by Daša Drndic
Adapted excerpt of In the Shadow of the Reich by Niklas Frank. Reprinted by permission of Niklas Frank.
Adapted excerpt from A Different Sea by Claudio Magris. Copyright © 1995 by The Harvill Press. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.
I make grateful acknowledgment to the following websites and organizations, from which I have taken and adapted text:
www.axishistory.com, by permission of “Schmauser”
www.xoxol.org/eichmann/eichmann.html
www.deportati.it/english-risiera_survivors.html
www.nizkor.org
www.deathcamps.org
avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-27-46.asp
My source for the list of transports and for some trial texts was www.holocaustresearchproject.org, and they are reprinted with permission of the Holocaust Research Project. I have also made extensive use of the Harvard Law School Library’s Nuremberg Trials Project and the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
D. D.
About the Author
DAŠA DRNDIĆ is a distinguished Croatian novelist, playwright, and literary critic, born in Zagreb in 1946. She spent some years teaching in Canada and gained an MA in theatre and communications as part of the Fulbright Program, and a PhD on protofeminism. She is now an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Rijeka.
About the Translator
ELLEN ELIAS-BURSAĆ is the leading translator of Croatian into English and a South Slavic scholar who has taught at Harvard. Her translation of David Albahari’s novel Gotz and Meyer was awarded the National Translation Award by the American Literary Translator’s Association.
Footnotes
* Ugo Ojetti (1871–1946), a writer and art historian. Founder and editor of the journals Dedalo (1920–33), Pegaso (1929–33), Pan (1933–5); occasional editor of the paper Corriere della Sera and their art and literary critic of many years. He wrote short stories, novels, humourist commentary, and compiled anthologies. A traditionalist. A member of the Fascist Party since its inception. Fascism attracts a number of Italian intellectuals. Later they say they saw the light and left the Party. Luigi Pirandello joins in 1923, receives the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934; Curzio Malaparte joins in 1921, quits in 1931. Malaparte’s real name is Kurt Erich Suckert. In March 1925 at the Congress of Fascist Intellectuals held in Bologna, their Manifesto is signed by Luigi Barzini, Antonio Beltramelli, Francesco Coppola, Enrico Corradini, Carlo Foà, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Curzio Malaparte, Ugo Ojetti, Massimo Bontempelli, Salvatore Di Giacomo, C. E. Opo, Serbio Panunzio, Alberto Panzini, Camillo Pellizi, Ildebrando Pizzetti, Enrico Prampolini, Ardengo Soffici, Ugo Spirito, Gioacchino Volpe and others. The Italian Academy is founded in 1926. The President is Guglielmo Marconi, who from 1930 on, three years before Hitler comes into power and eight years before Mussolini’s racial laws are adopted, systematically prevents Jewish candidates from being accepted into the Italian Academy, marking their names with the capital letter “E” (Ebreo: Jew).
Among the members of the Academy are composers Pietro Mascagni, Ottorino Respighi and Umberto Giordano, scientist Enrico Fermi, writers Giovanni Papini, Antonio Beltramelli, Alfredo Panzini, Luigi Pirandello, Ugo Ojetti and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, painters Achile Funi and Giulio Aristide Sartorio, historian Gioacchino Volpe and religious historian Raffaele Pettazzoni, sculptor Adolfo Wildt, art critic Emilio Cecchi, and musician Ildebrando Pizzetti. All of them enjoy a sizeable monthly stipend. They travel first class on trains for free. People address them as “Your Excellency”.
They appear at public ceremonies in the robes of the Academy, and carry ornamental swords.
A law is passed in 1926 banning Italian women from teaching philosophy, history, Italian language and literature, and Greek and Latin in secondary schools.
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* Elsa Finzi, born in Genoa on 14 May, 1891. Arrested in the spring of 1942 with an anti-fascist group, including Ferruccio Parri. Accused of founding an anti-fascist association and of fomenting anti-fascist propaganda. After the trial, released on 24 November, 1942. Ferruccio Parri, Italian politician born in Pinerolo in 1890. Under fascism, persecuted and arrested. From 1926–33 held in internal exile. With Carlo Rosselli starts an organization which helps victims of fascism flee the country. From 1943 to 1945 a leader of the Italian partisan movement; a founder of the Giustizia e libertà partisan brigades. President of the coalition government in 1945, and until 1948 a deputy, then a senator. President of the League of Veterans of the Italian Resistance Movement. Dies in 1981 in Rome.
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* Born in Naples on 20 January, 1904; dies in Naples on 8 May, 1959.
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* Mathematician, born in Naples on 15 August, 1912; dies on 28 May, 1982.
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* Mathematician, born in Naples on 12 March, 1908; dies in Bologna, 30 May, 1989.
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* Anti-fascist. Born on 29 March, 1873, in Padua; dies on 29 December, 1941, in Rome.
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* Anti-fascist. Born in Ancona on 3 May, 1860; dies in Rome on 11 October, 1940.
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* Born in Venice on 19 January, 1879, leaves Italy in 1938, teaches at Princeton, dies in New York on 6 May, 1943.
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* Born on 16 February, 1903, in Turin. Flees in 1938 to Great Britain, and returns in 1946 to Bologna. Dies on 2 October, 1977, in Frascati.
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* Born in Rome on 20 October, 1901; dies in Chicago on 28 November, 1954.
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* Pasquale Isidoro Simonelli (1878–1960), Commendatore of the Order of the Italian Royal Crown, a Catholic, born in Naples, where he is educated and works as a bank clerk. Goes to the United States in 1897. He first gives Italian language lessons in New York, and in 1898 he gets a job as a librarian in a secondary school. With the help of a certain Joseph Francolini, Simonelli starts his banking career at the Italian Savings Bank of New York City, first as a clerk, then a secretary, and then as a member of the board. He becomes an American citizen in 1902 and joins the Republican Party. Simonelli is Enrico Caruso’s personal banker and handles all his business related to the New York Metropolitan Opera. He spends his whole life bringing Italian opera singers to New York and does much to fuel their popularity. Among these are Riccardo Stracciari, Titta Ruffo and Beniamino Gigli. In 1936 he returns to Naples, to Villa Simonelli, to his palace, where he lives until his death. He is buried there in 1960 in his family mausoleum at the Sant’ Erasmo cemetery.
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* In one moment
The roses have faded
The petals fallen
Because I could not forget the roses
We searched for them together
We found roses
That were her roses, my roses
This journey we called love
Out of our blood and tears we made roses
That shone but a moment in the morning sun
Under the sun among the briars we withered the roses
That were not our roses
Roses that were not ours, not mine, not hers.
P.S. And thus we forgot the roses.
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* Friedrich Rainer, born on 28 July, 1903, in Carinthia (St Veit an der Glan). Attends law school. As of 1930 a member of the German National Socialist Workers Party; from 1936 works in the Party administration in Austria; 1938–41 made Gauleiter, district governor and governor of the Reich in Salzburg; 1941–5 he is in Carinthia and the neighbouring parts of Styria; in 1943 he is appointed defence commissar of the Adriatic Littoral. On 8 May, 1945, hands over his administration to the representatives of the democratic parties, and the British Army extradites him to Yugoslavia. He is tried at Nuremberg. He is put to de
ath as a war criminal on 13 March, 1947, in Ljubljana.
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* Odilo Lotario Globočnik, born in 1904 in Trieste to a Slovenian father (a Habsburg cavalry lieutenant who goes on to work as a postal clerk after the war) and a Hungarian mother. In 1923 his family moves from Trieste to Klagenfurt. In Austria in 1931, Odilo Globočnik becomes a member of the Nazi Party and in 1934 he joins the S.S. He takes an active part in forming Nazi cells throughout Austria before its annexation to Germany in 1938, and in 1936 becomes head of the Party for Carinthia. Before he comes to Trieste, he is one of the key people in an operation of vast proportions in which about two and a half million Polish Jews are murdered (Aktion Reinhard). Globočnik arrives in Trieste with a large team of “professionals”, with a death squad that has already proved itself in exterminating the populations of Russia, Poland and Germany, as well as in the death camps—Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. In 1943, ninety-two members of the Einsatzkommando Reinhard are stationed in Trieste, including a large number of Ukrainian S.S.-troops, both men and women. The Einsatzgruppen or Einsatzkommandos were special squads with the task of “fighting the enemies of the Reich and aiding the troops in combat”, in other words, of occupying the territories that had been conquered, to squelch all rebellion and exterminate the non-Aryan population.
The Einsatzgruppen came under the administration of R.u.S.H.A., the Central Department for Security of the Reich (the Reichssicherheitshauptamt), which came, in turn, under the supervision of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, with the Reichsführer of the S.S. and Ministry, Heinrich Himmler, at its head. While in Lublin, in Poland, Globoĉnik lives in a luxurious villa quite lavishly. He is remembered not only for his monstrous murders of unfathomable proportions but also for his campaign to amass astonishing quantities of stolen and confiscated property from the “undesirable” population living in the occupied territories. Their property is then catalogued and listed in detail, ranging from items such as fountain pens, rings and women’s opera glasses, to apartment buildings and factories, the value of which reaches 178 million Reichsmarks. All the stolen goods on the road to Berlin pass through Lublin, and some are warehoused at Trieste harbour. In late 1943, 667 containers, each holding between five and eight cubic metres, wait in Trieste for detailed cataloguing and listing at precisely the time Globočnik is staying at Via Nizza. On 31 May, 1945, near Weisensee in Carinthia, Globočnik is arrested by the British Army. Two hours later he commits suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule.
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* I am restless like murmuring water,
Shattered like a waterfall spraying chasmward its force,
And numbers to itself droplets of pain,
That drip every day, every day.
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*Josef Oberhauser, S.S.-Oberscharführer, born in 1915 in Munich. Seventh-grade education, farm worker. Joins S.S. troops in 1935, joins the T4 programme in 1939. Works as cremator at Bernburg, later at Grafeneck, Brandenburg and Sonnenstein. In 1941 goes to Lublin, becomes Globočnik’s officer for communication and Wirth’s faithful escort during tours of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Transferred to Trieste in autumn 1943, where after Wirth’s death he is in command at the San Sabba camp. Sentenced to fifteen years in prison in Magdeburg in 1948, but amnestied in 1956. Nine years later on trial in Munich, sentenced to four and a half years in prison and released after two. For crimes committed in Belzec, where 600,000 Jews were murdered, only Josef Oberhauser is convicted. Most of the S.S. men stationed at the death camps in Aktion Reinhard were never brought to trial.
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