I could never have imagined that from the “remainers” would come forth such a strong, lyrical, absolute, beautiful testimony. To say that I was moved, reading the pages of Nelida Milani, is not saying enough. I felt the disturbance that comes from epiphanies and revelations. Nelida could not have uttered a louder, more moving, more noble cry, not even if she were nothing more than a character invented by the mind of an author, determined to pay a great tribute to the Julians who remained, victims of history.

Anna Maria Mori shares the fate of refugees 

Anna Maria Mori's tone never reaches Milani's bitterness and anger. But there is a deep unifying element between the two, given by their common origin and their identity as losers. Mori writes: "Dear, angry, indomitable, beautiful, desperate, never resigned Nelida: I hope, I want my passion and my anger to be similar to yours. I want it and I hope so because our roots are the same: daughters of the same land, of the same wind, of the same water [...]. Daughters of the same, frightening war and of the same horrendous and unjust post-war period. Because your memories and mine – which we have in common with two great armies of humanity differently and equally defeated and desperate, the humanity to which you belong which is defined as the 'remainers', and mine as the 'gone ones' [...] – if they are not exactly identical, are however very similar: memories that run parallel, and often, up to today, incomprehensible and incomprehensible to each other [...].” P. 77

Anna Maria Mori appears more resigned than Nelida Milani to the irreversibility of the past: “But attachment to what is no longer there is bad. Attachment to what cannot be is bad. The temptation to take refuge in a defunct order is bad. What has been, what once was, can never return.” (p. 213)

Mourning the loss of one's native land 

My personal experience as an Istrian refugee, who took refuge in Italy with his parents as a young child, should lead me to identify with Mori's testimony, rather than with that of Milani, who remained in Pola. Instead, this is not the case. Nelida Milani's voice seemed very similar to that of my parents - all due proportions made for the fate of refugees, which they knew. My father and mother always carried in their souls the mourning for the loss of their native land, where they never wanted to return, not even for a fleeting visit. Their attitude - categorical, irreducible - and the tragic sense of things that they always had towards everything that referred to the lost Adriatic lands seem to me very similar to Milani's feelings. Above all, my father never recovered from the trauma of the collapse of his world, and the unheard-of acts of murderous ferocity that struck so many of his friends, at the hands of Tito's "liberators". This painful burden of memories and grief has been passed on to me by them. It is therefore good to admit it right away: I cannot review a book like this without the pain I carry inside me overflowing through my entire being, to the point of moistening my mouth with bile. Because it is not easy to open the enormous coffin of the victims, of those thrown into sinkholes, of those uprooted forever, without suffering deeply again.

It is painful to measure, to compare one's own existential pain - caused by that immense tragedy, which was accompanied by the silence and indifference of public opinion - with that of two other beings with different existential itineraries, but also victims of the defeat of the homeland and the loss of the native land. Not a physical loss for those who remained in those lands, but a loss nonetheless, as Nelida Milani shows us in this book.

What do you want, we refugees from Istria, Fiume and Dalmatia, victims of a historical event unknown to most, and victims of our own meekness, do not have the comfort of knowing that others know our history. If it is impossible to spend 24 hours in the United States or Canada without coming across at least ten times a news item that recalls the Holocaust, for us it is almost impossible to find an interlocutor even a little attentive and sensitive to our story as Julian-Dalmatian refugees.

The dominant Italian anti-patriotism explains in large part this indifference. And, outside Italy, the grotesque Manichaeism established by the victors does not confer any other patents than that of executioners, or allies of the executioners, to the vanquished camp. From this it follows that Tito, for years, was seen as a legendary figure of a heroic anti-Nazi fighter.

The Italian Identity: A Painful Identity 

I was dreading reading this book. I dreaded it as one fears as a child those dark places that hide tragic secrets, real or imagined. I had to wait for the right moment. I wanted to feel fit, optimistic, light. I read it in the morning, because in the morning one is more rested. But the book grabbed me with the force of tragedies in which we know that the actor's face, behind the mask, is our own face. Painful effect, yes, but also cathartic...

Deep admiration for the two authors. A feeling almost of love for Nelida Milani, the “remaining”, with the harrowing voice, so alone in her journey of departure in a land that has become foreign, hostile, and in a city that is now a ghost town, whose profound essence will survive only in the hearts of the many departed and in some of those who remained like her.

Of the Julian-Dalmatians, the “real” ones are those who left. Those who “remained” were Slavs, by race, by culture, or at that time Italians with Slavic sympathies, compromised with communism, perhaps accomplices of the infoibators… There could perhaps have been some rare, very rare exceptions. This has been, for years, the judgment among the refugees, expressed on the “remained”. This last category is always indistinct, distant: a world apart, quite indecipherable. They were and are like certain acquired relatives, with other blood in their veins, whom we have not seen for years, because of certain family histories.

But I am wrong to speak of “race” and “blood”, since in our speech, in our definition of the group, race and identity, blood counts for little. What counts are feelings. After all, our people, like other border peoples, are the result of different ethnic contributions. “He is of Italian feelings”, so many times in my family it was established that a certain person, originally from our lands, and who could be confused with the Slavs, was after all one like us: of Italian feelings.

The heart doesn't lie. Names do. Names change: they become Slavicized, Italianized... They adapt. But it is the choice made by the heart, the culture, the feelings that establish a certain and unshakable identity.

If one were to judge by their names, then all Italians with those sonorous names that almost always end in a vowel would have “Italian feelings”. But we know that this is not the case. We know it because we have learned to know them, and, let’s face it, because we have also learned to despise them; blandly, however, without real malice, accepting them for what they are: basically turncoats, opportunists, at least as far as their national conscience, almost non-existent, their very weak sense of homeland (I am certainly not referring here to emigrants, who belong to a completely different species); a sense of homeland that is abstract, distant, theoretical, uncertain for them, but not for us, whose identity is given by a choice of national destiny, a choice of the heart, which once made is never abandoned.

Faithfulness to origins in a tormented land 

Why this loyalty to the origins? Why do we want to continue to be what we were? Nelida Milani: “We have firmly wanted nothing else, if not to live in accordance with our nature, giving expression to our habits, to our traditions, speaking the language of our ancestors… Can one repent of one’s own blood? Of one’s own nature? Of every fragment or stump that possesses a hope of completeness, an aura of potential restoration that often takes on the contours of a sound, of a footprint, of an interrupted trace?” (p. 12)

How much truth there is in this talk of fragments and stumps… The desire for “completeness” – faithfulness to the origins – has cost a high price, both for the refugees and for this small group of those who remained, of whom we knew so little and to whom Milani finally gives voice: a strong, painful, tragic voice. Milani: “We who, in order to preserve ourselves, had to fossilize, remain stuck on the day of the laceration, be what we were.” (p. 78)

Istria is a tragic land, with ancient wounds, and new wounds like the one caused by the recent partition of Istria between Slovenia and Croatia. Milani: “The wound has reopened in the very body of the land. It is a cut in the hill behind Castelvenere, or rather, two cuts between Slovenia and Croatia, on the Dragonja river and in Sicciole. A long and useless border kneaded with new colonial smells, which runs between the thyme bushes and the thorns of grattaculo, beyond which you can see another countryside, the same one: the same network of pines, the sky that does not want to pretend to be another sky.” (p. 12)

If it may be surprising, at first, to discover in a “leftover” such a strong Italian passion, it soon turns out that the points of contact between us and her – between certain “gone” and certain “leftover” – go beyond a generic communion of feelings. The points of contact concern other, more precise, more complex aspects of the soul, starting from the sense of loneliness and distrust towards others. In fact, even when others appear similar to us, we tell ourselves that they cannot be like us.

Nelida Milani's experience is very particular, so her distrust is even stronger. She writes: "The second reason [for the initial refusal to collaborate on the book] is a sense of estrangement from the 'brothers of Italy', never fully recognizing oneself in any of you." (p. 11) Addressing Anna Maria Mori, she tries to explain: "You don't even suspect the reality. What do the exiles know about our 'internal exile', guaranteed only by the space of our homes? They can't imagine how much it cost us, in terms of bitterness to endure, pride to save, conflicts to overcome, and tensions, contradictions, determination, suffering. And courage. A strange type of courage, or perhaps a subspecies of it." (p. 11)

Yes, perhaps we cannot fully understand the bitterness, the humiliations suffered by those who remained in those lands and wanted to remain faithful to the Italian identity. To tell the truth, we did not suspect that among those who remained there were people of a similar mettle, of such moral strength. And yet in Pisino, my hometown, where I once visited a family of those who remained, I had the opportunity to understand it. But at the time I did not dwell too much on the matter, limiting myself to feeling a sense of surprise. Only now does everything appear clearer to me.

Nelida Milani gives voice to that group of Istrians who, due to the whims of fate, did not leave despite identifying themselves with the vanquished. Their fate was not easy. The Slavic communists considered these people as enemies.

Italians equal fascists 

Even little Nelida is seen as an enemy – a “fascist” – by the new masters of Istria: “[…] Mrs. Scricchiolò […] every time she met me she never failed to wink with a guttural tear of acrimony 'you Italian, you fascist' waving a threatening finger in the air as if being Italian were a nice prank against her seething national affirmation.” (p. 18)

If Italians are fascists, the Italian language is also a fascist language: “Near the 'Vladimir Goitan' elementary school, a man was standing with a large dog, but we couldn't focus on the image completely. We walked towards him, unaware. When we were close to him, he looked at us with dark, steady eyes in his broad, hairy face and said: 'If I hear you speak Italian one more time, I'll let go of the dog and let it devour you. I'll make you lose the desire to speak this fascist language.” (41)

Istria is now Croatia, and Croatian homologation affects the “fascist” names: “When, a few years later, my little brothers Claudio and Diego, marked in the registers and for life as Klaudio and Dijego, also had to go to Croatian school, I definitively abandoned the presumption of mastering a cohesive and defined individuality.” (p. 42)

Taboos, interdicts, proscriptions in various eras do not disappear: they metamorphose. The devil no longer exists. Fascism exists. And the accusation of fascism is always a winning weapon. Even we refugees, especially in Venice - my family, like many others, stayed in the "Foscarini" collection center in the lagoon city - were welcomed with hostility and accused of being "fascists". Then little by little we were enveloped by indifference and the confused idea that we were entirely or partly Slavs or, in any case, people a little difficult to categorize, with overly complicated histories behind them. Many exiles emigrated overseas - Italy was in ruins - finding stability and even prosperity. But not all were lucky, as demonstrated by the example of those who emigrated to Argentina, where difficult economic situations are not lacking among our people, even today.

Occupation and not “Liberation” 

Official Italy, the only country among the defeated of the Second World War, celebrates every year the “liberation”, which saw the massacres of the foibe and the amputation of the national territory. The victims of the Yugoslav occupation, the exiles, the vanquished have never needed linguistics courses to understand the lie of the word “liberation”. Milani: “When my cousin Edda, a refugee with her mother around the world, came to Pola for the first time after twenty years in Venezuela, she met an old classmate at the market, a certain Laura Versaico married to Kovacic. As soon as the generic questions began to flow, one after the other, she boasted with amiable bragging that things had been fine in Yugoslavia for some time, but that the years after the Liberation had been very hard, at which point Edda interrupted her abruptly to say with the calm and disarming force of banality: 'What on earth are you talking about? But what the hell kind of liberation? What liberation are you raving about? You mean occupation?'” (p. 75)

Defeat, exodus, loss of the native land... I am sure that these words will evoke in Italians lyrical passages, biblical events, pages of history regarding exotic peoples. The word "exodus", for us, has nothing indeterminate, vaporous, romantic. Exodus was our mass departure, with the loss of one of the most precious things for man, especially for the Mediterranean man, the microcosm that saw him born and filled his soul with colors, sounds, flavors, that he will never find elsewhere again... Anna Maria Mori: "And you Nelida, you always leave, angrily, painfully from there: from the exodus. Your pain and your rancor are fifty years old since the Paris Peace Treaty: February 10, 1947." (p. 78)

The tangle of sufferings 

Nelida Milani's pain is a pain that affects the whole being and in which historical events are connected and intertwined with the personal tragedy she suffered as a child, when she was abandoned by her mother, who soon after left for Italy. Nelida Milani renders the episode of the farewell with tragic accents.

Her mother reappears, after a long absence. Nelida thinks that her mother has come to take her away forever. She is happy. Her mother, on the other hand, has come to say goodbye for the last time. “But how? You go out and run away, you go away without me, you tear out the roots of my body that are spreading into yours? You don’t want me? Your betrayal will be everyone’s betrayal. The catastrophe hits my chest, I watch the red coat go away.” (p. 24)

Departure, abandonment, torn roots, loyalty, mother, homeland… Words, until they are lived, felt in the flesh, cannot give us all that they have inside: ineffable sweetness or terrible poisons. “It is perhaps the greatest pain a creature can feel: to love a mother who exists and is not there, to hold someone you cannot have.” (p. 26)

In Nelida's life there is a sort of coincidence between historical events and the traumatic, intimate, private facts she suffered as a child. Exodus, abandonment, occupation, mother, homeland, stepmother, loyalty have, in Nelida Milani's story, a totality that knows no borders.

“She” enters his life, his father’s companion. “She has radiant steel-blue eyes, she sleeps in my mother’s bed, in the same place, on the window side. Grandma doesn’t love her, they don’t love each other. Grandma loves my mother and I love my grandmother. My grandmother who is only mine. Everyone loves and respects her for the versatility of her intelligence, for her outbursts of courage and generosity. I am extremely jealous of her, even now, when someone brings her up, I change the subject, I throw myself onto another track. She has always been close to me, I had to leave her under the pine trees where one day I will join her so as not to leave her again. She is a great love, my great love.” (p. 25)

The Xenophobic Paranoia of the Slavic Liberator 

The “liberation” and the advent of “socialism” in Istria brought about a frenetic phase of street demonstrations, public trials of the bourgeoisie and fascism, and anti-Italian slogans. Nelida Milani: “Every day the Citizens’ Committee organized demonstrations. Some received precise orders to shout slogans in the crowd. ‘Death to the priests who sided with the fascists!’ ‘Death to the Reakcija, fat with the blood that sucked us!’ ‘Let’s sweep away the debris of the bourgeoisie and fascism!’ The leaders shouted all sorts of insults and frenzies in their and our languages. I will be condemned to hear people speaking badly of Italy and Italians all my life. What a joy! Never a moment’s respite from suspicion. That’s where diversity begins, that hump that you carry around with you and that prevents you from passing through that hole that everyone else passes through. That's where aversion begins, when they block the channel of flow of the liquid that unites you to others, they slowly drain it. And so, slowly, from all the exclusions and denials, from all the refusals and suspicions, from all the struggles and resistances, another being is created in you, another you that you don't love, and that you will have to fight." (p. 79)

The diversity of being Italian, in daily contact with the Croats, spasmodically nationalistic as anyone who has met them even once knows, is a test that breaks or strengthens. Milani appears to come out of it hardened and furiously bitter.

The harsh reality of social-communism descends on Yugoslavia, including Istria. The law on nationalization causes grandmother to lose ownership of the tavern, which also employed Nelida's father: "Dad worked in the morning on the construction site and in the afternoon at the tavern." It is a tragedy against which nothing can be done. The steamroller of social engineering - "social engineering" - has the sun of the future on its side. "Grandma cried a lot," Milani recalls.

“I remember the nationalization of the tavern: the rooms had one more square meter, ninety-one instead of the maximum allowed by the law on public establishments, ninety square meters. Grandma wanted to knock down the toilet in the courtyard to reach the prescribed ninety, but they wouldn't let her. They took it away from us, our family tavern, because the interests of the state are superior to those of the individual. And the song that some of the customers sang sounded so mocking: 'Long live socialist Pola, the whole world knows it, we are all workers and we want freedom.' That was the result. In her own home and with her own means, in the house where there had always been a tavern since 1921, Grandma had to be a tavern keeper for the state and not for her family, she had to work with her own nationalized inventory, and receive a monthly salary from the state.” (p. 82) The nationalized tavern “was given to the management of various Zica, Mustafa, Andrija, Rifat”.

The regime that had built thousands of monuments in which it proclaimed itself as the restorer of “freedom to the people,” takes away freedom from the people, suppresses economic freedom and lays the foundations of a system based on the political privileges of the few – the nomenklatura – and the poverty of the masses. The future, however, thanks to propaganda, then appeared glorious: “Oh, everything would change, everything, everything. Everything that seemed like the end was nothing but a beginning. […] One had to resign oneself to sacrifice, persuading oneself that suffering allowed the achievement of some remote but noble goal, communism, where everyone would be equal. A lot of words, words all sugar and honey. It was hope, it was utopia.” (p. 70)

Revenges and settling scores are the order of the day: “[…] those who I had always known were spies, that type of Croatians who had remained silent under fascism without protesting and in the meantime were compiling lists of those against whom to take revenge. And among these there were fascist officials, but also simple municipal employees, or shopkeepers. The fault, the only fault was that of being Italian.” (p. 73)

“In a collective state of paranoid xenophobia, the Slavic liberator had thrown away all caution, had pulled the demon out of the wineskin in which he had kept it for hundreds of years, had opened the hunt for the Italian, and his henchmen were already looking for guilty parties and innocent victims, to whom they could apply the law of retaliation, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, they shouted white, red and green the color of the three shits, white, red and blue the color of youth. The Ozna took the Italians by night, held them prisoner, interrogated them. He made them pay dearly for their lives spent knowingly confusing justice with fascist intimidation, morality with law. But the innocent also paid, an entire population paid.” (p. 74)

The story of Anna Maria Mori 

Anna Maria Mori's narration has less lacerating tones. Anna Maria's mother is Istrian, from Lussino. Her father is Tuscan, Florentine, but, when Anna Maria is born, he has been rooted in Pola for years. Her father says: "I arrived in Istria in '20-'21: there was great enthusiasm for Italians and Italy, in Trieste I saw and met only Italians. Slovenes and Croats were rather in the countryside inland in Istria, and if anything you found them in the morning at the market, where they offered their goods with extreme kindness ..." (p. 85) As you can see, no hate speech from Anna Maria Mori's father against Slovenes and Croats. He describes the Slavic occupation of Pola as follows: “And then 1945 arrived: [the armed Slavs] entered the city, Pola, where they began to take possession of the barracks, the town hall, the public buildings, and some private villas. It lasted forty-five days, and then the Allies arrived: we believed it was to give us back to ourselves; in reality it was only to guarantee us the possibility of leaving, exiles but alive… And we decided to leave immediately after the occupation and the very first moments of terrified astonishment; we decided as soon as we were able to understand that there was no more hope for us, that if we had stayed we would have had to live in daily terror. Because it was not we who wanted to leave; the truth was, and is, that 'they' did not want us on those lands, whose history they claimed to erase, together with our presence…” (p. 101)

When the English and New Zealanders arrived in Pola, “the people seemed to be crazy with happiness, the entire population had flocked to the Gardens, everyone offered flowers to the English soldiers, and the soldiers reciprocated with chocolate… But it didn't last long: it was clear almost immediately that the fate of our lands was sealed. We tried to change it. And when the representatives of the Four Powers, the Russian, the English, the French and the American, arrived to see the situation up close, the city of Pola gave life to a spontaneous, enormous demonstration: the entire citizenry took part, including women and children. The Slavs, to counter this, organized their own demonstration: to make it consistent, they went to get people from the countryside, even beyond the borders of Istria, and brought them to the city on trucks.” (p. 27)

Anna Maria Mori's parents did not leave immediately: for a short time they ran the Albergo Miramare, Riva Mazzini 7, Pola. “Rental contract starting April 25, 1946 and ending December 31, 1946.” Maria Pasquinelli stayed in that hotel. Anna Maria's father recalls: “She taught at a school in Split. She left there, from Dalmatia, and arrived in Pola, in Istria. She stayed with us, in the hotel for months at a time. Every now and then she left, she didn't tell me where, and after a few days she came back. One morning, as she was leaving, she said goodbye to me, gave me the keys to the room, and said something I didn't understand at the time: 'There's a lot of my stuff in the room. If they come to take it, hand it over without objecting... I'm leaving...' Shortly thereafter I learned that she had shot the English general De Winton; it was her way of rebelling against a peace treaty that she considered unfair towards the Istrian population. She shot him, hit him right in the heart, then handed the weapon to an officer who rushed to the scene and was arrested without putting up any resistance: she was first sentenced to death, then the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Only many years later was she released, without ever having asked for clemency…” (p. 96)

The turbulent days of the massacres of Italians committed by the “liberation” forces, who in reality freed many of their own lives, remain forever etched in Anna Maria Mori, according to whom there is a link between the cult of virility and the cult of cruelty and blood, so widespread in the Balkan world: “My childhood memories of the violence of the occupiers on the occupied, of the Slavs on the Italians of Istria, men who killed other men, and were killed by others, often only for personal or class revenge, and always in a “virile” spectacular way, are memories that never include doubts, analyses – and much less historical-cultural criticisms from the female side – on the roots in which the culture of the 'masculine' is rooted in those parts of the world, perpetually, and perhaps not by chance, bloodied.” (p. 28)

The explanation of everything: fascism 

Fascism equals supreme evil. Italians equals fascists. But fascism lasted only twenty years. And yet everything is attributed to fascism. Nelida Milani: “Memory and oblivion. The act of transmission is found between these two poles. What is useful from the past for present action is selected: fascism, fascism, fascism. You can call for centuries, no one answers. Centuries of history are measured against twenty years of fascism. Good, or rather, what am I saying, bad! Infamous fascism. But has fascism emptied the Slavic countries? Where is the counterpart of Portole and Montona? Of Capodistria and Pola? Of Fiume and Dignano? Of Grisignana and Vrsar? Of Gallesano and Albona? Has fascism emptied Istria of its inhabitants?” (p. 86)

The loss of the native land and its transfiguration into regret 

Loss is part of life. But losing your country is not a normal loss: “We are used to losing. Every day someone around us moves away or disappears, a friendship or a love fades or dies, death takes away one of our own. Losing is part of our destiny. But it is rare to lose a country… the country where I was born and which, still, only yesterday, was mine…” (p. 86)

Deep is the contrast between the painful but perfect image of Pola, which has remained forever in the hearts of the exiles, and the banality of a gray daily life for those who remained, in a city full of defects, and which evolves along the inclined plane of decadence. Nelida Milani witnesses the painful and magnificent phenomenon of the transfiguration of the native land, which one has been forced to abandon, so that the place left behind becomes a lost paradise. She has the opportunity to observe it in the relatives who have gone away. They idealize a world now surrounded by the halo that only sacred memories have. The daily life of the exiles, in the places of transplantation in Italy, with all the banalities and miseries, is in total contrast with the memory that they themselves keep of their native city, transfigured in their memory into a sort of celestial Jerusalem. The contrast between this ideal image of Pola – the lost paradise, which in the end never was a paradise – spread among the exiles, and the impoverishment and gloom of the Istrian city, which those who remained instead witness daily, is a source of painful discomfort for the latter: “In their letters [of the aunts who went to Italy] Pola becomes the earthly paradise from which they were exiled, they dream of a city that has never existed, and the one that was continues to die. This makes those who remained feel bad and know better than anyone the defects of the city in which they are imprisoned, a second-hand, frozen and finished world.” (p. 93)

Anti-Italian Hatred and Its Many Victims 

The war is over, but there is no respite for the Italians of Istria, the target of intimidation and brutality. Nelida Milani: “The Italian communist comrades of Pola would arrive, for example, in a small hilltop village in the Buiese area, get off the truck in the vegetable fields, among tufts of grass and hedges, among eggplant seedbeds and vines, among chicken coops and rabbit hutches, among pergolas and sheds, among pots of basil and hedges of broom, and with a list and addresses in hand they would begin to call by name the inhabitants still asleep in their homes: 'Pino! Bruno! Ernesto! We have come to pay you a visit'. They would come out into the farmyard and a hail of blows would fall on their backs. Mothers' cries, wives' cries, children's screams would pass through a sky of silence, while those poor people were beaten to death. A kick in the belly concluded the pedagogical operation and the thugs disappeared again in their truck. The next day the unfortunates packed up and left. Everything planned, everything formulated in a doctrine, documented with the best arguments born of a twisted acuity, everything organized according to the directives from above.” (p. 99)

Anti-Italian hatred can even divide a family, a couple. Nelida Milani tells the story of a woman from Polesano, Stella Rovis, who returned to visit Pola for the first time after the exodus. Stella Rovis “will pass by the houses of her relatives over and over again without entering any of them” (p. 28). The reason is that these relatives of hers, first of all her own husband, were among the torturers of the Italians, whom they attacked and terrorized in order to take possession of their property. Stella Rovis will tell all this to Nelida’s grandmother: “She told her about that day in December, when she had stopped by her husband’s office, and how from then on she had turned against him, who organized expeditions in the Buiese area to beat up Italians, to make them flee to Italy, to confiscate their movable and immovable property. It was all written in the Naredenje […] that she had read while he was on the phone in the other room. From that day on, it was difficult for her to love even their son Dino, who resembled him so much, as before […]” (p. 29) Stella Rovis then told her in-laws everything. And their reaction? “They had simply called her a 'dirty fascist' and thrown her out of the house so that she wouldn't infect them, and they had told her that in that way she was sabotaging the revolutionary effort, and ruining her husband's career.” (p. 38)

It is a pity that among the Italian writers, who have fed for years and years on the turgid breast of the Resistance, especially the imagined one, handing out with both hands certificates of courage and literary, artistic and cinematographic prizes, no one has ever thought of describing the fate of the vanquished of the Adriatic lands.

The courses and recurrences of history will ensure that decades later, paradoxically, declaring oneself Italian in the former Yugoslavia will bring substantial advantages to more than one person. Nelida Milani denounces Darijo Andrijevic who, with the end of the Yugoslav federation and the fall of communism, promptly reconverts to Italianness, declaring himself a native Italian speaker and resuming his original name: Dario Andretti. “He presented the documents to the Italian Consulate in Fiume to receive Italian citizenship. Only a few years ago he certainly would not have imagined that he would find a new political creed, a new religious faith and a new ancient national identity.” (p. 100) Illuminating detail: Dario Andretti, formerly Darijo Andrijevic, receives an Italian pension(1).

The castaways of the collapse of their world 

Nelida Milani: “There are those who do not survive a devastating experience, and those who do. There are those who get back on their feet and those who are destroyed, people react differently.” (p. 104) It seems like a banal statement. And it probably is, but only for those who are lucky enough not to see in this “there are those who are destroyed” the tragic truth of the exodus for someone in their family, as happened to my father. He never recovered from the trauma of the collapse of his world, from the horror of blood that hit Pisino, his friends, his dearest things, and he lived a large part of his life like a castaway who cannot land anywhere.

Ethnic hatred, in the Balkans, is an abundant raw material. Anti-Italian hatred is almost a tradition. Nelida Milani: “There are truths that are felt inside the body, like the need to eat or drink. That of hatred against Italians is not only a long story, but almost a tradition that smoulders under the ashes and tends to renew itself periodically.” (p. 105)

From the period of the Slavic occupation, Anna Maria Mori, who was then a child, remembers the fear: “I stole stubs of sentences: 'This night they came to take away such and such a neighbor; yesterday they took away another, and no one knows what happened to them…'” (p. 110) For the first time Anna Maria heard the term 'foibe' used repeatedly.

The strategy of fear, skillfully conducted by the Slavs, aims to empty those lands of the native Italian population. In this regard, we can recall the phrase of a protagonist, Milovan Gilas, who confirms the emptying operation, conceived in high places: "In 1945, Kardelj and I were sent by Tito to Istria. It was our task to induce the Italians to leave with pressure of every kind. And so it was done."

It was an operation of “ethnic cleansing”. “Ethnic cleansing”, “ethnic cleansing”, “nettoyage etnique”: these terms will be accepted by the dictionaries only 40 years later, when the peoples of the laboratory “Yugoslavia” will pay the price, having exploded in blood because of the hatred between its Slavic ethnic groups, who will jump at each other’s throats after a very long wait. Forty years later, televisions around the world will broadcast the terrifying exploits of the “new man”, until shortly before socialist, third-worldist, equidistant, champion of self-management, great propagandist in the international forums of that incomparable model of overcoming bourgeois egoisms, embodied by Tito’s Yugoslavia.

But then – absent the spotlights, the cameras, the special correspondents – the tragedy unfolded in silence. And it has remained forever shrouded in silence. Milani describes the exodus that occurred “in the desperation of those who witnessed the departure, a unique and solitary pain, which found no space in official speeches, in newspaper headlines, in history.” (p. 141)

How time flies… Only yesterday Tito's Yugoslavia was giving political and moral lessons to the entire world. There was no world forum on the problems of humanity in which the new Titoist man did not participate to give lessons in a loud voice to the petty inhabitants of the rest of the planet on how to overcome national-bourgeois egoisms, and access a new humanity, more open, more tolerant, more generous.

It is almost painful to make fun of the bloody massacres that accompanied the dismemberment of Yugoslavia along its ethnic seams, but it is not difficult to imagine the state of mind of an Istrian refugee like me, who for years and years had to endure the incredible Yugoslav lies, endorsed by the "progressives" of the entire world, first and foremost the Italians. The latter were crazy about flags and red stars, while they considered that displaying the colors of their own flag constituted a provocation of a reactionary and fascist nature. It was the era in which you risked being beaten up if you were caught buying magazines like "Il Borghese" at the newsstand, not aligned with the dominant anti-patriotic conformism.

Ethnic cleansing – first edition, without spotlights and without headlines – causes the exodus of Italians, alias “Nazi-Fascists”, champions of infamy, with dark capitalist instincts, who will land on Italian shores welcomed by the hostility of progressive forces: our magnificent homegrown communists, whose hearts beat in unison with that of their Yugoslav brothers, builders of a new model of society. And our communists, Italians by name, were ready to give up not only Fiume, Istria, Dalmatia, but also Trieste, the neighboring territories, and everything the magnificent Tito claimed. After all, what could borders count for, compared to the proletarian solidarity owed to the glorious fighters of Nazi-Fascism?

The tragedy of our people took place without the presence of spotlights, cameras and movie cameras, which instead would illuminate the bloody war between the Yugoslav ethnic groups, years later, but also in the absence of any other sign of attention, solidarity, sympathy. A silent witness to the exodus from Istria, writes Nelida Milani, was the "desperation of those who witnessed the departure, a unique and solitary pain, which found no space in official speeches, in newspaper headlines, in history." (p. 114)

A Castle of Lies 

Anna Maria Mori rejects the total judgments and labels that, then and in all these years, have been pinned on the exiles: “It is not true that I and all three hundred and fifty thousand Istrian exiles are, were, bourgeois and fascists. It is not true that all of Istria was Slavic and should have returned to Yugoslavia. It is not true that all of my people are only nostalgic and irredentist.” (p. 7) It is a vain effort to try to distinguish, to nuance, to clarify: “Above all, I have avoided more or less vain discussions, which many of my people have stubbornly continued to have, in the attempt, which has failed to date, to dismantle that immense castle of lies that concerned us, as Istrians and exiles, and which had, and has, perhaps more to do with psychoanalysis than with politics. It is that the lies that have concerned us and that concern us, as the people of Istria forced into exile, are those that are difficult to dismantle: they are those that are built to make peace with one's conscience, making the victims the real culprits. Vae Victis, as those Romans taught us who in Pola built their most beautiful Colosseum, with the great white stones that history has colored gray.” (p. 8)

Istria is emptying. Even the soul is torn from the places. Those who have returned to visit know it so well: the places no longer have their Mani, their Lares, the benign spirits that guard memories. The dead swallowed up by the foibe are dead forever. Perhaps it was the Balkan superstition, of letting a black dog die with the foibe victims, that had its effect. No one, nothing will ever return. The strangeness of the places was sealed forever in those tragic days. The champions of ethnic cleansing, after all, know how to clean.

Nelida Milani: “[The 'liberators'] had stopped breaking into houses at night and taking their inhabitants, now they were taking away the houses themselves and the lands. They had already ruined everything, as if the villages were pretending to be like that, empty of voices and tremors, the farmers were pretending to be farmers, the fields were pretending to be fields… All joy vanished, the bonds that keep men together destroyed, the farmers were running away as if chased by fire. They were abandoning the land that nourished them, the farms, the houses where they were born, houses where something had happened, or rather where there had been a story but there was no one left to know it or remember it, houses condemned to be silent. Almost everyone had left, the last echoes of children's voices had faded away in the silence of the ancient stones, there was everywhere an air of old people waiting for life to end, an air of young people born who knows where.” (p. 114)

The death of the foibe 

The death of the foibe marks the agony and the end of a people. It is a death that occurs in isolation, in indifference, in silence. It is a solitary death, without funerals, without signs of mourning, without rites of passage. It is a death, precisely for this reason, that will never be exorcised. It will remain forever in the survivors, as I have unfortunately been able to observe in my family, in my parents, in myself.

Nelida Milani: “After September 8, the Druze were the absolute masters of Istria for a long period, during which several thousand people disappeared. The places of disappearance would be revealed several decades later, after the fall of the Wall. They would be publicly indicated, in the newspapers. But the inhabitants of the surrounding area had always known them, even if they had never spoken of them to anyone. The farmers had identified them immediately, one by one, because of the groans that came from the rock crevices. They said that for a long time they had heard calls and invocations for help coming from the bowels of the earth, the groans of the too long agony of those who had remained alive and still yearned for life despite the terror of the certain end, a terror that ended with the death rattle.” (p. 118)

The reversal of our world of origin has also marked the reversal of the truth, which our own life bears witness to: the “liberators”, acclaimed as such by all humanity, were in reality executioners: our executioners; the “progressives”, who for years supported the “social engineering” conducted in the gulags of the East, are the true reactionaries.

It is true that the vanquished are always wrong. But this time the vanquished have been attributed all the wrongs in the universe. And they have also been entitled to jokes and sneers. The defeat of the homeland in the Second World War has in fact provided an inexhaustible humorous material to the brains of Italian creators, in a kilometre-long series of films, books, theatrical works... The country of Pulcinella has returned to its ancient vocation, perhaps its only true one, of a people of acrobats, of caricatures, of clever, exuberant people, who know how to have fun, and who for centuries have rooted now for one foreign ruler now for another.

The worst posthumous offense, inflicted on those who knew how to die with courage and honor, as my uncle Lino Gherbetti (born Gherbetz) knew how to die, thrown into a sinkhole by Tito's partisans, is this inability to conceive, today, in Italy, that there were those who, like him and many others, truly believed in the dream of another Italy: a disciplined, serious, normal Italy, with a normal sense of national honor, after centuries of foreign domination, and of armed imperialisms and colonialisms, throughout the world, conducted by those powers who then posed as implacable judges of the vanquished, and who attributed to them the very invention of war.

The dream of a new Italy 

Today, after decades of hammering and jeering at the Italy of the past, I myself am beginning to wonder whether behind the apparatus, the rhetoric, the pomp of the protagonists and extras who profited from that “dream of glory” there was real substance, that is, people with healthy intentions, normal consciences, right feelings. But then I only have to think of the so-called “fascists” in my family and in the circle of our relatives – patriotic border people, serious, honest, humane, loyal, orderly, with a deep sense of civic duty and national solidarity – and then even more tragic seems to me the fate of those who, at the borders, were deceived by that hope, by that illusion, and really believed in that dream, and then had to pay in person, sometimes with their lives.

Many of the Italians on the eastern border lived the dream of a new Italy as something serious, noble, beautiful. They had been educated in order and seriousness by Austria. They had been prepared by a long wait for a sense of honor, patriotism, and the desire to be considered Italian in every way. For a long time, in fact, these people had waited for “redemption,” a term that for them never had anything rhetorical about it because it corresponded to a true feeling.

Sad was the fate of many refugees who, like my parents, after the shipwreck, remained, despite everything - why hide it? - faithful to that illusion so close to their most intimate and true nature, and continued to put into practice daily the ideals of order, self-discipline, honesty, seriousness, national solidarity, patriotism. And they could not have done otherwise, because you do not change nature by changing geography.

We have the Austrian imprint. Today we willingly recognize this filiation. And to think that the Habsburg empire and its emperor were so opposed by our fathers. The “reversal”, the exodus, the life in contact with other Italians led to the rehabilitation of our enemy of the time: Vienna and its empire. The rehabilitation coincided with the new meaning that we ourselves give today to certain words, “Rome” for example, which had inspired us so much and made us dream. Today the word Rome, unfortunately, has for us a bit the same connotation that it has for Umberto Bossi, even if we totally reject the latter's racist ideology against the South.

The liberators were anti-fascists. And anti-fascism was and is the supreme good. Their victims became “ipso facto” fascists, this subhuman species, responsible for the Holocaust, the only one, the true one, the one with a capital H. So they deserved their ordeal. And the descendants of the victims, far from advancing moral credits towards anyone, should be careful how they speak!

The Way of the Cross of Istrians, Fiume, Dalmatians 

The reversal of roles, the wholesale beatification of the “anti-fascists”, including the murderers of innocents, meant that people started talking a little about the foibe only after the fall of the Wall. It would take perhaps a century for certain truths to surface. Nelida Milani tells us about what her uncle Aurelio suffered at the hands of the “liberators”: He was “arrested in front of the church and taken to the Slavic command in Pola together with other Italian civilians and soldiers.” (p. 118) He was locked up in a cell measuring 3 by 4 metres with about thirty other prisoners, “packed like sardines, gasping for air and all with their hands tied behind their backs with wire. They had been tied like this from the beginning and would never have freed them, not even during torture. They were dying of thirst and only after many imploring requests did a soldier give them a bottle of urine. […] Their only crime was being Italian.” “First they dressed them up for the holidays, tortured them all night.” (p. 119)

Being Italian… A great fault, and not only in the eyes of the Slavs, but also of all the others, Italians first and foremost, who for half a century turned their backs on the tragedy of the foibe, ignoring them, or even justifying them as a measure of just retribution against the “Nazi-Fascists”. After all, the Yugoslavs had fought valiantly, alone, against Hitler’s soldiers. The liberators were necessarily on the side of good. Omnia munda mundis, in short. There is only one Holocaust. Woe betide anyone who abuses its name… The accusation of anti-Semitism is launched for much less… and it is an accusation that causes profound damage. Anyone who speaks of the deaths of the Basovizza foiba seems to risk being accused of wanting to minimize the Risiera di San Sabba.

The President most loved by Italians, but certainly not by us, Pertini, has never made dangerous confusions about the “Doc” martyrs. Mori asks himself: “But why did the 'president of the people', but not of our people, Sandro Pertini, when he came to these parts to commemorate, rightly, the martyrs of the Risiera di San Sabba, not commemorate, unjustly, the martyrs of the foibe?” (p. 199)

Cinema has its obligatory themes, Hollywood and Cinecittà teach. The happy ending of the Second World War cannot be reversed. The beast has had a steel rod stuck in its heart. It would be a shame if someone tried to give voice to the dead of the foibe, if the martyrdom of the vanquished was revealed. Let's not confuse the bad guys with the good guys. Let's not confuse the innocent dead.

The Via Crucis of the Istrians, Fiume and Dalmatians, disappeared in the vortex of hatred, will never find famous directors or writers. And yet the setting would lend itself to special effects, with the blood and massacres that the public is fond of. But the Finzi-Continis have their gardens. The vegetable gardens of Istria, our stone houses occupied by others do not constitute literary or cinematographic material.

Nelida Milani: “From Pola to Fianona the guards did all sorts of things to the prisoners: one was forced to eat paper, another one stones, they shot the uncle near the ears, because they enjoyed seeing them jump. And then they arrived at the pre-arranged place. In a calm tone the Komandir announced that it was their duty to liquidate the fascists, the same ones who had filled his stomach twice with castor oil. And at the end he shouted: 'Death to fascism, freedom to the people!'. 'Death to fascism, freedom to the people!' repeated the others” (p. 120)

Miraculously, Nelida's uncle, who threw himself into the sinkhole just before receiving the fatal volley aimed at him and the others, survives the fall into the chasm, and painfully, some time later, re-emerges from what should have been his tomb, and which was for the others. He will then manage to leave Istria, emigrating to America. "In Detroit, Uncle Aurelio will undergo three long operations on his head, but will remain irreparably injured, blind in one eye and deaf." (p. 121)

The Road to Exile 

Other relatives of Nelida Milani also choose the path of exile. Some experience the departure as a fracture of the being, feeling projected far from the common furrow that destiny seemed to have traced, once and for all, for him and for the others. “My uncles left on April 12, 1949 under a blanket of bituminous clouds, handkerchiefs and tears. They lived downstairs, in the via del Lapidario, they had a house with a veranda on the courtyard, the countryside in front. When my uncle took leave of his house he had the curious sensation of suddenly feeling his life limited: 'They stole my destiny,' he said.” (p. 134)

How much truth there is in this feeling of “failed destiny”. Those refugees who, even after so many years, have remained exiles in their souls, know how true the phrase of Nelida’s uncle is: “They stole my destiny.” The forced renunciation of one’s native land is the loss of something irreplaceable that helped give meaning to the absurdity of life.

Nelida's uncles land in Toronto, where no one knows about their tragedy: “To the people of Toronto, they seemed like people who had come from nowhere, indecipherable: 'Why did you come here?' they asked. 'Why did you run away?'” (p. 137)

Even Nelida, who “stayed behind,” was asked a similar question: “Why didn’t grandma go to Italy with her daughters? Why did she stay in Pola?” It is clear that this question, repeated many times by those who instead packed up, always hurt Nelida Milani, who remained in Pola with her grandmother and father, and therefore part of the “stayed behind,” those who the Julian-Dalmatian refugees always suspected of being compromised, of not being Italian, and also of being pro-Titoist and complicit with the occupiers.

This book is precious because it lets us hear the voice of those who remained in Istria that had become red. And this voice, perhaps unique, or – who knows – perhaps a little more widespread than one might think, is a powerful song of pain, strangely similar to that of other exiles who left and never wanted to return, not even for a brief visit, because they were forever faithful to the ancient soul of their land, colonized and violated by the Slavic occupiers.

Why did some stay? Why did Nelida's father and grandmother stay? For domestic reasons, for life, for home, for continuity. You can feel that Nelida Milani wants to defend those who remained: "Dad didn't want to leave because of the boat and the fishing. Grandmother, first of all, for our house, her kingdom, outside of which the whole vast world was just an insignificant appendix, a kingdom populated by sons, daughters, grandchildren and a crowd of animals: turkeys, geese, ducks, hens, roosters, herds, donkeys, pigs. She loved it with absolute passion, just as I love it now that age is one with the places. I am happy to be sure of dying in here as she was happy." (p. 140)

For Nelida, her grandmother – who acted as a mother to her – is an incomparable model of love, dedication, instinct, life. She wanted to stay in Istria for the love of home. Nelida Milani not only justifies this choice, but makes it her own. And by raising a rustic hymn of love to the home and to her grandmother – home and grandmother are one – Nelida shows her rejection of the absurdity of history and the cruelty of men, while exalting continuity and loyalty. Loyalty to ancient values, to the civilization of the land, to perennial Istria, which has remained such only in hearts and regret, because everything around has been broken and twisted by a convulsive and absurd history.

The mass of Italians fled. It is the exodus. “People boarded the Toscana, which shuttled between Pola and Trieste…” (p. 141) It is the escape in the face of the tremendous fracture created by history, in the face of the upheaval of the soul of Istria. They want to escape from something absurd, which has invested the places and wants to enter the souls. “They had tried in vain to face an incomprehensible civilization. What had they ever done to deserve that world, in which they felt they had no possibility of leading a full, truly human life?” (p. 142)

The Sense of a Missed Destiny  

Places change names. “Pola has become Pula. Letters do not leave or arrive unless PULA is written on the envelopes. Pola has been erased from the face of the earth. The name was a symbol, and when symbols fall, nothing is as it was before.” (p. 162) I wonder what the phrase “The name was a symbol, and when symbols fall, nothing is as it was before” can really say to those who are unaware of our Julian-Dalmatian history. But for us who were born in a place whose original name has been eliminated, liquidated, made to disappear, this phrase says it all.

Years later, Nelida Milani was able to go to Florence to visit her exiled relatives, transplanted to that city. “A destiny, finally a destiny! It could have been my destiny, our destiny. It didn’t last long: eight days.” (p. 172) This idea of ​​the deprivation of destiny was expressed again. Those who left were deprived of it (The uncle, leaving, knew he was entering a historical limbo). But even those who remained, in an Istria dispossessed of its soul, had forever the sense of an unfulfilled destiny. In both, the fracture of collective history, the lack of continuity coincided with a painful fracture of being. Often even the simple emigrant feels this sensation of profound incompleteness, of non-realization, of the absurdity of his own existence. It is the price that sensitive souls pay for love: love for their homeland.

Nelida Milani, paradoxically, marries a Serbian. “I, who because of a mother's abandonment had grown like a very thorny cactus tied to the early years of my life and carried within me a very thin border between normal mourning and pathological mourning, clung to him seeking love and security and placing him on a high pedestal where I idolized him for decades.” (p. 175)

Historical tragedy and existential dramas 

The absolute nature of the feelings of this Istrian writer, her loyalty to the vanquished, her lacerating bitterness, the sense of betrayal suffered and of rebellion and challenge to the world reveal uncommon sensitivity and strength of spirit. The historical tragedy that struck Istria, which she internalized in its entirety, is added - as we have seen - to the terrible drama she suffered as a child: her mother, to follow another man, left her husband and children. The abandonment was a tragedy for Nelida, which remained in her forever. This central fact - the abandonment and non-return of her mother - is the backlight, the watermark through which we must look at the universe of this writer. But how can we calculate the impact that this profound existential drama had on her sensitivity, distinguishing it from the tragic, broader events that affected Istria and its population, and which equally marked her soul? How can we calibrate the precise causes of her feeling of pain and injustice? Feelings are never alone and love is added to love, pain to pain, resentment to resentment. How to separate emotions and feelings? How to distinguish between the various causes?

It is impossible for me not to open a parenthesis, starting from the doubt that Nelida Milani seems to feel about the character, perhaps “pathological”, of her own sensitivity, of her own grief. In this digging into the deepest layers of Nelida Milani, perhaps I risk wanting to see in her those who are instead my ghosts. And yet some of her words seem to reveal a state of mind that I myself continually feel. I know that it is not easy to talk about oneself, but I will tell you that people are surprised when they note the strength of my feelings of attachment and loyalty to the land where I was born, but from which I left as an infant, or when they realize in what way I have made my own the defeat of the homeland, which occurred in dishonor, with the loss of the Adriatic lands.

I realize that, in saying these things, my speech becomes difficult, because the very words I use – homeland, defeat, dishonor – have been corroded and worn out by a tradition of Italian rhetoric that has forever altered their meaning. But there are no other words…

Those who were born in my hometown, who knew my parents, who suffered the drama of the exodus, and who commemorate the lost land several times a year, have been happily surprised to see that someone like me, who lives on another continent, can experience such strong feelings of attachment and regret. Certainly they see me as very different from their children. But they do not even imagine the true dimensions of my inner reality. They do not know the absolute strength of certain feelings that dwell within me. If they did know, they would certainly judge them to be excessive, or they would remain, despite everything, incredulous. Hence my feeling of loneliness and sense of incommunicability arising from the eternal doubt that others can truly understand.

Italians, in general, do not understand these things. Quebecers, on the other hand, mourn a defeat suffered almost three hundred years ago. Jews mourn an exodus that occurred more than 2000 years ago. There were young Canadians, Australians, Americans, of Croatian parents, who went to fight, kill and die in the new Croatia (something that I myself consider excessive, also because, in my conception of patriotism, one owes love and loyalty to the homeland in which one is born). The defeat in Japan caused mass suicides. The cult of national honor is widespread among Americans. I do not want to justify certain excesses that arise from the cult of homeland and honor, but simply to say that when I compare my sense of mourning for the tragedy of Venezia Giulia and Dalmatia, and my solidarity for the Julian-Dalmatians to the spasmodic sense of ethnic-religious identity, to victimhood, to the sense of exclusion towards others, and to the cult of a past that goes back thousands of years that the Jews have, I cannot help but consider myself lukewarm, moderate, “secular.” And the same happens to me when I compare my warrior sense to that of the Chechens, Serbs, Croats, Irish, Basques, Corsicans…

In analyzing the causes of my feeling of being an “exile,” I realize that personal and family events have had a significant impact on making me what I am, and above all how much my parents have influenced me, with the example of their coherence, their courage, and the depth of their feelings of patriotic love, and, of course, also with their genetic baggage. And digging, digging, I realize that my sense of alienation and loss derives in part from an existential unease that has among its causes, probably, also the iron education received from a father who was too hard on his son, shy and sensitive, and my lack of “geographical” rooting, due to the continuous changes of location, both in Italy and abroad. But, at the root of everything, I see the foibe, the Slavic tribal hatred, the defeat of Italy, the tragedy of the exodus, the uprooting, the refugee camps, the dispersion of our people, the eternal regret for Istria, the mourning for lost honor, and the feeling of nausea for antipatriotic conformism and pro-communism as the direct causes of my feelings, of a lifetime.

Normal Mourning and Pathological Mourning: The Destiny of the Homeland Becomes Our Destiny 

The anti-patriotism, opportunism and pro-communism of large sections of Italy were the direct cause, if nothing else, of my decision to emigrate. Now it may make you smile to think that there were people in Italy, then, who feared – as my parents always did – a repetition of the “upheaval”, as they had already experienced it in Istria. Being Julian refugees, being viscerally anti-communist was certainly not a title of merit in the Italy that expressed the terrorism of the Red Brigades and the widespread phenomenon of the useful idiots and radical chic who exalted Tito's Yugoslavia, not only that, but Mao's China and Pol Pot's Cambodia.

Reading “Bora” allowed me to find the same reactions, the same emotions in others. Nelida Milani questions the “very thin line between normal mourning and pathological mourning”. In my opinion, hers is a defensive attitude aimed at rejecting the doubt that others might have about her, about her normality, with the idea that it was her tormented soul, and not the objective, historical facts, that caused such strong disturbance in her. This feeling of defense surfaces here and there in the book, revealing a complex personality.

If I insist on this point, it is because Nelida Milani is not the only one who wants to reject the doubt and perplexity about the perhaps abnormal, excessive, absurd nature of one's reactions to certain injustices. I am convinced that it was the historical event that overwhelmed us - the "denied" exodus - that was the cause of everything. Studies devoted to the victims of tragic collective events note that they remain afflicted by a sense of loneliness, when such bloody pages of history are not known to public opinion. The lack of recognition and the indifference of others prevent the ritual process of mourning and mourning, necessary for any healing, from taking place.

The very fact that other Italians are so different from us would seem to indicate that our pain is the fruit of an exaggerated sensitivity. The doubt that our reactions to events are substantially due to the exceptionality of our being is not expressed explicitly, but emerges from the contrast in behavior and sensitivity between our patriotism and the total indifference of the vast mass of Italians to the tragedy of the exodus. I remain incredulous in noting that my feelings sometimes arouse surprise and perplexity even in people of my origin. But it is a characteristic above all Italian, this not to make one's destiny coincide with the destiny of the homeland. The sensation of unique, incommunicable discomfort-pain prevents the comfort that comes from the conviction that others can understand us.

The book highlights the persecution conducted by the Titoist regime, with the internment of opponents in the gulag on the island of Goli Otok – the “Bald Island”. Those who paid the price were the “hardliners”, who, who knows, perhaps were simply naive, remaining faithful to the Soviet ideal – of Soviet propaganda – of an absolutely egalitarian society, which Tito, with his change, seemed to turn his back on.

Paolo – Nelida’s friend – member of the Communist Youth “had proved the Soviets right, criticizing the rationing of food for the masses, and the luxury of the leaders.” (p. 181) He was interned in the gulag of the Goose Island, paying dearly for his dissidence. Political prisoners were tortured and abused. It was the Titoist re-education school, administered by sadistic torturers. Only today have light begun to be shed on those ignominious pages, ignored for so many years.

Us and them… 

Anna Maria Mori goes on holiday to Istria, several times. “And at this point begins a journey unknown to the rest of Italy and Italians in general: the journey between 'us' and 'them', 'Us and them'. For the Italians of Istria, and here 'the parties' and 'those who remained' are absolutely the same, 'them' are the others: Croats and Slovenes, at this point it makes no difference.”

The Balkan mentality does not change. The animosity towards us emerges quickly. We Italians are truly different from them. Even those of us, Istrians, Fiume and Dalmatians, who have a minimum of warrior spirit must lay down our weapons in the face of the absolute sense of the conflict they have in those lands: “'Lori', the others: they are those, trained by their history and their culture to life as a conflict, either you win or I win, or you lose or I lose. In any case it is better that I win, and that you lose. They behave like this at all times and in all circumstances. Even more so when faced with what, who knows why, is the historical enemy: 'us', the Italians.” (p. 202)

Even the most recent events have confirmed the irreconcilable nature of the mentality of the Balkan ethnic groups. Anna Maria Mori: “And how can we reconcile this 'us' and this 'them'? Especially since they, 'them' (the s'ciavi but this too is racism) have no intention of reconciling, but of dominating, cancelling, cancelling you. We are fighting for a Europe without borders. They are killing each other to mark borders, to establish continuous differences: us and them, they the Serbs, the Serbs and the Croats, the Bosnian Serbs and the Bosnian Croats, the Christian Croats and the Muslim Serbs.” (p. 204) (2)

What if we had stayed? The end of Yugoslavia 

What would have happened if…? Who among us has never asked the question “if”? Anna Maria Mori: “Why did you leave? And you, why did you stay? Does it make sense to continue asking this type of question?” (p. 218) For Milani, who “remained”, and for this reason viewed with suspicion by many of the “parties”, the mistake was perhaps to leave: “And if you had stayed? If with astute patience you had remained in Istria, at home, your houses, your stables, your fields, your apartments, would not have been occupied. All the liberators would have left, one after the other. 'There, this one is over,' we would have commented. 'There, these people have gone too'.” (p. 226)

I too have heard, in the past, this sound of the bell. What can I say? Today it is too late even for the theory of ifs. The lesson of bitterness is so total, in me, that I believe that nothing can now bring comfort, or can aggravate the sense of pain. The death of so many refugees, and the death of a part of ourselves, makes everything absurd and mocking.

Everything went in the worst possible way: and in a mocking way, too. Yugoslavia was hailed for decades as a promised land by our progressives. Life in Italy was dominated by pro-communism and the most shitty opportunism. We refugees were ignored, or considered morally as Nazi-fascists. The aversion to communism prevented many of us from remaining in Italy. But, even abroad, in the Italian consulates we were listed as “born in Yugoslavia”.

Then the good and magnificent neighbors to the east slaughtered each other. And, may God forgive me, only this seemed to me like a return to normality and to the truth of things. The blood began to flow again. The foibe resumed their Balkan function of mass graves. For us, finally, things regained their meaning. The new deaths and the new blood proved us right.

“Bora” by Anna Maria Mori and Nelida Milani was not an easy book to read for me. No, not because it is written in a difficult way, but because it is too painfully true. But if it hurts the heart to find one’s own pain in others – one’s own tragedy – the testimony of others serves to dispel, in part, the blanket of loneliness. Let’s imagine for a moment that no one knew about the Nazi persecution suffered by the Jews. How should those who directly suffered it or whose families suffered it in one way or another feel? Of course, the comparison with the Jews is extreme, probably excessive, but it still allows us to understand that the non-recognition of an exodus, of a persecution, of a collective tragedy is a source of loneliness and bitterness for the survivors.

claudio antonelli

NOTES

1. Among them there were certainly particular cases of those who were forced to stay by the circumstances of life, even though they identified with those who left. Others, however, acted as accomplices of the Titoist regime, feeling not only communists but Slavs in spirit, and competed in anti-Italian zeal to be able to better take advantage of the happy fate that is always the prerogative of the victors: finding a good job, making a career, taking possession of the spoils of the enemy, that is to say the goods left by the refugees. But despite their anti-Italian behavior, they will benefit from the generosity of the Italy "born from the Resistance", which will also give many of them a pension.

   With the annexation of our lands to Yugoslavia, small groups of Italians (it should be noted that they were registered as Italians) emigrated from the peninsula to live in Istria or Fiume, which had become Yugoslavian and communist and therefore became a "workers' paradise" - see the group of Monfalconesi (1947-49), who however soon realised the delusion inflicted on them by the pure stupidity and class hatred that dwelt within them.

   After the collapse of communism, or even well before, these same pro-Yugoslavs and their descendants will discover the great advantages of their own ambiguous Italianness, which they will appropriately inflate and exploit.)

2. Those "remaining" of my Pisino  

On vacation in Italy from Canada, finding myself in Trieste I decided to drive to Pisino (Istria) for a short visit. It was a sunny day. I had the name of a family from Pisino (or “pisinoti” as we Istrians prefer to say) that I wanted to meet.

When I reached Pisino, after having unsuccessfully followed the directions I had in my possession, I turned to a person on the street, showing him the address I had. I was lucky. He pointed out the house, which was not far away. He did so with evident sympathy for me, perhaps because I had spoken to him in Italian. But I detected a certain caution in the way he cast a quick glance around, before pointing out the house.

I knocked. I introduced myself. I brought these people greetings from a “pisinoto”, a certain Nino Percich, from Buenos Aires, a great friend of theirs. As soon as I crossed the threshold, someone in the family rushed to close the curtains of the window, creating a dim light in which my eyes struggled to recognize things and people. Then I managed to see the owner of the house in a corner. He was immobilized in a wheelchair. He had had his legs amputated due to diabetes.

They treated me with affection, as if I were their relative. They immediately offered me ham, bread, and something else very tasty. And brandy, of course.

We talked about the “before”, about when my parents and many others who had left with the “exodus” were in Pisino. The names “Runco”, “Camus” and those of other families from “before” – that distant “before” – were pronounced with love and regret. But always in a low voice, with caution.

I was surprised by the intensity of their regret and the feeling of bitterness that possessed them. I was surprised because after all, these people were “left behind,” that is, they were not like us, “refugees,” “exiles” who had left. Furthermore, according to a certain yardstick, that family was, so to speak, more Slavic in culture than Italian… But “good people,” “country people,” to use the vague expressions my parents had always resorted to in order to attribute an identity that was not exactly Italian, but that was not the enemy of ours either.

They told me about all the times their applications to move to Italy had been rejected by the Yugoslav authorities.

I was not prepared to take in that drama. They told me proudly that they had taught the children Italian. Then the elderly landlady or perhaps the daughter-in-law – I don’t remember exactly – went to the window and peered through the curtains. She signaled me to come. I approached her. She whispered bitterly: “Do you see them?” I saw three or four people on the sidewalk below, as if waiting. “With your departure, they came from all over Yugoslavia. Of our people – and to tell the truth I don’t remember if she said “ours” or “yours” but in the end it was the same – there are so few left.

“We have nothing in common with them. But when we speak we must be careful what we say. They are primitive people, even violent.” He was referring to them: the occupiers, the victors, the Slavs who came to Istria from elsewhere…

claudio antonelli
Source: Heretically – 24/02/2022