May 1, 1945: Trieste is ready to celebrate the end of a long and painful war. The day before, the Volunteers of Freedom, the men of the CLN led by Don Marzari, took control of the city, taking it away from the German troops (and the mediation of the Bishop Monsignor Santin also managed to save the port and other structures of the city).

The war is therefore over and the people of Trieste are preparing to celebrate peace, as is now being done throughout Italy and much of Europe. But the reality they discover, that morning of May 1st, is completely different. The new arrivals, the Yugoslavian communist troops of Marshal Tito, are not bearers of peace, they are oppressors as much as, if not more than, the Nazi troops who have just left and who for two very long years had governed the city.

Tito's troops immediately began hunting down the men of the CLN and, together with them, thousands and thousands of Triestini, some with political characteristics (both because they were fascists and because they were exponents of political movements, even if anti-fascist), others, many others without any apparent political reason, with a perverse mechanism of pure chance (in a certain number of cases, personal events and grudges replaced chance).

For a very long month Trieste experiences this sort of massacre. Thousands and thousands of its children, taken from their loved ones, disappear into the clutches of the so-called Popular Militia, never to return. A good part of these end up in those black karst cavities that bear the name of “foibe”. The ritual is well-defined: they are tied up in pairs, taken to the edge of the chasm and then one of the two is shot in the back of the head so that, falling, he also drags the other into the chasm.

A tragic and barbaric ritual (it also included the final throwing, into the foiba, of a slaughtered black dog) with which thousands and thousands of human beings were slaughtered: all at the end of the war! In the Basovizza Foiba – the Mine Well that is a bit of a symbol of all the foibe – the foibates had to be quantified with the most arid and cruel of systems: five hundred cubic meters of poor human remains.

A massacre that lasted over forty days, until that June 12, 1945 when the Allied troops forced the Slavic-Communist troops to leave the city. A tragedy that affected many, many families in Trieste and that caused a real psychological trauma throughout the city. For years, people lived in a sort of nightmare, in which one question obsessively insisted: what if the Titoites return and the tragedy of the Foibe starts again?

It was only after October 26, 1954, with the return of Trieste to Italy, that this nightmare began to vanish.

The Foibe, if they were a nightmare for the people of Trieste, they also represented a refined and effective instrument of terror for the Istrians. Because the dramatic story of the foibe certainly had a decisive role in creating in Istria that atmosphere of fear, of terror that convinced three hundred and fifty thousand people to leave their homes, villages, cemeteries to escape, in Italy, the liberticidal and murderous regime of Yugoslavian communism. Because everyone was well aware that, to stay, the fact of not being a communist was enough to risk ending up like the foibe victims

Paolo Sardos Albertini 
President of the Committee for the Honours of the Infoibati