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The man in the photo of the Vergarolla massacre has a name
75 years ago the explosion in Pula that tore apart one hundred people. Bruno Castro, a direct witness, from Canada tells for the first time the truth about the iconic photo of the decapitated little girl. A sharp shot like a gunshot, then the end of the world: an explosion shatters the rocks on which thousands of people are enjoying the sunny Sunday in August, the pine forest erupts in a blaze, the sea turns red with blood and the crazed seagulls fight over the human remains raining down from the sky. While a mushroom cloud of smoke rises from the beach, for a radius of kilometers the entire city jolts, shattering shop windows and windows. Pula, Italy, August 18, 1946, today 75 years...
Finding Yourself on Remembrance Day
A young woman's journey to Istria today, looking for her great-grandfather thrown into a sinkhole in 43, her roots and the reasons for a useless, colorless and homeless brutality by Lucia Bellaspiga - 09/02/2021 Source: Avvenire The young woman who leaves for Istria in search of the sinkhole into which Romeo Martini, a shopkeeper in Santa Domenica di Albona and owner of thirteen houses, was thrown in 1943, is someone who has all the right credentials: in addition to her maternal grandmother who was a partisan in Tuscany, "I also had a membership card for the Young Communists, I smoked Diana Blu, I read "il manifesto", I listened to the songs of the small groups formed in the social centers that invited people to gouge out the eyes of fascists"....
But there are still those who think that Remembrance Day is a fascist memorial
Historian Eric Gobetti, who is photographed on Tito's site with a raised fist, claims that the term foibe "evokes barbaric scenarios" while "they were only burial sites" by Lucia Bellaspiga - 10/02/2021 Source: Avvenire "In the current European context, the equation between the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century (fascism and communism) is now a politically accepted fact, despite the many protests of scholars", laments Eric Gobetti, born in 1973, in the introduction to his book E allora le 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...
New foibe discovered
A team of speleologists exhumes the bodies of the victims of a Tito massacre: among them 100 teenagers and 5 women, all shot in 1945. Rosaries and combs found in the 14-meter-deep cavity. by Lucia Bellaspiga - 27/08/2020 - Source: Avvenire Children or little more, dragged by the hundreds to the edge of the Foiba and massacred there by rifle shots. The luckiest ones fell already dead into the void, for the others a long agony ended the torture. For decades the voices of the survivors of Marshal Tito's massacres have told us all this, but this time the bodies of the victims are speaking, found in recent days by a team of Slovenian speleologists in the area of the...
On the beach of Pola there was a real massacre
An explosion that seems to come from the bowels of the earth lifts the city, shattering shop windows and windows for a radius of kilometers, while an obscene mushroom of smoke darkens the sky... by Lucia Bellaspiga - 18/08/2020 - Source: Avvenire An explosion that seems to come from the bowels of the earth lifts the city, shattering shop windows and windows for a radius of kilometers, while an obscene mushroom of smoke darkens the sky of a sunny August afternoon. Dozens of bodies are thrown into the sea and hang from the branches of the pine forest, many unrecognizable, some pulverized. There are over a hundred of them, but only 64 will be able to be given names and surnames, for the others we will rely on...
Foibe, the courage of those who denounced the crimes
Dear Avvenire, I am the granddaughter of Marshal Arnaldo Harzarich, the head of the Fire Department of Pola who from 1943 in Istria led the teams to recover the bodies of Italians from the Foibe, and for this Gold Medal of Civil Valor. Reading the interesting article by Lucia Bellaspiga of January 6, 2018, with the interview with the last eyewitness of the extermination in the Foibe, Mr. Giuseppe Comand of Latisana (Udine), the dramatic moments experienced by me, then fourteen years old, passed through my mind, "running" like in a movie. I remember as if it were now that Uncle Arnaldo came every evening to say hello to my mother. One day, however, my grandmother came to my house,...
«I, at 97 years old, the last eyewitness of the Foibe massacres»
by Lucia Bellaspiga, correspondent in Latisana (Udine) Saturday 6 January 2018 The testimony of Giuseppe Comand, aware of being the last of the men who saw the bodies of innocent Italians rise in “clusters”. «The smell of the decomposing bodies was pestilential, the air unbreathable for kilometres away. My brave companions, firefighters stationed in Pola, gulped down cognac before lowering themselves into the sinkhole: they descended for hundreds of metres with two ropes and a sort of chair, placed the body in the coffin and gave four pulls of the rope, the signal to say pull me up». A century of life was not enough for Giuseppe...
