary at that time, Helena Reigraf from Fellbach, whom he later marries. After Hering is admitted to hospital, Josef Oberhauser takes charge of San Sabba.