Historian Eric Gobetti, who is photographed in Tito's places with his fist raised, claims that the term foibe "evokes barbaric scenarios" while "they were only burial places"

by Lucia Bellaspiga – 10/02/2021
Source: occur

“In the current European context, the equation between the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century (fascism and communism) is now an accepted fact. politically, despite the many protests of the scholars”, laments Eric Gobetti, born in 1973, in the introduction to his book So what about the foibe?, published by Laterza close to the Day of Remembrance of the Foibe and the exodus of Italians from Istria, Fiume and Dalmatia. Incredibly, Gobetti does not seem to endorse the recent Resolution of the European Parliament against any dictatorship, as one would expect from a 21st century Euro-citizen, who also defines himself as a historian: the Europe that looks to the future rejects equally all the chasms of inhuman violence, black or red, and this does not seem to convince him. As well as the fact that since 2004 the Parliament has established the Day of Remembrance, to break a silence that lasted 60 years on the tragedy of the Julian Dalmatians, the only Italians who at the end of the Second World War did not know the Liberation, but fell directly under a new dictatorship equal and contrary to fascism, Tito's communism. "This book was born from an urgency", Gobetti declares from the beginning, that of "stopping the mechanism that has been set in motion", which would make the Day of Remembrance "a fascist memorial date". The intent, therefore, would be to tear the celebration away from the groups of fascist-clad twenty-year-olds who objectively ride it, forgetting that the tragedy arose precisely from a war of aggression wanted by the Duce alongside the Nazis: a laudable intent, if it were not for the fact that Gobetti instead “contextualizes” every Yugoslavian atrocity, ending up, despite himself, by justifying the unjustifiable and thus obtaining the opposite effect of demonstrating that memory is not yet shared.

His work – he assures – is written for those who know nothing about the Foibe and the exodus, but he does not dedicate a single line to the protagonists, those who saw and experienced it first-hand. It is true that history and memory are different things, but the intense memoirs of the witnesses are completely excluded from his “Bibliografia ragionata” (as he calls it): not a panorama of the vast existing production, but the scant list of authors largely oriented. The rest, he says, is “of little historiographical value” or written “with a simplistically victimist perspective”. Among the “victimists” there is even Graziano Udovisi, the only foibe victim who came out alive from the abyss into which he had been thrown and able, many years later, to describe the horror he experienced.

Gobetti does not deny the evidence, the Foibe exist and the corpses still exist today at the bottom, just as the roundups exist, the show trials, the slavery in forced labor camps, the terror brought by Tito's partisans into the heart of a civilian population and therefore the mass flight of Istrians, Fiume and Dalmatians from their lands, but all this "contextualizes", and therefore in a nutshell justifies.

First of all, the Foibe. The use of the name as a symbol of the entire tragedy is “not very correct”, in fact it evokes “a scenario of massacres conducted with barbaric methods”. With a disconcerting conspiracy, he ventures a semantic comparison with what he instead considers a tribute to the Nazis: “In the opposite sense – he denounces – the expression 'gas chambers' is used, thus giving the impression of a high level of technicality”… The Foibe were not very advanced, the gas was technological. The Foibe, he explains, were not at all “an instrument of execution” but rather a simple “burial place”, especially since, Gobetti claims, bodies were usually thrown in already. The testimonies that do not match the bizarre theory (the “corpses” were killed a moment before, on the edge of the foibe) are “macabre stories” not worthy of trust. Despite the memories of the trucks loaded with living Italians to be thrown into the foibe, still whispered today by the last elderly people who saw them leave; despite the story of Graziano Udovisi (tied with wire, only the first in line who dragged the others down was shot); despite the testimonies of the children still alive, who as children went under the prison bars to cry out a desperate affection to their father (until the day he didn't answer me anymore…); and despite the very recent discoveries of mass graves with the bodies of tens of thousands of opponents of Tito's regime (mostly Croatian and Slovenian citizens): along the margin hundreds of ammunition, proving that they were executed on the spot.

The first massacre of Italians took place after September 8, 43, but for Gobetti "the aim seemed to be to bring order", "to judge the guilty" in a civil manner. In reality, Tito's objective was to eliminate any real or presumed obstacle to the Yugoslav occupation of the Italian region, from the shopkeeper to the priest, from the doctor to the teacher: it was big game hunting, and the report drawn up on November 6, 43 by Captain Zvonko Babic-Zulija for the Information Centre for the Croatian Littoral and Istria, organ of the Croatian liberation movement. Strange that the historian Gobetti does not know it. Not only that: of the 217 bodies recovered in '43 by the Fire Brigade (most still lie down there) "about half were military". Granted that if this were true it would justify nothing, the identities ascertained were 134: 116 civilians and 18 soldiers.

At the end of the war, he then underlines, only “a small part of the victims” died in the foibe because, Gobetti candidly assures, “the majority of deaths occur in the internment camps”, where people die, yes, but “not as a result of the sentences, but rather because of the living conditions”: they are communist concentration camps “comparable and even worse than the fascist internment camps”. An accusation, finally? No: it seems that dying of starvation is more civilized than “that image of primitive violence conveyed by the term 'foibe'”. Furthermore, “the violence committed by the liberators at the end of the war”, that is, in times of peace, would be a “modern” phenomenon, because it occurred “all over Europe”. So they all do it, in short…

In reality he forgets that no other victorious country in 45 persecuted the people it had liberated. Tito had to “establish a new communist regime” – Gobetti contextualizes –, therefore what made “the number of victims of partisan violence particularly high at the end of the war” was the “will to preventatively repress any opponents”, practically a necessary choice. A ferocity that – Gobetti recalls – struck the Italians in Istria but Croatians and Slovenians inside with hundreds of thousands of deaths. A democratic massacre, in short, not an anti-Italian cleansing. And the first to fall would be the Nazi collaborators, “for example the 97 members of the Guardia di Finanza arrested at the beginning of May 1945”. Is it possible that he doesn’t know that the financiers themselves had participated in the insurrection of the CLN in Trieste against the Germans a few days earlier?

Even the very unproletarian expropriations (to the detriment of anyone, from the farmer to the fisherman, whose boat the regime even took away) would be “a path to modernization”. For this reason Gobetti finds it strange that the poverty induced by communism, forced collectivization and “voluntary work” induce the entire population to flee towards the regions that remained Italian. The exodus of hundreds of thousands of people, which Gobetti calls a voluntary “transfer” “freely chosen” so as not to have to “learn a new language” and “a new sociality”, was not a necessity for him but “a kind of collective psychosis”.

It is true that Italians were "tried" and "executed" (obviously show trials, not only of people accused rightly or wrongly of fascism, but above all of the defenseless population and even of the anti-fascists of the National Liberation Committee), but ultimately "in the same context we must also remember the Nuremberg trials": the institutional trial of Nazi criminals compared to the summary executions of innocent civilians...

Many things are happening in recent months on the road to reconciliation, the authorities of Ljubljana and Zagreb are bringing to light the hundreds of thousands of victims of Tito's terror, and recent excavations conducted together with our nation have allowed the first Italians to be buried: it is not time to step back. Gobetti, who writes about the Foibe, does not deny his travels of memory to the tomb and places of Tito, photographed with his fist raised in the gesture of the Yugoslav brigades. What would we say if an essay on the Resistance was written by a historian who for years went to Predappio and performed the Roman salute there?