"The smell of the decomposing bodies was pestilential, the air unbreathable for kilometers. My brave companions, firefighters stationed in Pola, would gulp down cognac before lowering themselves into the sinkhole: they would descend for hundreds of meters with two ropes and a kind of chair, put the body in the coffin and give four pulls of the rope, the signal to say pull me up."

A century of life was not enough for Giuseppe Comand to erase from his memory the still unbearable memory, decades old yet ever vivid: "74 years have passed, but I can still smell that smell, and above all the words of my companions, who, shocked, vented every evening by recounting what they had found..."

Today he is 97 years old; he was 23 in those dramatic days, following the Armistice of September 8, 1943, when the sudden change of front in the Julian regions left Italian citizens caught between two fires: Tito's communist partisans on one side, their former Nazi allies on the other. "I certainly wasn't a hero," Comand says today in his home in Latisana, "the same one where I was born on June 13, 1920." In other words, he cared about everything "except the war: I just wanted to go back to my home."

A graduate in Agriculture in Udine, in 1939 at the outbreak of the Second World War he received the well-known call-up notice, reported to the Trieste district and was assigned to Africa with the XI Military Engineers, but «due to a lack of armored vehicles I was instead sent back to Udine, assigned to territorial defense: I received phone calls from the overflight officers, so that the anti-aircraft guns would not fire if Italian planes passed by».

Two years later, in 1941, he was chosen from a group of soldiers transferred to Sussak, near Fiume (then Italy, now Croatia) to join the Fire Brigade, with the role of storekeeper and as a person in charge of compiling the marching sons. «I remember September 8 perfectly, when Captain Casati announced the end of the war, then he gave me some documents to take to Tersatto, near Fiume, to the colonel... But at the colonel's desk I found Marko, a Croat in his 40s, the son of the innkeeper, sitting, who told me «from today the colonel is no longer there, I am the commander of all the partisans in the area». I was a friend of his sister Beba, so he offered me to dress in civilian clothes and desert. He would have me escorted to Monfalcone, then I would have managed to get to Latisana... But it would have been high treason against my companions, so I refused. The only time I played the hero I got myself into trouble…».

Because from that day on, Istria experienced the first wave of ethnic cleansing by Tito's communist partisans, who rounded up Italian citizens from house to house and threw them into the sinkholes. "My company set out trying to reach Trieste," Comand recounts, "but the roads were infested with partisans with the red star, so we had to detour between Pisino and Pola and risked our lives several times. In Pola we camped in the military sports field, without water or food. The first night we were surrounded by Tito's men, then, out of the frying pan into the fire, we fell into the hands of the Germans: they took away our stars and swore that if we ran away, our families would be interned in Germany. And that's when they assigned us to exhume those poor bodies from the sinkholes, to help the Pola Fire Brigade led by the legendary Marshal Harzarich..."

Arnaldo Harzarich (from Pola, who died in exile in Merano in 1973), a Gold Medal for Civil Valor, and his team searched several foibe from October 43, recovering over 250 bodies. After the war ended, in 1945 he presented the valuable documentation to the Allied authorities, describing the work he had done and the awards he had received, foibe by foibe. "At Vines, he was the first to descend, without wearing a mask, but he soon had to re-emerge due to the stench. I was so shocked that I shouted to the fascist marshal in charge of us to shoot me because I would never have descended into that terrifying passage. So he allowed me to recover more bodies, under the rubble of a house in Pazin that had been bombed by the Germans in retaliation. I remember that I had to find the body of Toni Fornèr, the baker's nickname, and his two daughters came every day to ask if we had found their father."

In the evening, however, the team returned from the foibe "and then I had to wash the rubber suits of Harzarich's men. The men, who had received the self-contained breathing apparatus with tanks on their backs from Pola, pulled up about eighty bodies from the Foiba di Vines alone in those days, plus another forty from an open-air sand quarry near Pisino... Their stories were frightening, as was the smell that permeated the suits when I threw them into the cement tanks filled with disinfectant".

Dozens of bodies were also recovered from the bottom of the Villa Surani Foiba, and among them a half-naked girl, "not lying down but with her back against the rock face, her eyes wide open, looking upward. Marshal Harzarich himself described that gaze upward 'as if she had a celestial vision', those are his words... It's the first time I've told anyone about it," Comand bursts into tears, serene and unwavering in his memories until this moment. He repeats what two sisters who were cooking for Harzarich's team at the time, and who had lost a brother in the foiba, told him: "That girl had been kidnapped by the partisans, and all night her screams could be heard as they tortured and gang-raped her. She was Norma Cossetto, the symbolic figure of the martyrdom of the foiba victims ." I won't add what they did to her before throwing her into the pit alive, I can't: I was shocked even then, but those were times when we were accustomed to horror, now I suffer even more."

Having finally returned home to Latisana at the end of 43, Giuseppe Comand married Modesta, who had passed away two years earlier at the age of 92, and only in 2009 did he have the courage to take her and their two children to Istria, "but never to the Foibe, too scary." Aware of being the last eyewitness among the men who saw the bodies of our innocent Italians rise in clusters from the depths of the Foibe (since then no one has ever descended to recover the other thousands of victims), he felt a duty to testify: "I, who saw it, am sick when anyone dares to deny Tito's massacres and the Foibe. It would be enough to descend today to the bottom of the many remaining unexplored pits and continue Marshal Harzarich's work. How many poor people are down there, unburied."

Like Toni il Fornèr's daughters, there are still many survivors alive who claim the body of their father or mother or older brother, still swallowed up by the silence of a little-told story. And of an Italy that does not know how to ask for its dead back.

Source: occur