Gianni Giuricin: Testimonies from the concentration camp

Protagonist: Gianni Giuricin
Author:

We offer you a testimony of the days of imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp, told in the book "Il dio brot" by Gianni Giuricin, author of numerous publications and writings on the subject, partly autobiographical and partly stories of characters in his family who were put to the test by the dictatorships of the "Short Century". What is striking about his stories is the clarity of the narration and an approach that aims to be as faithful as possible to the sensations and thoughts of the time, without a posthumous revisitation that could pollute their immediacy. And what is striking, like a punch in the stomach, is the cruelty of a timeless existence, of young people to whom life reserved a very hard test that would mark them forever.

TESTIMONIES FROM THE CAMPS.

Thus I became acquainted with the three-tiered or layered wooden sleeping places which characterised all the concentrations of prisoners and internees.
Here we were given the first privilege of a compulsory photograph, taken from the front and in profile, with the indication of a personal number, written on the individual data sheet.
A copy of the photograph was distributed to the new "stars" together with a double aluminum tag with a chain to hang around their neck in case of need for identification, both alive and dead.
From that moment on I became Mr. 4136 and on the tag the number 110277.
Two days after our arrival they made us leave the barracks to gather together with the officers in the center of a square, in front of a stand decorated on the sides by two fixed machine guns and microphones and megaphones, the troops on both sides. All in line, "aligned and covered" as in the great parades. We were many thousands of Italians, of all weapons and specialties.
After a couple of hours of waiting (it's the same all over the world), while the radio equipment was being tested, the German officers went up onto the podium, accompanied by a senior officer of the Bersaglieri, complete with a plumed hat.
His speech, partly very repetitive, referred to the latest Italian events underlined with words of vituperation for the betrayal of Badoglio and the king, but in the end concluded with a pressing appeal to resume fighting alongside the German ally, leaving that inactive condition of internment.
They all sensed the danger they were running into due to the repetition of the click, sharper than normal, of the heels (quite a few cavalry and artillery officers were equipped with spurs) every time the orator pronounced the name of the king, a normal practice under arms in Italy at that time. The click to attention was supposed to occur at the pronunciation of the name of the king of the duce. But in that case, in the Luchenwalde camp, the name of the duce was passed over in silence, of the heels. No agreement had been made in this sense among the officers, nevertheless a demonic sharp click reverberated in the square if the orator mentioned the king.
This dangerous demonstration of opposition did not cease even when the two German soldiers on duty at the machine guns noisily operated the loading trolley with a loud clang of steel amplified by the radio system.
I must have laid down my weapons and stopped fighting to witness an excellent demonstration of unanimous silent discipline, not very suited to the not overly military nature of the Italian, regardless of the monarchic and republican ideals of the moment. A few bursts of machine gun fire in the direction of the Italians lined up in the square would not have caused much surprise: it would have been an act in the order of things, ordinary administration.
None of this, even if those thousands of Italians in agreement would have fed the saints up.
In the few days that followed in that camp, thoughts were not lacking in each of us: where we would be sent, the worries of everything we needed in that condition and that we lacked, the situation of our families, many with the war at home.
The generals had fallen from the pedestal of the military hierarchy: in our hut someone had taken care of washing the socks that remained under the tap provided. Wooden castle like us, sack of shavings and planing, mattress and pillow, of some softness of the very first days and later a real wooden board.
The soldiers often came to see me: comments about the slop, the scant bread, where we would be sent... A few days later we were informed by an interpreter that the officers, with the exception of the generals, would be transferred elsewhere. At seven in the morning the following day we were made to leave the barracks to proceed, in columns, along the internal dividing fence. On the other side of that barbed wire my soldiers, the non-commissioned officers, Sergeant Major Usai, and the orderly Paganelli had come running. The fences could not be climbed over.
We held hands in the gaps in the fence. They were crying, soldiers who had fought in the war, the loss of a parent.
During the transfer journey, a stop was planned, in broad daylight, along the platform of a Polish city station, where the Germans had arranged for the distribution of a ladle of turnip broth, the so-called slop.
Guarded by armed sentries as at every stop on the convoy, we were given the opportunity to stretch our legs after that long first part of our transfer.
The bundle of tracks adjacent to ours was crossed above by a metal bridge that allowed local residents to travel from one side of the railway to the other, which had a station in the city centre.
I happened to see some unfortunate colleagues ahead who were bending down to pick something up from the ground. As I got closer I noticed that some Polish civilians, men and women, passing on the bridge were dropping bread and fruit. But by then our sentries had also noticed it and began to shout threateningly in the direction of the Poles.
That initiative in our favor was thus thwarted, even if some young people, heedless of the risk, still dropped something and then rushed to get lost in the crowd of people who continued to pass on the bridge.
The distribution of the swill took place at the edge of the station, at the end of a long, very leafy hedge, along which we were arranged, one by one, in a long line.
Before reaching the clearing that allowed the distribution of the "vegetable" broth, a hand emerging from the hedge offered each of us two cigarettes without being seen or recognized by us, obviously to avoid the danger of the Germans' reaction.
After the last interminable stop in the open countryside, on September 28th we reached our destination: we were in Przemysl, west of Lviv.
The soldiers who took us into custody accompanied us for a few kilometers of road that we traveled with difficulty, spurred on by the frequent "Schnell!" shouted at the top of their voices, as the German soldier knows how, until the entrance to the famous fortress that takes its name from the city of Przemysl, which would become our Stammlager 347 of Neribka, destined together with that of Pikulica, to isolate the internees who were already officers of the army that had finished fighting.
The city of Przemysl, located on the Krakow-Lviv railway, is located in Polish Galicia. A few kilometers away stands the famous Fortress which takes its name from the city of Przemysl.
It is said in the camp that the commander Valentino Petchnich, an Austrian, was born in Trieste and that he knew the Italian language, but the real lagerfuhrer was the SS captain Reyner, head of security in the two camps of Neribka and Pikulica, where the Italian prisoners or internees of war were locked up.
Already under Austrian sovereignty, during the First World War, the Fortress had been an important centre of entrenched camps.
In 1914 and 1915 the fortress had the task of blocking the Russian army's passage through the Carpathians.
Apart from the cold, hunger soon made itself felt and became the main torment of the internees.
The writer found himself with other colleagues searching for and collecting the few wild grasses that grew spontaneously on the sandy ground in the vast courtyard of the Fortress to eat them without any seasoning, after having boiled them in an enamel basin, on some of those occasions with inside them some field mice captured with the blanket while they were emerging from one of the numerous holes guarded by the hungry Italians.
In Przemysl, the real life of the internee begins, characterized by a state of horrendous, never-ending hunger, by the lack of everything a human being needs, covered in the same clothes he wore day and night, and by the continuing uncertainty about what would happen next.
The lack of freedom, being locked in a camp enclosed by high wire fences, watched day and night by soldiers on duty with machine guns placed on high turrets, sleeping on a layer of hardened shavings, the lack of linen, the gathering once a day in the courtyard, for hours and hours dedicated to counting the presences, exposed to the freezing wind, the rain and later the snow, with the blanket on our shoulders, the lack of news from home for a long time, were the normal aspects of life for the internees in the concentration camps of Adolph Hitler's Germany. If you think about the about-face we were accused of, almost as if we were the protagonists of Italian politics, it could not be excluded that our internment could have had a more tragic end than the one we suffered, with over 40.000 victims out of a total of about 600.00 deportees.
One might venture to maintain that the harsh treatment would not have been excessively brutal if the painful note of continuous hunger, day and night, without respite, indescribable to anyone who has not experienced it personally, had been missing. The torment of each single day, apparently longer than its twenty-four hours, of the interminable nights, was connected with the mad desire to eat, with the ever-present bestial hunger, with the negligible piece of bread that disappeared in a real moment or sometimes with the piece of potato that was given the value of gold.
The few objects of some value could not fail to start, a chain, a ring, a watch, which were exchanged for bread, for something to eat probably stolen from our possession by the German soldiers. Even in this respect, the whole world is the same.