Bruno Vespa's new book is out, Resentment and Hope: Portrait of a Nation from the Post-War Era to Giorgia Meloni, in a World Stained with Blood (Mondadori – Rai Libri, Milan 2023).

The newspaper Free he anticipated a passage from chapter VII ("That strip of Italy betrayed and lost") which talks about the foibe and the drama of the Julian-Dalmatian refugees.

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"An inevitable historical fact." So Louis Longo, number two of Palmiro Togliatti and head of the revolutionary wing of the PCI, defined the annexation of Trieste and of the coast to the Slovenia. The Communist Party of Trieste had made an indecent proposal to the CLN: to admit into the Italian Liberation Committee a representative of the Slovenian Communist Party and establish once and for all that the Julian population (therefore also the Italians) wanted to join the Marshal Tito's Yugoslavia. Josip Broz (nom de guerre «Tito») is a legendary figure, a leader from birth to death. One of fifteen children of a Slovenian-Croatian Catholic family, with no substantial school education, he was always the first in everything he undertook: in war, in the factory, in the trade union, in politics. Tito did everything, even a successful fencer and test driver of Daimler cars. When he drove the Resistance against the Germans and the Italians, Hermann Goering admired him for the skill (and luck) with which he repeatedly escaped capture and physical elimination. The Allies recognized him as an important partner in the fight against Nazism and, especially the English, gave him significant support also in his requests for the annexation of Italian territories. He was also a leader in ruthlessness, and we Italians paid the price.

But let's get back to the PCI. The proposal of the Julian communists could not be accepted by the CLN and it was not. Indeed, it caused a certain amount of confusion in the Northern Italy National Liberation Committee, also because Longo - beyond the intention of ceding Trieste to Yugoslavia - included the Julian partisans in the ranks and under the orders of the Titoites. Only with their entry into the government did the communists become convinced that Trieste should return to Italy, even if - as we will see - Togliatti would have gladly exchanged it for Gorizia. The Italians immediately realized what it would have meant to be under Tito. After September 8, the Italian army disbanded until it dissolved, while the Titoite one was ready to take its place. The Istrian fascist historian Luigi Papo believes that the Marshal was informed in advance of the armistice, because the occupation of Istria by the communists was instantaneous (Roll of Honor). The Germans resisted only in Fiume and Pola, while Tito elevated the city of Pisino to the status of capital of Istria, immediately setting up the People's Tribunals for the hasty puppet trials that began the ethnic cleansing of the Italians.

State murders were not limited to representatives of fascism, but wanted to radically eliminate any administrative and social function that recalled Italy. The uniforms, first of all: whether those of a carabiniere, a municipal or forestry guard, had to be eliminated together with those who wore them. Landowners were killed according to the custom that we saw in vogue among the Emilian communists. But with them also the postal officer and the pharmacist, the teacher and the bank employee, the midwife and above all the poor municipal messenger, unpopular because he delivered tax obligations and in any case was often the bearer of unpleasant news. They were rarely individual murders: as Fulvio Costa and Annamaria De Savorgnani told us, in the inland areas the victims were lined up and thrown into the sinkholes, in the maritime ones they were drowned. The Trieste journalist Fulvio Molinari told the story of the three sisters in Istria contesa But let's go back to the PCI. The proposal of the Julian communists could not be accepted by the CLN and it was not.

Indeed, it caused a certain amount of confusion in the Northern Italy National Liberation Committee, also because Longo – beyond the intention of ceding Trieste to Yugoslavia – placed the Julian partisans in the ranks and under the orders of Tito's partisans. Only with their entry into the government did the communists become convinced that Trieste should return to Italy, even if – as we will see – Togliatti would have gladly exchanged it for Gorizia. The Italians immediately realized what it would have meant to be under Tito.

While writing Winners and losers, I was struck by a plaque at the entrance to the town hall in Gorizia: "The reverent Town Hall remembers the employees who disappeared in the name of Italy." There were 23 names engraved on it. Three were of those who fell in five years during the Second World War, twenty were taken away in May 1945 by Tito's partisans and never returned home. There were four employees in the Gorizia town offices, six (five of whom were women) assistant employees, three traffic policemen, an assistant accountant, an assistant technical assistant, an assistant secretary, a division head, a chief secretary, a messenger and the health officer. The entire town bureaucracy. On September 16, 1967, the twentieth anniversary of the return of Gorizia to Italy, the mayor Michele Martina said: «The forty days of the Yugoslav occupation in 1945 were a moment of illegal, absurd repression, born of hatred, political disorder, a desire for summary justice against a population often guilty only of belonging to a nation, a city».

The most dramatic aspect was the opposition between the Italian communist and anti-communist partisans. The Julian communists thought that Togliatti would have kept them forever under Stalin's protective wing and were subservient, to quote Crainz, to Tito's desire not only to annex the whole of Venezia Giulia, but also to wipe out everything that was non-communist. («We will kill and deport all the bourgeois ... Comrades, we must live to destroy: on the complete destruction of the past we will rebuild the new Italy»). At the end of 1944 Togliatti personally wrote the order of the day of the communist brigades: «The Italian partisans, gathered on 7 November on the occasion of the anniversary of the Great Revolution, enthusiastically accept to depend operationally on the IX Slovenian Corpus, aware that this will be able to strengthen the fight against the Nazi-fascists, accelerate the liberation of the country and establish in Italy, as in Yugoslavia, the power of the people».

And he added that "the communists must take a stand against all those Italian elements who remain on the ground and act in the name of Italian imperialism and nationalism and against all those who contribute in any way to creating discord between the two peoples.

THE GREEN ISLAND

The name of the Osoppo brigade is missing, but the identikit is perfect. The Osoppo-Friuli brigade was founded on Christmas Eve 1943 in the seat of the Udine bishop's seminary and was made up of Catholic, lay and socialist elements, who soon came into conflict with the Italian and Slovenian communist partisans. Francesco De Gregori, with the battle name "Bolla", was in command and, to quote Giorgio Bocca (History of partisan Italy), had created a "green" island (from the color of the handkerchief that its members wore around their necks) in the "red" sea of ​​the communist partisans. The Osoppo was asked to join the IX Slovenian Corpus, as the Italian communist partisans had done, but the Osovans refused.

Mario Toffanin, known as "Giacca", head of the communist commando that allegedly carried out the action against Osoppo, confirmed on February 1, 1970 to the Friulian researcher Marco Cesselli that he had received from Alfio Tambosso, vice-secretary of the PCI of Udine, the order of the General Command to eliminate the leadership group of Osoppo. On February 7, 1945, about a hundred Gappisti under Giacca's orders reached Osoppo in Porzus, a small town near Attimis, in the Udine area, where 22 Osoppo members were gathered. Toffanin immediately killed De Gregori, another Osoppo member and Elda Turchetti, a girl considered a former spy who later joined the group. Another 14 "green" partisans were rounded up and killed in the following days.

Two Osovani saved themselves by going over to the communists and were then important prosecution witnesses in the trials against the band of communist partisans. Toffanin and other gappisti were sentenced to life imprisonment in vain: they had already escaped to Yugoslavia and would have returned free thanks to the Togliatti amnesty. Toffanin was then pardoned by Sandro Pertini in 1978.

Comments Ernesto Galli della Loggia in The Death of the Fatherland: «It was there, in those lands and in that event, that for the first time it became… clear to the forces of antifascism that in the camp of the winner there were two projects, different and opposing, regarding Italy, since in reality the winner was not one, but included at least two, and these two, the “Westerners” and the “Easterners”, obeyed incompatible worldviews». The death of the Carabinieri captain Filippo Casini, 30 years old, from Genoa, commander of the Pola company, should also be seen in this context. In July 1944, although he was not a communist, he thought it useful to join the Yugoslav partisans to fight the Nazi-Fascists, imitated by 69 Carabinieri of his command. But, as would have happened to De Gregori, it is difficult for a non-communist to obey orders that cannot be shared. Brought to the usual, phantom "people's tribunal" together with his wife Luciana Alfì (25 years old), who had wanted to follow him, they were sentenced to death and shot on August 14, 1944. In his online column "100inWeb", the journalist Vito Barresi claimed that they were thrown into the Bainsizza del Carso sinkhole together with their daughter of a few months. The group of carabinieri commanded by Casini was dispersed and there is no news of what happened to the individual elements. Captain Casini was awarded the silver medal for military valor.

Bruno Vespa