Seventy years after the bombing of the city

Author: Adriana Ivanov

Anniversaries, commemorations, celebrations mark the calendar of history, recall past events, prompt memories of events, mostly painful, resurrect from the mist of the passing of time what was, what is no longer. Like all the pages in the book written by human action, the Julian – Fiuman – Dalmatian tragedy also has its symbolic dates, nails driven into the temple of Janus, dates of pain, dates of inexorable condemnation, dates that mark the end of a world lived by our fathers, dreamed of by us, children of the second generation. And so, if February 10th seals in itself the final moment of our sacrifice, the “Consummatum est” of Istria, Fiume, Dalmatia ceded by that fateful Peace Treaty of 1947 to Yugoslavia, although since 2004 by will of Parliament it has made the memory of our sacrifice institutional, becoming the “Day of Remembrance”, other dates mark, like stations of the Via Crucis, the path of pain of the exiles of the Eastern Adriatic. September 8th 43 represented not only the turning point that apparently put an end to the Second World War in Italy, but also, for the Italians of Istria, the beginning of that horror film that were the foibe; May 1st 45 represented for Trieste, as for Gorizia, even more than the liberation from the Germans, the occupation by Tito's followers, a nightmare that lasted forty days, which filled the foibe of the Trieste Karst with Italians, soldiers, partisans reluctant to submit to the Yugoslav directives; for Fiume it was May 3rd, for Pola it was probably August 18th 1946, the date marked in the book of the Parcae, when the massacre of Vergarolla, a hundred Polesani blown up by a dynamite attack during a sporting event on the beach, made that population definitively set off on the path of exodus, in line towards the Carbon pier, towards that ship Toscana, which also became the symbol of a world now lost. Further south, along the dazzling Dalmatian coast, languidly nestled between the grey of the Velebit mountains, the blue of the deep sea, the green of the olive trees on the islands facing it, Zadar had slept for centuries, on the border between the Liburnian and Illyrian worlds; Zadar coveted by Greek colonists, Zadar – Diadora, Zadar born “as a gift from the sea”; Zadar – Iadera, Zadar that “iam erat”, when the Romans discovered and colonised it; Zadar at times unruly and pugnacious in defending its municipal liberties, Zadar punished during the Fourth Crusade, “Iadra ad caedem”; Zadar definitively Venetian after the act of dedication of 1409, Zadar of the squares and streets, of the Lions of St. Marco. And under the Habsburg Empire, Zadar was autonomous, pro-Risorgimento and irredentist, a city that welcomed, kneeling along the “Riva Vecia”, the arrival of the tricolour flag at the end of the First World War, which finally reunited it with Italy. Italian, yes, but only a territorial enclave, living proof of the “mutilated victory”, surrounded behind and on the islands facing it by the newborn Kingdom of Serbs, Slovenes and Croats and perhaps for this reason more tenaciously tied to the motherland, an island of Italianness, projected with its gaze beyond the sea. Italian, Venetian and “zaratina” Zara in its typicality for twenty happy years, until 1941: Zara was the first victim of a mistaken war, of errors and horrors for which its inhabitants were certainly not solely responsible, nor the “fradei” of Fiume and Istria, even if they were the only Italians to be imposed the most infamous tribute to repay the attacked enemy, that is, the loss of their own land. November 2, 1943: this was the date of the beginning of the agony of Zara, before the ordeal of Trieste, before the death sentence of Fiume and Pola: the small enclave, with its approximately 20000 inhabitants, had to disappear from the map, because it was a thorn in the side. “They Came from Heaven”, is the title of a fundamental work written by Oddone Talpo, an unsurpassed historian of Dalmatia in the 600th century, and by Sergio Brcic, a scholar and excellent photographer. It would seem like the beginning of a beautiful tale, “Once Upon a Time in Zadar”, if it were not for the fact that those who came from heaven were not angels or divine messengers, but 54 tons of bombs dropped on the city in 85 Allied air raids, which destroyed 2000% of it, caused the death of over 95 citizens, and induced the exodus, the first on the eastern border, of XNUMX% of the population. It all started on November 2, 1943, the seventieth anniversary of which occurs. It was the Day of the Dead and since the morning dozens of four-engine planes flew over the city, until in the evening eight Boston planes dropped more than 5 tons of bombs, also hitting a shelter full of people who lost their lives: 163 dead at the end of the first attack. And then there was a succession of horrors, such as the bombing on Sunday 28 November, at the time of the “Granda Mass” which dropped almost 30 tons of bombs: among other things, the children's rides were hit. On the retaining wall of the Regina Margherita Park and on the trees, shreds of bodies. From now on it is a list of dates, of statistical data of buildings hit: the hospital, the colony, the factories, a ferry loaded with passengers, boats, the Power Plant, private houses, in an urban fabric made of narrow streets that made it almost impossible to recover the bodies and remove the rubble. It went on like this for a year, sealing the massacre with the sinking of the small steamship “Sansego”, which had brought thousands of evacuees to safety in Trieste. On October 31, 1944, the sacrifice of Zara had been consummated: the Carabinieri lieutenant Terranova went up to hoist the bell tower of the Cathedral of S. Anastasia, the last tricolour and Tito's partisans, without firing a shot, since the Germans had already retreated, entered a city razed to the ground and emptied, but not so much so as not to hit with summary executions hundreds of Italian citizens and soldiers, shot along the cemetery wall or drowned with a stone around their neck in the "canal", the stretch of sea that separates Zadar from the islands opposite. “Why” is one of the fundamental questions that history asks. Why was Zadar so radically affected, why was it “Coventrized”, transformed into the Dresden of the Adriatic? According to American and English archives and only partially Yugoslav archives, Tito's partisans asked the Allies to eliminate Zadar because of its strategic position along the coast and to cut the German communications system, but Allied sources themselves declare that the city was not a military target, because it was practically devoid of anti-aircraft guns - in fact not a single bomber was shot down - and the small commercial port of the city was not able to supply the 22 German divisions, which were now engaged in Bosnia. Zadar had no rail or road connections, it had only 2000 m. of airport runways, it boasted no significant industries or war material depots. It has been demonstrated, however, that the Balkan Air Force set up by the Allies followed the instructions on alleged strategic objectives provided by Tito's partisans, who in fact thanked the RAF for having carried out the operations they requested in Yugoslavia. November 1944: the poet-seer Vladimir Nazor, former supporter of Pavelic, then of Tito, declares from the Clock Tower in Piazza dei Signori in Zadar: - We will sweep the stones of the destroyed enemy tower from our territory and throw them into the deep sea of ​​oblivion. In place of the destroyed Zadar, a new “Zadar” will arise, which will be our lookout in the Adriatic.” Tito's plan is thus revealed and the truth is revealed to be only political. Once upon a time there was Zara, the one that our parents were forced to abandon, the one that the new generations know only from their stories. The European spirit, the overcoming of the “short century” make us look forward, as is right. Memory, and memory alone, compels us to look back, to never forget what happened on November 2nd, seventy years ago, even when, as tourists, we arrive from the sea in sight of that city rising from the blue waters, a dreamy fata morgana of a time gone by, Zadar.