In 1848, while the “Springtime of Peoples” raged throughout Europe, the city of Trieste remained almost inert. Almost, because, in solidarity with the Venetian uprisings that brought the Republic of San Marco to prominence, a portion of the Italian community took to the streets in the most important port of the Habsburg Empire, but the majority of the citizens remained neutral and their loyalty to Vienna earned the city the title of “Urbs fidelissima”. Faced with this disappointment, the young Giacomo Venezian, the leader of the Triestine patriots, reached the Roman Republic and died in its defense, inaugurating a sequence that would lead numerous Triestines to exfiltrate to fight in the Wars of Independence and in Garibaldi's expeditions. Furthermore, Venezian came from the prosperous local Jewish community, which, especially after having seen the broad religious freedoms that the Albertine Statute granted, firmly espoused the cause of Italianness.

Another illustrious example of such participation is that of Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, a glottologist from the Jewish community of Gorizia, who was responsible for the successful coining in 1863 of the terms Venezia Giulia, which indicated the region still under the Habsburg rule, inhabited mainly by Italian speakers and enclosed between the Adriatic Sea and the Julian Alps (Gorizia, Trieste and Istria), Venezia Euganea and Venezia Tridentina, which were equally excluded from the annexations of the Second War of Independence and were the object of the ambitions of the newly formed Kingdom of Italy.

On the eve of the First World War, members of the Jewish and Italian elites of Trieste found themselves even more united in their desire for emancipation from Austria-Hungary. Some because they observed with concern the consensus that had gathered the Mayor of Vienna Karl Lueger, whose anti-Semitic and generally contemptuous policies towards the non-German communities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire aroused the admiration of a young Adolf Hitler among many, others because the pro-Slavic policy of influential Viennese circles with an anti-Italian function was now irreversible. Eugenio Morpurgo, Eugenio Vivante, Teodoro Mayer and Giacomo Venezian (descendant of the patriot of the same name, among the founders of the Dante Alighieri Society and fallen on the Carso front) were the intellectuals who best expressed the adhesion of the Jewish community of Trieste to the irredentist struggle.

The victorious results for Italy in the Great War aroused initial enthusiasm in the annexed provinces and the rise of fascism itself, which proposed itself as the sublimation of Italianness, aroused particular dismay among the former irredentists only in the republican and Mazzinian fringes. The proclamation of the racial laws by Mussolini in Trieste during a trip to the sites of the Great War, on the twentieth anniversary of the victory, culminating with the inauguration of the Redipuglia military shrine, therefore aroused a trauma in the Julian Jewish component, which by now considered itself part of the Italian national community and had not associated itself with the flow of Jews who set sail on the Lloyd Triestino ships for Palestine, inflamed by the Zionist project and threatened by the anti-Semitic policies of the National Socialists.

This was a severe blow to members of the Italian Jewish community in general, but Trieste in particular, who had completed a process of assimilation characterized by passionate adherence to the Risorgimento and even to the Fascist regime, seen as the final stage in the triumph of the Italian identity with which they had identified. Things would certainly get worse when, on September 8, 1943, the Kingdom of Italy was eclipsed, replaced by the cumbersome presence of the German army and the SS supporting the nascent Italian Social Republic. In particular, the provinces of Udine, Gorizia, Ljubljana (annexed autonomously in 1941), Trieste, Pola, and Fiume became part of the Adriatic Coast Operational Zone, where the prerogatives of the RSI were purely formal and in practice it was a military governorate headed by High Commissioner Friedrich Rainer, Gauleiter of Carinthia.

Roundups, searches and arrests reduced to a minimum the Jewish communities of Trieste, Gorizia and Fiume, rooted for centuries and sent to the concentration camps passing through the Risiera di San Sabba. It was an old rice mill requisitioned by the German troops who arrived in the city after the proclamation of the Armistice, which had been used initially as an internment camp for Italian soldiers taken prisoner following the political, military and institutional disarray of September 8. Later it became a prison camp in which partisans, anti-fascists and entire Jewish families were detained in inhumane conditions waiting to be sent to Dachau, Auschwitz and Mauthausen as part of the extermination of 6 million Jews from all over Europe. The Bishop of Trieste, Antonio Santin, often tried to intercede for many of the prisoners in this camp, managing, for example, to free the former irredentist volunteer Giani Stuparich and his family (his wife belonged to the Jewish community), but he did not always succeed in obtaining the release of Jews who had married Catholic spouses.

A point of reference in Italy for the Nazi concentration camp archipelago, the Risiera also saw harsh interrogations carried out within its squalid walls, accompanied by torture and violence that often continued until the prisoner's death. In order to avoid the disposal of these corpses, the dryer used to process the rice was converted into a crematorium, which was destroyed by the Germans with dynamite on the night between 29 and 30 April 1945, on the eve of the uprising of the National Liberation Committee of Trieste that would have forced the Germans to barricade themselves in a few strategic points of the city centre while waiting to surrender to a regular army. It is estimated that over 8.000 people passed through the Risiera on their way to the concentration camps, while the estimate of the victims killed here varies between 3.000 and 5.000 units.

In their ruthless work, the German police forces under the command of Odilo Lotario Globočnik relied on the support of Ukrainian collaborators who had been evacuated from their hometowns due to the collapse of the Russian front, but who had gained gruesome experience in extermination operations during the devastating Operation Reinhard . The anti-partisan struggle was also conducted according to the dictates of the "Bandenkampf," a manual of counter-guerrilla operations drawn up based on experience gained on the Eastern Front, which had led the German army to carry out the harshest reprisals against resistance forces and their alleged supporters. Also involved in these operations were the men of the Special Inspectorate of Public Security for Venezia Giulia, established in 1942 to counter the Slovenian partisan struggle that was spreading from the province of Ljubljana into the Slavic communities of Trieste and Gorizia.

Declared a National Monument in 1965, the Risiera during the years of the Anglo-American Military Government that followed the failure to create the Free Territory of Trieste as foreseen by the diktat of 10 February 1947, had been adapted as a Refugee Collection Centre for the benefit of a portion of the thousands of Istrians, Fiume and Dalmatians who reached the Julian capital by taking advantage of the options provided for by the Peace Treaty or by makeshift means and defying the Yugoslavian armed surveillance along the border, as well as dissidents against the regimes that were consolidating in Eastern Europe.

Lorenzo Salimbeni