Dear Moni Ovadia,

I am writing to you regarding your article that appeared on February 12, 2019 in Il Manifesto and was taken up by the blog RemoContro entitled: Auschwitz and Salvini's Foibe.

First of all, I would like to introduce myself. I was born in the late 50s in a Julian-Dalmatian refugee settlement in Rome. My parents were exiles, like my wife's. My family, traditionally Catholic, liberal, democratic (like almost all of our family), suffered not only the Exodus from their hometown, but also persecution in peacetime for being Italian, all after having an uncle who, refusing to fight for the Germans, after September 8, was deported from Pola, where he was a Navy soldier, to Dachau, along with many others.

I live in Pomezia, and when she came to present one of her works ( The Laughing Jew ) at the Libreria Memoria, together with the amazing Vladimir Denissenkov, I was there. I listened in reverent silence to her moving performance and, at the end, amid the crowd, I timidly approached her and told her I was a second-generation refugee from an Adriatic island. She took the book I had just bought from me and wrote a dedication that I sometimes look at with affection: "To Anthony, who knows the ways of the Exodus."

I tell you all this not out of flattery, but because of the civilization from which I was born, the culture from which I come, I, proudly defined as an Adriatic Jew , have always admired you for your art; not for your political ideas, but for your humanity, different from mine, but still a living humanity.

I begin, therefore, with what unites us, as you say in your article: " I consider any violence deliberately perpetrated against an innocent human being an unjustifiable crime ." It would be enough to stop there. But there is also our aversion to the death penalty that unites us, because, like you: " I believe that the value of life is supreme ." However, after this sentence quoted in your speech, everything takes on the sinister feel of the justificationist. Let me explain.

Since the promulgation of law 92/2004 – establishing the Day of Remembrance -, desired with dignity and firmness by the world of the Julian-Dalmatian Exodus, a season of active testimony has followed which has seen the protagonists of the first generation – together with descendants and people of good will, expression of a civil, free and justice-loving society – tell: the historical events suffered in Istria, Fiume, Quarnaro and Dalmatia, the reasons for an ethnic hatred and, finally, the disastrous consequences for an entire population in search of the recomposition of its own identity.

Following such a spontaneous mobilization and the increasing diffusion of an initially tenuous knowledge on these issues, in an increasingly sensitive cultural context, we have seen an increase in actions aimed at providing misleading, justificatory, and reductionist interpretations of abominable acts, such as, precisely, the executions carried out on the basis of ethnic hatred (and we are direct witnesses of this) and political ideology.

Sometimes, we witness with astonishment the exclusion of our people in the historical dissemination that takes place, for example, in schools and we take note of a narration of the history of the Eastern Adriatic where the fascist element is represented as a fundamental question from which to start again to understand, as far as possible, what happened afterwards, that is, what was the drama of the ethnic cleansing of the Italian speakers in Istria and Dalmatia.

Contextualize is the watchword of those who justify.

However, starting the history of the eastern Adriatic from the advent of the fascist regime in 22 clearly appears to limit the understanding of complex events. Citing, for example, the burning of the Narodni Dom (the People's House, a meeting place for Trieste's Slovenian community) in 1920 while ignoring the Split massacre, which occurred a few days earlier, or other bloody events, such as the Maresego massacre in 1921 (to cite just three news stories that testify to a poisonous climate evident since 1919), or, again, without going further back, the failure to return Venice's lands after the Congress of Vienna and omitting the Austrian Crown's resolution of 12 November 1866, which instituted the first ethnic cleansing of Italian-speakers in Dalmatia (1870-1900), leads to a truncated history. A narration of the story, in fact, which leads the listener to say: “ ah, well, but if things were like this then it is understandable that… ”.

In justificationist storytelling , the pattern is more or less the following: the burning of the Narodni Dom, precisely, the forced denationalization of the Slavic element in the New Italian Provinces, the aggression of Yugoslavia, the citation of General Roatta's phrase, the occupation of Ljubljana during the Second World War (which is deliberately confused with the assignment of the Karst territories after 1918 established by the Treaty of Rapallo), the concentration camps of Arbe and Gonars. This narrative, systematically infected by the disease of presentism, fails to mention what happened before the First World War , nor, above all, what happened after 1945 , forgetting not only the murders that continued until the 50s, but also, for example, the persecution of everything that sounded Italian by the Croatian Catholic Church, so ideologically violent that it lasted long before and long after the end of the Second World War. (For purely illustrative purposes, I cite two events at which I was physically present: i) in 1974, in the church of the place where my family comes from, the Italian inscriptions of a Via Crucis, a work composed of 14 oils on canvas from the late 700th century in Venice, were torn down; ii) in 2001, a parish priest of the same locality burned, before my eyes, the parish books because, I quote: “they were written in Italian” – a fact which then generated lively protest from those who live there today, Italian-speaking Croatians and immigrant Croatians from the interior, all decidedly intellectually honest.)

What connection should such events that occurred in peacetime have with war? Is it right to kill the friend/relative/acquaintance of a fascist, because he is a friend/relative/acquaintance of a fascist? And even if the answer were yes, then, should it be right to kill the friend/relative/acquaintance of someone who has committed other atrocities? Today's news offers plenty of ideas.

The justificationist, therefore, by telling only a part of the truth, the one that suits an ideological group, leads the listener to the crucial phrase: " Ah, well, but if things were like this, then it's understandable that... ". But it is precisely in that " it's understandable that... " that the question of a civil society is at stake: if you start by justifying one abomination, you then move on to justify another, until you justify the Srebrenica massacre and others. And so history will have taught us nothing and Memory will have been in vain. Until we hear some madman who, sooner or later, will argue that the Nazi massacres during the war should be put into context!

" What is the violent origin of the foibe? " he writes in his article. But why? Does it matter? If life is life and must be protected, is it important to know the motive for a crime? If we know it, will it horrify us less? We will certainly know the story better, but then it would be good to know it all without stopping at the end of the war and justifying, for example, in this way:

• The death, on August 18, 1946, of a hundred people on a beach in Vergarola, near Pola, after the explosion of nine tons of bombs judged to be inert;
• The death of Don Francis Boniface (blessed of the Catholic Church), killed by four 'popular guards' on 11 September 1946;
• The death of Ferdinando, German e John Gulin, arrested on November 29, 1946, massacred, locked in bags and thrown into the sea;
• The death of Don Miroslav Bulešić (also blessed), who was killed by partisans on 24 August 1947 to save the Eucharistic Bread;
• The death of Federico Altin, died on September 12, 1948 after having his tongue amputated by the Titoists, who did not allow the doctor to provide assistance;
• The death of Zorovich Brothers, disappeared in 1956 while fleeing by sea to Italy (like my father-in-law) and found by fishermen a few years ago off the coast of Cigale, near the island of Lussino, with their skulls pierced by a bullet hole.

We have many cases like these. The tragedy is that all this occurred well beyond the spring of 1945. How can all this be justified? I don't think there are any acceptable answers. However violent the origin of such a reaction may have been: "a furious insistence on revenge did not generate peace" (see: David Lindley: Incertezza , Einaudi 2007). And indeed, the communist revolution in the Balkans and, for our part, on the eastern coast of the Adriatic, failed miserably, having been skillfully exploited by nationalisms that, by contrast, are still smoldering under the ashes today.

Continuing his speech, I come across a concept often invoked, both for better and for worse: " Are Italians good people? " I reflect and say I don't know the answer. One cannot generalize. Some are good and some are not. They were not good people when they greeted the racial laws with indifference , showing almost no reaction when six-year-old children were expelled from school, and not lifting a finger when their Jewish fellow citizens were sent to deportation and extermination. They were not good people when they threw stones at Julian-Dalmatian refugees crammed into freight cars and when they spilled the milk intended for their children, prepared by the Red Cross. They weren't good people when my teachers in Rome (adults...), in the 60s, took me out of my desk , put me in the middle of a classroom and, because I only spoke the Istrian-Venetian dialect, they mocked and ridiculed me for my inability to pronounce double letters and open and closed vowels, in the midst of a crowd of classmates who looked at me like a puppet to be kicked, inside and outside the school.

That the politicians of this infantile people, with short memories and blissfully less cultured, have always sought their own gain is nothing new. For example, the war debt that the Italian state, the aggressor, owed to Yugoslavia was repaid with the homes of the exiles. Naturally, once emptied by the millennia-old occupiers, the governments of a ragged and beggarly Italy saw it as a great deal to use those properties to repay an otherwise unpayable debt. It's a shame that this violated the international treaties signed by Italy itself, which prevented the expropriation of the property of the citizens of those lands. But this is just one of the many civil rights that we, the people of the Julian-Dalmatian Exodus, are still waiting to see respected after more than 70 years. It seems that this business of respecting civil rights applies only to a certain class of people, never to us, second-class citizens.

Moreover, the popular narrative, cleverly instigated by fake news generators like Piero Montagnani , a post-war PCI leader in Milan, portrayed our people as " relics of the republic, who clog up the life of the cities and offend them with their presence and ostentatious opulence " (see: L'Unità , Northern Italy Edition, Year XXIII, No. 284, Saturday, November 30, 1946). In short, the perception of our people was a bit like the Jews for the populations of Eastern Europe: unwelcome citizens possessing great wealth (see: Martin Pollack: Paesaggi contaminati , Keller, 2016). Ultimately, if the refugees were wealthy, there was no need to be too scrupulous about using their real estate to balance the books for the homeland.

Political parties have exploited not only our history , but every human history to suit their own interests . However, I cannot fail to point out one point in favor of Salvini . I was present in Basovizza on February 10th, and our Interior Minister—it's not true that he equated Auschwitz with the foibe (you can listen to the recording)—in his speech, he wondered what conceptual difference there could possibly be between a crime against a child exterminated in a Nazi camp and a child thrown into a foibe. The hyperbole could only be rhetorical.

We always argue over words, but beyond the beautiful and right words, we are here , still struggling to convey a concept of Memory capable of generating a seed of positivity in our society , just as we wait to see our rights satisfied by a State that, year after year, tells us: "not now because the moment is delicate", completely absorbed in resolving the next emergency...

Yet we truly want to demine a contaminated landscape , precisely because an urgent need for knowledge, justice, truth, and equity is irrepressible, and we cannot help but seek every path to a shared memory . We know what suffering and marginalization are, and we cannot give up in a battle for civilization that seeks only to capitalize on a negative experience so it never happens again. And we want to do this by integrating, not dividing.

Years ago, in 2013, just after being elected to the leadership of the largest organization of Julian-Dalmatian exiles (the National Association of Venezia Giulia and Dalmatia, which arose from the refugee camps scattered throughout every province), I went to see the then president of the ANPI , Professor Carlo Smuraglia . It was May, and I entered the elegant building in the Prati district of Rome, headquarters of the Association of Italian Partisans, and was observed by the staff as if I were a Martian. The professor was very kind. We sat around a table and I explained the reason for my request for a visit: “ Professor, if we want to defuse once and for all the controversies, the battles, the verbal abuse, the political exploitation, if we want to build a shared memory, let's form a table. Let's form a study group, let's include some Historians with a capital 'H' , let's dig into history together, let's search deeply for the truth, because we are not afraid of it, we know from now what will emerge . Our people, until the advent of the Third War of Independence, didn't even have the concept of nationalism. Powers we never sought have played unworthy games on our heads, and they have been doing so since the end of the Venetian Republic. But not the lies about us! Let's search together. Let's bring the truth to light. ”

We're still here waiting for a response to an offer that's still valid . But if that response doesn't arrive, then it's quite clear we're just trying to keep a controversy going that we didn't want and didn't seek.

Whose rhetoric would it be, then?

The rhetoric about the foibe doesn't belong to us, because we are a part of living history and, if anything, we bear witness to what we have endured. Certainly, the rhetoric of anti-fascism is too narrow for us, the kind that deliberately ignores the fact that, while on April 25th, the Italy to the left of Trieste was freed, the Italy to the right was occupied, and that those occupiers, exploiting the communist umbrella, carried out against Italian-speakers what was common in the Black Sea until the 90s: ethnic cleansing . Except that, when the Wall fell, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Herzegovinians, Slovenes, and Montenegrins were fighting among themselves, whereas forty years earlier they were all doing so together against a single ethnic group.

Division isn't in our DNA, but rather the acceptance of diversity; we don't have a single family that isn't mixed (a horrible term, but it gets the point across). Even the most illiterate of our first-generation exiles knew at least two languages ​​and two dialects. Anyone who touched the eastern Adriatic was instantly connected to a network of connections that ignored differences of language, race, and religion.

Precisely because we want to work for peace, we, who have never broken a glass in our lives, want to carry out a shared work on our memory; a work in which we offer respect for the diversity of others, asking for it with dignity for our own.

For this reason, I ask you to help me and us create the conditions so that a climate of mutual understanding and sharing can finally begin within our society, without justifying, minimizing, denying, or contextualizing the tragedies of peoples or individuals, but simply by understanding . Yes, I don't believe there can be any other path than mutual understanding and respect. To this can only be added knowledge of the facts. Of all the facts. Of the only facts that clearly and unambiguously outline history. We can leave interpretations to individuals, but it is more necessary than ever to come together to bring the truth to light and finally work for a moral justice that is long overdue, yet always snubbed, minimized, downgraded.

It is for all this that I would like to take you to see our land and our places. I would like to show you with my own eyes an overwhelming beauty that cannot help but give rise to a feeling of goodness towards life. I would like to take you to Punta Pax Tecum on a day of clear bora wind. Show you the Gulf of Quarnaro, with Fianona and Istria behind you and guide your gaze from Abbazia to Ossero and further down, into Dalmatia. And finally, meditate on the landscapes that still hide victims of a senseless hatred that must never happen again. Our civilization is at stake.

 

Antonio Ballarin

President of the Federation of Associations of Istrian, Fiuman and Dalmatian Exiles

Rome, 19 March 2019