THE MEANING OF THIS RESEARCH
by Italo Tibaldi
This list, begun as far back as 1955, and still to this day incomplete, is the temporary result of the attentive consultation of all of the retraceable sources, both Italian and foreign, which refer to Nazi extermination and elimination camps, as well as to the Italian deportation in the Lagers in the years 1943-1944-1945.
After more than half a century after that event, it aspires to have the function of a documented testimony of individuals; comprised of each of the registry elements that in one’s lifetime served to give a person an identity, and the number, supplied to this same person as a deportee, serving to identify and earmark him in the Lager, and, whenever possible, with annotations that allow us to reconstruct each personal journey, arriving therefore at a collective testimony of the deportations and transfers, with their political and racial motivations, often times with both of these motivations simultaneously. It is consequently a summation of testimonies, both direct and indirect, simple and concrete. As a “reality” reading it is quantitatively and qualitatively complex, yet it has the power to stimulate ulterior reflection.
It is an essential contribution, and therefore, a necessary one, in the construction of that mosaic which will become the “History of the Deportation” and which has as its finality, further critical investigation and the development of new tangents for study and elaboration.
I should here propose in its integral version the introduction and the preface which Daniele Jalla, curator of the publication, wrote for “Compagni di Viaggio” (Travelling Companions) containing the first research of the survivors of the concentration camps from 123 mass transfers: it is a “work in progress”, a research still underway that invites whoever was a protagonist to participate, with any suggestions, corrections or integration of documentation that they might make; in this way, the research takes on the flavor of mutual commitment.Does it make sense to do work with a theme as specialized as the transferring of deportees to the concentration camps, a theme which can’t be clustered together with many others, be it for the contents, or be it for the inherent messages?
It is inevitable to ask oneself questions of this nature, also because we find ourselves in the presence of circumstances that continually push us into affronting the theme of continuity between the past and the present, and which force us to constantly reflect upon the reasons for that which was “that certain” past of our own. We note a sort of glossing over and dimming of our experience, and this translates itself consequently in the loosening of a generalized civil consciousness of precisely what Nazism was.
Regarding the Italian deportation, there doesn’t yet exist an aggregated historical study; but the historical coordinates, the absence of a systematic research to create a rigorously documented reconstruction, having the characteristic of being undeniably genuine, has developed in ANED the will to realize this lengthy research. It will serve also as a way to put forth single experiences, fused together in what was one of the greatest of collective tragedies. Many, those driven by the need to pass on the legacy of all those who have died with noble simplicity, have traced for us a picture of an experience that can’t limit itself to the vicissitudes of a single individual or group, but is in the midst of a context much more grand, that of human values.
This research aims to give testimony to the companions who fought against Nazism and Fascism: perhaps this constitutes a great, yet painful occasion. It’s not intended to be an “obsession of the memory” but rather, the urgent pressure to satisfy a moral need: to compile and to pass on these lists, which are for the greater part, death notices, yet it is also the result of curiosity about death, touched by the piety that makes these deaths ever more inadmissible in a humanity that is sustained by the faith in Freedom.
And so, those that have appeared in “Compagni di Viaggio” as timid excursions, have in these past several years assumed a declaration of intent on a collective level, resulting in the continuation of the excavation underway regarding the deportation of the Italians during the years 43-44-45, under the skies of the Third Reich. We have thus discovered more than 40 thousand numbers: 40 thousand personal experiences of the world of concentration camps, that were certain to have taken place in the winterlike darkness of the Lagers.
It is complex research work, work that will not ever be extinguished, and it is made even more difficult by the scarcity of oral sources – at present the survivors count only 1,500. Each one of us carries our own past inside of us, fragments of truth that we hope serve to encourage a renewed reflection about our history and culture, having at this point concretely transferred our own stories and given memory a future, renewing that “globalization” of solidarity that we knew in the Camps in those far away years of 43-44-45.
It must be noted, in a general sense, that the study of female deportation and of the many political deportees sent to the extermination camps, used in forced labor in the armaments industry of the Third Reich and distributed in the Subkommandos, persons who represent the major part of Italian deportation, has never gone beyond limited specialized research. Their destinies have never been particularly recounted. These 40,000 Italian deportees remain in the background of historical-scientific interest, while the sources of the forced labor have been destroyed or are dispersed. The testimonies of the “witnesses of the period” still living, yet ever more difficult to gather and that must resist to the historical methods of “oral history”, merit a timely insertion.
Of course, it was difficult to explain the voracity for profit that the SS had, but today we know what was behind this insatiability, we know the ends, the values of that coercive production of slaves, pale skeletons who were crowded with such venom in fetid, dingy barracks. It is less easy to comprehend that ominous will to dehumanize us and to create slaves out of us. The numbers that they gave us in place of our names flow endlessly and every Lager is the branch of a gigantic river. A long list of numbers that keep seizing us, but this is what they wanted to make of us. With indefinite suspense, we have returned to the conquest of our identity: a human identity.
For a long time I have imagined this “list” without a face, and yet with too many faces. I couldn’t have imagined, after the initial silence, such a strong number of those present, so different, so imposing. In anguish for the hidden aspects, those which at every occasion suggested to me, “Stop!”, I have represented these “extracts” for the knowledge of the future generations. Sometimes, cupping my hand, I gathered nothing, no news; but then the “chip” under the skin of the hand had already gathered everything, and the results are dissolved inside the publication of these lists.
Naturally, these long lists have a dramatic compactness, behind the metamorphosis of the deported individual, made into a number, there’s a terrible power, the impossible attempt to “remove” that cruel vision and set it free from every torment. But that wasn’t the way it was. And now, fifty five years have gone by.
