When the Italian communists welcomed the Istrian, Julian and Dalmatian exiles with spitting and stones 

by Cristina Di Giorgi – 18/02/2021
Source: The Saboteur

Bologna, February 18, 1947. The clock strikes 12 and the loudspeaker announces the entrance into the station of a train full of refugees from Istria, Julian Alps, and Dalmatia. Fleeing the terror caused by the spread of violence in their lands by Marshal Tito's communist partisans, they have undertaken a long journey of hope toward what they rightfully consider their homeland.

Most of them are women and old people, but there are also many children.

Having left Pola on February 16, in Ancona they were met with hostility from local communist militants, who had to be chased away by the army. Put back on a (freight) train, the exiles, tired, hungry and frightened, were forced to leave in a hurry. And they arrived in Bologna, which in this particular episode proved to be full of ideological hatred, as fierce as it was unmotivated.

Even before the train carrying refugees from Istria, Julian and Dalmatia arrived at the station, the local communists had threatened to block the entire railway station (at the time the most important in the country) if it stopped. Their hostility even went so far as to prevent the Pontifical Aid Society and the Red Cross from giving the exiles the hot meals they had prepared for them. Some young people waved red flags with the hammer and sickle and threw spit, stones and tomatoes at the carriages. Others, devoid of even the slightest shred of humanity, poured the milk that had been brought to distribute to the little ones onto the tracks.

Only upon their arrival in Parma were the exiles finally assisted. Then they left for La Spezia, which was their final destination.

On the first platform of Bologna station, the site of this dark chapter in Italian history—remembered, not coincidentally and not unfairly, as "the train of shame" (certainly not of the exiles)—a plaque was placed in 2007 with a controversial inscription, which, to be honest, isn't entirely true. Leaving aside the thinly veiled justification that the exiles were " forced to pay, as innocent victims, the burden and consequences of the war of aggression waged by fascism " (which isn't exactly the case. And anyone who has studied the history of Italy's eastern border knows this well), the attitude of the people of Bologna upon the train's arrival is described as one of " initial misunderstanding ." And it's hard to see how the welcome with spitting and stones could be considered such. And this is especially true if one takes into account the fact that the Italian communists, well before February 1947, had clearly and unambiguously expressed their thoughts about those who voluntarily left Istria, Fiume, and Dalmatia.

Here, in fact, is what we read in L'Unità on November 30, 1946: " We will never be able to consider as entitled to asylum those who poured into our great cities not under the pressure of the advancing enemy, but fearful of the breath of freedom that preceded or coincided with the advance of the liberating armies. The leaders, the black brigands, the profiteers who found refuge in the cities and there squander the stolen wealth and provide recruits for common crime, truly do not deserve our solidarity nor do they have the right to steal our bread and space, which are already so scarce ." This is clearly " an extremely emblematic line of the instrumental and mendacious political attitude of the left at the time – we read in an article published in Il Giornale d'Italia – and partly also of that of today, according to which the exiles were fascists and collaborators expelled from the paradise of socialist workers ", as Tito's Yugoslavia was considered.

In the face of so much ignorance and so much resentment, the only possible response is to tell the truth. As we have done in this piece (and as proof of what happened there are stories and testimonies of those who were present that day). The truth. Because the Exiles, in addition to the apologies (which never arrived) for how they were welcomed, deserve that we make the most of our efforts in Remembrance. Not only on February 10 (when the anniversary is celebrated in honor of the martyrs of the foibe and the exodus) but always.