Daša Drndić

Trieste

A single moment suffices to unlock the secrets of life, and the key to all secrets is History and only History, that eternal repetition and the beautiful name of horror.

— Jorge Luis Borges

Map

1

For sixty-two years she has been waiting.

She sits and rocks by a tall window in a room on the third floor of an Austro-Hungarian building in the old part of Old Gorizia. The rocking chair is old and, as she rocks, it whimpers.

Is that the chair whimpering or is it me? she asks the deep emptiness, which, like every emptiness, spreads its putrid cloak in all directions to draw her in, her, the woman rocking, to swallow her, blanket her, swamp her, envelop her, ready her for the rubbish heap where the emptiness, her emptiness, is piling the corpses, already stiffened, of the past. She sits in front of her old-fashioned darkened window, her breathing shallow, halting (as if she were sobbing, but she isn’t) and at first she tries to get rid of the stench of stale air around her, waving her hand as if shooing away flies, then to her face, as if splashing it or brushing cobwebs from her lashes. Foul breath (whose? whose?) fills the room, rising to a raging torrent and she knows she must arrange the pebbles around her gravestone, now, just in case, in case he doesn’t come, in case he does, after she has been expecting him for sixty-two years.

He will come.

I will come.

She hears voices where there are none. Her voices are dead. All the same, she converses with the voices of the dead, she quibbles with them, sometimes she slumps limply into their arms and they whisper to her and guide her through landscapes she has forgotten. There are times when events boil over in her mind and then her thoughts become an avenue of statues, granite, marble, stone statues, plaster figures that do nothing but move their lips and tremble. This must be borne. Without the voices she is alone, trapped in her own skull that grows softer and more vulnerable by the day, like the skull of a newborn, in which her brain, already somewhat mummified, pulses wearily in the murky liquid, slowly, like her heart; after all, everything is diminishing. Her eyes are small and fill readily with tears. She summons non-existent voices, the voices that have left her, summons them to replenish her abandonment.

By her feet there is a big red basket, reaching to her knees. From the basket she takes out her life and hangs it on the imaginary clothes line of reality. She takes out letters, some of them more than a hundred years old, photographs, postcards, newspaper clippings, magazines, and leafs through them, she thumbs through the pile of lifeless paper and then sorts it yet again, this time on the floor, or on the desk by the window. She arranges her existence. She is the embodiment of her ancestors, her kin, her faith, the cities and towns where she has lived, her time, fat sweeping time like one of those gigantic cakes which master chefs of the little towns of Mitteleuropa bake for popular festivities on squares, and then she takes it and she swallows it and hoards it, walls herself in, and all of that now rots and decomposes inside her.

She is wildly calm. She listens to a sermon for dirty ears and drapes herself in the histories of others, here in the spacious room in the old building at Via Aprica 47, in Gorica, known as Gorizia in Italian, Görz in German, and Gurize in the Friulian dialect, in a miniature cosmos at the foot of the Alps, where the River Isonzo, or Soča, joins the River Vipava, at the borders of fallen empires.

Her story is a small one, one of innumerable stories about encounters, about the traces preserved of human contact. She knows this, just as she knows that Earth can slumber until all these stories of the world are arranged in a vast cosmic patchwork which will wrap around it. And until then history, reality’s phantom, will continue to unravel, chop, take to pieces, snatch patches of the universe and sew them into its own death shroud. She knows that without her story the job will be incomplete, just as she knows that there is no end, that the end reaches on to eternity, beyond existence. She knows that the end is madness, as Umberto Saba once told her while he was in hospital here, in Gorizia, in Dr Basaglia’s ward perhaps, or maybe it was in Trieste with Dr Weiss. She knows that the end is a dream from which there is no waking. And the shortcuts she takes, the quickest ways to get from one place to the next, are often nearly impassable, truly goats’ paths. These shortcuts may stir her nostalgia for those long, straight, rectilinear, provincial roads, also something Umberto Saba told her then, so she sweeps away the underbrush of her memory now, memories for which she cannot say whether they even sank to the threshold of memory, or are still in the present, set aside, stored, tucked away. It is along these overgrown shortcuts that she walks. She knows there is no such thing as coincidence; there is no such thing as the famous brick which falls on a person’s head; there are links — and resolve — of which we seem to be unaware, for which we search.

She sits and rocks, her silence is unbearable.

It is Monday, 3 July, 2006.

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

2

Her name is Haya Tedeschi. She was born on 9 February, 1923, in Gorizia. Her documents state that she was baptized on 8 April of that same year, in 1923, by Father Aldo Boschin who, of course, she does not remember, just as she has no memory of her godmother, Margherita Collenz. There is also a baptism celebrated by Don Carlo Baubela. Baubela is a German name. She meets Don Carlo Baubela in the autumn of 1944 when he is already old and hunched over and, spreading the fragrance of incense and tobacco with his half-frozen, trembling hands, he gives his blessing. Gorizia is a charming little town. There have been interesting histories in Gorizia, little family histories, like this one of hers. She never met many of the members of her family. She has never even heard of quite a few of them. Her mother’s and her father’s families are large. There are, there were, families in Gorizia with tangled stories, but their stories do not matter, despite the way history has been trailing them along with it for centuries, just as rapids sweep along broken branches wrenched free of the shore, and the carcasses of livestock, their bellies bloated, cows, their eyes glassy, tailless rats, corpses with their throats slit, and suicides. There were no suicides in her family. Or if there were, no-one ever spoke of them to her.

There were several well-known people who lived in Gorizia and committed suicide. Many people passed through Gorizia on the run. Some stayed, some were taken away. Of these some were Jews, some were Gentiles. Of these, some were poets, philosophers and painters. Women and men. The most famous person to commit suicide in Gorizia was Carlo Michelstaedter.

Her mother’s name was Ada Baar…

It took her years to assemble the information from which she tailored her mangled family tree and learned who was what to whom. For a long time now she has had no-one to ask. Those who remain are few, and their memories are blotted, full of gaps, covered with the black stamps of oblivion or contention and like little islands engulfed in towering flames — they shimmer, elusive. The dead voices of her ancestors shudder, whimper, well up from the corners of the room, from the floor, the ceiling, they creep in through the Venetian blinds and hum history just beyond her reach.

She has no idea what her ancestors looked like. There is no proof. Nothing remains.

Her family rattle on the bottom of the trough (of her memory). Today the limbs, her family’s branches, are so jumbled, so dislocated, it is impossible to settle on their whereabouts. The organs of her family are strewn all over. The lives of her ancestors matter less and less for her story, however, for her wait.

Her grandfather was born in Görz. Her mother was born in Görz. She was born in Gorizia/Gorica. When the Great War broke out, they began moving, living in many places. She doesn’t know what Görz was, nor does she know what Gorizia is now though she has been here nearly sixty years. She takes walks along Gorizia’s streets, but hers are brief forays, quick walks, walks with a purpose, jaunts. Even when she takes longer strolls, when her strolls are more leisurely (when the days are mild and her room feels stale, a humid inertia), Haya doesn’t notice the big changes in her surroundings. She feels as if she has been sitting for sixty years in a shrinking room, a room whose walls are moving slowly inward to meet at a miniature surface, a line, at the apex of which she sits, crushed. She cannot see, nor is she watching. She has wax plugs in her ears. She does not hear. Görz, Gorizia, are memories. She isn’t certain whose memories they are. Hers or her family’s. Maybe they are fresh memories. When she goes out she squints at the sun, picks daisies, sits at the Joy Café and smokes. She has not let herself go. She does not wear black. She is not forever rocking back and forth. All is as it should be. She has a television. She has little memories, darting memories, fragmented. She sways on the threads of the past. On the threads of history. She swings on a spider’s web. She is very light. Around her, in her, now is quiet. Gorizia has a history, she has a history. The days are so old.

Sometimes she dreams

she is dragging her mother in a plastic sack. she is dragging her by the legs. she wants to hide her. one of her mother’s legs snaps off. her mother is dead, but she says, hide that leg, bury it near the stationery shop at the intersection of seminario and ascoli; take the rest to rose valley, that is what she says

Her grandfather, grandmother and mother are born as subjects of the Habsburg Monarchy to which their ancestors came long before, from Spain, she thinks. She is born in Italy. They speak German, Italian and Slovenian, mostly Italian. Grandmother Marisa was a Slovene, as was her great-grandmother, Marija. Both died young. Her family did not mix much with others in terms of race and nationality, yet they became mixed. Today all her ancestors are jumbled, impossible to disentangle.

An oft-thumbed family booklet, a guidebook of sorts from 1780 that Haya Tedeschi keeps on the desk by the window with a dozen old volumes and several pamphlets, says that Görz or Goritz is an ancient city on the banks of the River Lizono, situated in Gorizia, in a small province by the name of Friuli, a possession of the House of Austria. Sovereignty over the Gorizia Habsburgs is lost between 1508 and 1509 when the Venetians rule the town, building it into a fortification, only to lose it during the Napoleonic Wars, when it becomes part of the Illyrian provinces. The castle (1780) still dominates Gorizia. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the guidebook says, a synagogue was built there, suggesting the influx of a colourful community. Gorizia lies about thirty kilometres to the north of Aquileia and, according to the guidebook, some seventy kilometres north of Venice. The town of Gorizia is in a wooded area, not far from a road that ran, in Roman times, from Aquileia to Emona. The name of the town appears first in a document dated 28 April, 1001 (“quae sclavonica lingua vocatur Goritia”), with which Emperor Otto III makes a gift of the fort and settlement to Patriarch Giovanni II and Verihen Eppenstein, the Count of Friuli. Today, the guidebook says, Gorizia is an archbishopric with jurisdiction over the bishoprics of Trieste, Trento, Como and Pedena.

Her grandfather Bruno Baar fights in the Austrian Army during World War One. His half-brother Roberto Golombek, a student in Vienna at the time, opens a dentistry office there at Weinberggasse 16 in 1924. Roberto moves to Great Britain in 1939 and gets a job at a sardine factory, so that between 1943 and 1945 the Baar family, while still living at Via Favetti 13 in Gorizia, is supplied, who knows how, with vast quantities of salted sardines, thanks to which they survive the bleakest years of World War Two.

As of May 1915, Italy is no longer neutral. It has not been granted Trentino, the Southern Tyrol and Istria by Austria-Hungary, which it had demanded in return for staying on the sidelines. Rarely does war leave anyone on the sidelines. Hence, affronted, Italy conducts secret talks with the Triple Entente, after which it crosses over and joins them. Invariably there are conflicting sides in any war. The Great War was a conflict between two sides led by the selfsame purpose. To conquer the world. For themselves. For one side. When it enters the war on the side of the Triple Entente, Italy asks again for: Trentino, Trieste, the Slovenian coastline, Istria, a part of Dalmatia and Albania, as well as the right to the Turkish provinces of Adalia and Smyrna, expansion of the colonies in Africa, and so forth. Italy asks for a great deal. What is not granted after World War One, Italy strives to make up for in the next war. Wars are games on a grand scale. Self-indulgent young men move little lead soldiers around on many-coloured maps. They draw in the gains. Then they go to bed. The maps hover in the sky like paper aeroplanes, then settle over cities, fields, mountains and rivers. They cover people, figurines, which the great strategians then shift elsewhere, move here, there, along with their houses and their stupid dreams. The maps of the unbridled military leaders cover what was there, bury the past. When the game is done, the warriors rest. Then historians step up to fashion falsehoods out of the heartless games of those who are never satiated. A new past is written which the new military leaders then draw on to new maps so the game will never end.

Italy joins the Triple Entente. A new front is created — the Italian front. Major battles are fought along the Soča. The Soča flows through Gorica, Gorizia, Görz, Goritz. The Soča, the Isonzo, is a river of a vivid turquoise hue. In its river bed it holds a history which eludes historians. The Soča is a river much like a person. Quiet one moment, raging the next. When it rages, it is mighty. When it is quiet, it sings. The Italians wage four terrible battles in 1915 along the Soča. In the Sixth Battle of the Soča (there are eleven or twelve all told), in 1916, the Italians finally capture Gorizia. They shout Viva! Evviva Italia! The Soča is red. Blinded. The rains tell it, we will heal your wounds. The rains push fiercely into the Soča, like lovers gone wild. The Soča is silent. The muddy and bloodstained waters rise, but the rains do not rinse them clean. On the river bottom roll bones which, like a huge baby’s rattle, disturb its dreams. To this day.

The Soča is a flowing archive of history, a warehouse of wars and love, of legends and myths. It is a coronary artery nourishing the banks. It holds its internal organs in so that they do not spill over. It is a miraculous ray of the cosmos in which endurance shimmers. It is webbed with bridges that summon, like outspread arms, to an embrace. As Ungaretti writes: Questo è l’Isonzo / e qui meglio / mi sono riconosciuto / docile fibre / dell’universo…

In early July 1906, avid hunter Archduke Franz Ferdinand reluctantly sets down his gun and abandons his favourite castle at Konopičte. The castle is nestled in a dense pine wood in central Bohemia surrounded by bountiful hunting grounds. It is lined inside with precious leather and mahogany, and furnished with a host of Ferdinand’s hunting trophies. Ferdinand was fondest of hunting bison. On two hunting expeditions to Poland he nearly wiped out the European bison as a species. The castle is in fact a noble and precious animal cemetery. At Konopičte the thousands of post-mortem remains of Ferdinand’s victims have been meticulously stuffed and arranged in glass cases. Their heads hang on all the walls, and there are many walls at Konopičte; the teeth and tusks, devotedly repaired and polished by local dentists, are displayed on cushions of purple velvet and set out in little cases of lead crystal with decorations carved to fit. In addition to the hunting trophies, the castle at Konopičte is overstuffed with furniture that František carts back from his also beloved Villa d’Este. He also keeps his weapons there. He has a cache of all kinds of armour, a total of 4,618 pieces. Aside from his fondness for bison, Ferdinand has a special affection for St George, so he also collects 3,750 little sculptures of the Christian martyr slaying the “dragon”. Archduke Ferdinand is a serious collector. He collects antiques, paintings by naive “masters”, village furniture, all sorts of big and little utilitarian and useless objects of ceramics, stone and minerals, stained glass, watches and medals.

The castle is surrounded by a spacious, well-tended rose garden visited by guests and horticulture experts. When they see the roses, each of them sighs, aaah. Among the roses stand many Renaissance sculptures.

Thirty-five years later the castle at Konopičte caught the eye of high-ranking S.S. officials, who turned it into an S.S. vacation centre. Hitler had most of Ferdinand’s collection transferred to the Wehrmacht Museum in Prague. He also saw to it that the remaining 72,712 exhibits were shipped off to Vienna so that “after the war” he could have them brought to his private museum in Linz, which had not yet been built. Before they moved into Konopičte, the Nazis ordered that the castle be painted black inside and out.

So Franz Ferdinand leaves the Konopičte hunting grounds for Vienna where he boards the Woheiner Bahn (the Venice-Trieste line) and stops at the railway bridge in the town of Solkan/Salcano. Actually, he stops in a ravine through which the Soča/Isonzo river runs, not far from Gorizia (Nova Gorica today) on the Slovenian-Italian border, which has nearly disappeared in the new, certainly historical, birth of yet another empire — Europe. A brass band is playing, the banners and flags of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy are flying, the black and yellow flag, by then somewhat outdated, the Ausgleich flag — the flag of the Compromise of 1867—and the merchant marine, red-white-green flag with its two crowns, the banner for war — the Kriegsflagge — which would vanish not even eight years later, in 1915.

It is Thursday. The sky is clear. Now and then a small blackbird wings by, quickly, like a restless eye. From the cool shade under the bridge wafts a breeze with the fragrance of wilting linden blossoms, fresh pine shoots on the branches, the moss and cold water. On flows the Soča, serene and pure, its breathing even and deep.

Most of the people in the crowd are children, because school is out for the summer. The children wave because they are children, they have no feel for history. Precisely ten years later, on this very spot, these same children dig into their trenches, crawl across the mud, then disappear in the Soča, and images of that ceremonial summer day break through the raging rapids of the emerald “holy waters” like fireflies, like a lullaby, like an echo, and slip in under their eyelids whispering “Farewell” in at least five languages. With their dying breath, they call out to their mothers Mutti, mama! Mamma mia, oh mamma! Majko! Anyuka, anyuka! Mamusiu! Maminka! The birds won’t fly. The birds will drop. A black rain of birds will become the Soča death shroud.

Escorted by members of his family, Franz Ferdinand disembarks, shakes hands with the builders, waves to the assembled crowd, smiles, then goes over to the railing of the marvellous white bridge carved from 4,533 stone blocks of Karst limestone and looks at the gleaming river. Rudolf Jaussner, the architect, and Leopold Orley, the engineer, do not hide their pride and exhilaration. Franz Ferdinand looks into the River Soča/Isonzo and has no notion of the number of pledges of love and passionate promises that have been flung into its waters while it rose, angrily overflowing its banks, powerless to prevent incursions into its sky. It took Jaussner and Orley nearly two years to make the miracle happen: the largest arched railway bridge ever raised over a river. Five thousand tons of stone were built into the bridge; the central arch, completed in only eighteen days, has a span of eighty-five metres, unheard of until then.

And so it is that the famed Transalpina railway line is inaugurated: a route that would connect the coastline, actually Trieste, to Austria. The Monarchy needed a direct link to its southernmost provinces. The Monarchy had no wish to travel through alien territory, such as Udine. The Monarchy felt complete until the territories it possessed began to seem inadequate so it wanted more; until it lost what it had already had. Today the old Meridionale line passes through the main Gorizia railway station, built in the second half of the nineteenth century. The trains which stop in Gorizia are half-empty. As if Gorizia is still healing from the wounds of the war. Nova Gorica is left with the Transalpina line. At the border between Nova Gorica and Gorizia there is a museum in which they preserve small, nameless histories. On what used to be a “solid border” slicing Gorizia, cake-like, into two unequal parts, on that “solid border” today there is a square around which everyone is permitted to walk. Beyond the square, in both halves of the sliced city, there still rises a wall of air.

His Highness Franz Ferdinand and the Duchess of Hohenberg, Sophie Chotek, cross Solkan Bridge for the last time on the evening of Tuesday, 23 June, 1914. The husband and wife have boarded the Transalpina in Vienna, bound for Trieste. The windows of their compartment are open. It is June, so the perfume of the linden trees is in the air. Sophie hums the Blue Danube waltz, and Franz says to her, Perhaps one day they will write a song for this little river, too. Sophie says, I don’t think so. This is a small river, unimportant and unknown. Franz says, That may not always be so. Sophie and Franz toast each other’s health with a glass of first-rate, chilled Tokay. They do not know it, but their hearts beat the way the Soča is flowing, just then, at Solkan Bridge.

On Wednesday, 24 June, Franz boards the warship Viribus Unitis. Despite a shiver of fear, he wants to believe that the “united forces” will truly protect his empire. But the nerve of European history has already been flayed. Italy and Austria are ever closer in an embrace of mutual loathing. A new ethics of misunderstanding is born. The “legacy of bitterness” between Austria and Italy mushrooms into one of the most acute instances of European nationalistic intolerance, a sort of negative folie à deux, a hatred embraced by both sides, and its web snares Germany and France, Greece and Turkey, America and Russia, Vietnam and Cambodia, Croatia and Serbia… The white stain of reason.

On a smaller vessel František then sails up the River Neretva to the town of Metković, continues by train to Mostar, and briefly to Ilidža, where Sophie is waiting for him. On Friday and Saturday, 26 and 27 June, the Archduke takes part in a mountain exercise, near Sarajevo, of the 15th and 16th Military Corps, but it is already becoming clear that every attempt to create a new beginning, even Ferdinand’s, will lead to an end, just as every end holds a beginning. As the story goes, after he was hit, the Archduke whispered with relief to his adjutant, God brooks no challenges. A higher power has once again imposed the order I was no longer able to sustain. In July 1914, Franz Ferdinand and Sophie travel aboard the Viribus Unitis, the same Austro-Hungarian warship on which they arrived, but this time in coffins. In September 1914, the Russian Chief of Staff publishes a Map of the Future Europe, which is remarkably like the one drawn up later, in 1945. The bullet with which Princip shot Ferdinand is preserved at Konopičte.

It is 25 May, 1915. The last passenger train crosses Solkan Bridge on its way from Vienna to Trieste. Solkan Bridge is battered, bombed, repaired and then hit again by a barrage of fire, and over it roll batteries, columns of soldiers of opposing armies march over it until 1918—the Austro-Germans and the Italians. Bruno Baar marches, too.

In the bloodiest of all eleven or twelve battles waged along the Soča, the Sixth, fought from 5 August to 17 August, 1916, Italy opens the way through to Trieste. In the embrace of its lavish gardens and palaces, shielded by mountain ranges, with the Vipava and the Soča as a diamond necklace on its bosom, Gorizia, a little Homburg, a treacherous copy of Baden-Baden, would for many years to come fail to draw the Austrian aristocracy as it had once drawn them during the hot summer months.

General Cadorna lines up twenty-two Italian divisions along the Soča on 5 August, 1916. On the other shore, nine divisions of weary and dispirited Austro-Hungarian troops await the order to attack, most of them too young and too old for warfare.

Bruno Baar is forty-nine. He has a pot belly, three children and a wife who bakes cakes for the Austrian soldiers. He has a winery in which he no longer makes wine. He has a collection of the latest seventy-eights, to which he is not able, just then, to listen, so he dreams of them as he marches along the flooding banks of the Soča, humming “La donna è mobile”, because he adores Caruso. Meanwhile, his Marisa, swaying on dented high heels, carries walnut crescents to the brothel for the Austro-Hungarian officers, and imagines that she is Bice Adami bringing the audience in Milan to their feet with her rendition of “Voi lo sapete”, accompanied by the piano. Marisa Baar, née Brasic, does her best to sing soprano, but without success, her voice is coarsened by harsh tobacco. A droplet of summer rain falls on her eyelash, where it lingers, making a miniature crystal ball which reflects her future. Marisa Baar sings “Voi lo sapete” without an inkling that Bice Adami will long outlive her.

Cadorna begins the battle with a diversionary artillery volley on 6 August, 1916. He places two infantry units to the south on the Monfalcone side with two corps each as decoys. Cadorna’s ruse does not work. The Austrian units do not budge. As it was, Count Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf had already cut back the number of troops along the Soĉa front in order to bolster his offensive near Trentino. Hence Cadorna swiftly deploys his troops from Trentino by train (on the Transalpina line) to the Soča. Fierce fighting, dangerously out of control, begins two days later in Oslavia and on Podgora Mountain, when Cadorna captures the peak of Mount Sabatino. Units of the 12 th Italian Division march into Gorizia on 8 August. The Italian Army crosses the Soča the next day under a barrage of fire. Holding their guns high over their heads as if they were carrying children, as if they were greeting the sky, the soldiers plunge into the river singing the Garibaldi hymn:

Si scopron le tombe, si levano i morti

i martiri nostri son tutti risorti!

Le spade nel pugno, gli allori alle chiome,

la fiamma ed il nome d’Italia nel cor:

corriamo, corriamo! Sù, giovani schiere,

sù al vento per tutte le nostre bandiere.

Sù tutti col ferro, sù tutti col foco,

sù tutti col nome d’Italia nel cor.

Va’ fu ori d’Italia,

va’ fu ori chè l’ora!

Va’ fuori d’Italia,

va’ fu ori o stranier!

Later people will sing other songs. Mostly women will sing, and mostly they will sing a song with the refrain, “O, Gorizia, tu sei maledetta”.

Austrian shrapnel whistles, churning the drunken Soča into a pool of green-blue foam. Then a terrible silence settles in, pierced by the sun’s sharp rays, and a vast crimson veil dances on the Soča, wet and sticky and thick. The army bugles sound the signal to charge and the grey uniforms line up in a protective firewall. This living wall, resembling insects with their wings plucked, howls Avanti Savoia! The stone bridge over the Soča has been hit the day before. Engineers ready the railway bridge over which the railway line runs from Milan and Udine to Gorizia and Trieste. The Italian fighting batteries, now in tatters and gashes, gallop over to the other side, firing at the Austrians, who fall back. Following the soldiers under a forest of spears are the Carabinieri, the Alpini, the Bersaglieri, the infantry and the cavalry. As far as one side is concerned, Gorizia is taken. For the others, Gorizia has fallen.

Bruno Baar scrambles up a hill and watches the battle, hidden behind the scratchy trunk of a hundred-year-old pine tree on which someone has carved a heart. They seem to him like idle children who have chosen to split into two camps separated by a slender thread. As if on both sides of the thread these children are lying flat on their stomachs, puffing, and the thread rises into the air, twists into a snake and falls like a waft to the ground. That thread is the border, Bruno Baar says. It will always twist and turn. Then he says, I’ll go and turn myself in.

Twenty thousand Italian soldiers are killed at the Sixth Battle of the Soča and 31,000 of them disappear or are captured. The Italians take 19,000 soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian Army prisoner. They capture sixty-seven pieces of artillery weaponry and a heap of mines and machine guns. The Austrian losses come to 71,000 men, some of whom are killed, some missing in action and some taken prisoner. The tally of casualties for all twelve battles along the Soča for the Italians is 1,205,000, and for the Austrians, 1,291,000.

The losses of the Kingdom of Italy on the Austro-Hungarian front in World War One are: 650,000 killed, 947,000 wounded, 600,000 taken prisoner or missing in action; 2,197,000 victims in total.

The losses for the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy on the Italian front are: 1,200,000 killed, 3,620,000 wounded and 2,200,000 taken prisoner or missing in action; a total of 7,200,000 people are casualties one way or another.

Later, a medal was designed to commemorate the taking of Gorizia. It was awarded to the bravest, both those who survived and those who were killed. The ones who went missing in action were unable to receive the medal. These men missing in action are a big problem, one cannot simply go missing. Turn into nothing. The missing are a problem because they turn up sooner or later. They come back. No matter when, no matter in what shape, they return, whether in someone else’s body, in someone’s voice, they always leave a trace. When they come back they are a nuisance, because the medals have already been doled out. The medal for valour at the Sixth Battle of the Soča is an important medal. It is a testament to the battle over the only corridor that led out of Italy into Austro-Hungary. The largest number of Italian medals was given to fighters of the 45th Infantry Division, because the most fighters were killed in the 45th Infantry Division. At the Soča. In the Soča. A local Gorizia resident, Castellucci, “designed” the medal. Today there are few such medals on the market. They are rare, so their value is rising. Collectors pay €50 and more for one. Precisely as much as a forgotten life is worth. Along with the medals, there are souvenirs and mementos of the battles along the Soča. Genuine souvenirs and those of more recent vintage. For instance, a twenty-centimetre-high, nickel-plated vase made from an eighty-millimetre shell, with etchings on it of towers and a gateway, describes the march into Gorizia. These vases are inscribed with the words Ricordo im Gorizia and Ricordo di Gorizia, and Bruno Baar keeps his in a display case as if they were trophies. Here:

This is for the sake of remembrance. Medals and souvenirs in general. For those who have the time to remember. Remembering is best done in old age. Life is calmer then. Because fresh memories are not, in fact, memories at all, they are happenings. Except in old age memories become deceptive, distorted, and it is difficult to determine whether these (old-age) memories have ever been real.

Bruno Baar does not write home from the front. He has no time to write. He returns soon after he leaves. He says: One should adapt. He says this in Italian, because now he is speaking Italian more often and forgetting his German.

Many write. Many never return. Many go missing. That is why their letters have been preserved. Today some letters are sold at auctions, like the medals and the souvenirs.

I did not go missing. I am a journalist. I report from the theatre of war. I arrived in Gorizia in 1916, accompanied by Sig. Ugo Ojetti,* well-known Florentine fine arts and literary critic. Ojetti was assigned the task of protecting historical monuments and art works in the war zones.

Yes, for we live in a country of contemporaries who have no ancestors or heirs, because they have no memory. When we die, everything dies with us.

Here is Brother Giorgio, the regiment chaplain, a handsome man. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a warm smile and unusually temperamental, down-to-earth views. I am almost certain he joined the fray. I happen to know thousands of priests and monks who fought in the Italian Army; many were killed. That is as it should be, no matter what the Pope says and the faith preaches. So it is, too, in journalism. If you do not intend to lie, the truth is never relative.

It poured with rain during my stay in Gorizia. The largest city hotel was closed, so we dined at a more modest spot, La Posta. They served us our food in the kitchen because an Austrian shell had fallen on the dining room just before we got there. We had a fine meal: minestrone, mutton with vegetables, pudding and fruit. We drank excellent vintage Austrian wine. There aren’t wines like those any more. And finally, coffee the likes of which hadn’t been had in Europe since the beginning of the war. While we were eating, Italian and Austrian batteries exchanged salutations over the city.

We crossed the Isonzo and arrived at the Friuli heights. The sun broke through the leaden grey clouds and lit the blazing bastion of the Karst. Beyond it lay Trieste, the Italian city of longing. But before the longing of the Italians can be fulfilled, the Karst will bleed for years and years to come.

Much later Bruno Baar tells his grandchildren, he tells Ada Baar, Tedeschi by marriage, what it was like on the Soča, because his grandchildren are always pestering him, What did you do in the war, Grandfather? And because his children, too, ask, What did you do in the war, Father?

There was fighting for a second mountain, for Sabatino, Bruno Baar tells them. We were living then at Via Romagna 8. We had a beautiful view of the Isonzo. There were gardens and trees all around the house, lush greenery. Gorizia had been captured with caution, so it wouldn’t be damaged, because everyone was counting on the town, the Italians and the Austrians, as they meant to come back once the war was over. So Gorizia was only bombed a little, for tactical reasons. People went on living in Gorizia. There were hospitals here and cafés, and the artillery was in the streets at the edge of town, and there were two brothels, one for soldiers and the other for officers. The nights got chilly in late summer. There was fighting going on in the mountains, on the other side of town. The metal railway bridge was battered by shells, the tunnel running along the Isonzo caved in. The avenue of trees on Corso Italia was unscathed. There were girls in town waiting for their soldiers. After the fighting there wasn’t a single oak tree left standing on the mountain, no pine forest, nothing but tree stumps, trees split apart and the land torn up. I started making my Picolit and my Asti wines again.

When I came back, Bruno Baar tells them, sometimes in the dark we’d hear the troops marching under the window and guns going past pulled by motor-tractors. There was much traffic at night and many mules on the road with boxes of ammunition on each side of their pack-saddles and grey motor trucks that carried men. In the fall the rains came. The vineyards were thin and there were mists over the river and clouds on the mountain and the trucks splashed mud on the road and the troops were muddy and wet in their short capes. The king came through at times. He lived in Udine and came out this way to see how things were going, and things went very badly. With the rain came the cholera. But it was checked, and in the end only 7,000 soldiers died of it.

Bruno Baar speaks, but again Haya asks him, What did you do during the war, Grandfather? And she says, You are making all that up. That is Hemingway’s story, not yours.

A story is a story, says Bruno Baar. It can be anyone’s.

But the story doesn’t go like that. It meanders.

Bruno Baar does not engage in battle. Any battle. Ever.

So it is with war, Haya Tedeschi says. There are civilians in war. They do not fight. Civilians live. Civilians do their best to go on as if nothing were happening. As if life were beautiful. As if they were children.

Gorizia is still slowly coming into its own in 1916. It is shelled by the Austrian Army, by a stern parent castigating a wayward child.

They are children of Austria, my grandfather and grandmother and my mother are children of Austria. Later, Austria abandons its children and they have to adjust, right? asks Haya Tedeschi.

So the shells are falling. Bruno, Marisa, Letizia, Ada and little Carlo run down to the cellar every time the shelling starts, when flour and sugar begin spraying from the kitchen shelves and the stone floor becomes an airy dough for Marisa’s crescent rolls and macaroons, over which the members of the household tiptoe, lightly, as if flying, as if on a cloud floating beyond time. It is October 1917—25 October, 1917—when Caporetto wages the final, twelfth, battle of the Soča. Marisa sweeps Carlo up, but does not make it to the door. A bullet zings through the window, ricochets off the stone mortar and pestle, still green inside from the pesto ground in it the day before, and comes to rest in the belly of the pale-complexioned woman in a blue and black dress with white polka dots.

Marisa is taken to Laibach, where else? Gorizia, formerly the Nice of the Monarchy, is still only an island, a blotch on the no-longer-sumptuous thighs of the Empire. Marisa struggles, semi-conscious, for three months. Bruno sends packages, because the hospital telegraphs: FOOD NEEDED URGENTLY. Letizia, Ada and Carlo muck about in the cold kitchen under clouds of flour and sugar rain, as if playing in sand and mud, making white worms and little bread rolls like pigeon shit when it splats out of the sky on to one’s arm, and these, nothing like Marisa’s crescent rolls and macaroons, they send to Laibach, but Marisa is already dead. Decades later, when the wars are over, at the Military Archive in Ljubljana Haya finds a yellowed page from the local papers with a news item about the death of an unknown Slovenian woman, who “to her last breath” was calling out for her children, Otroci moji! Otroci moji! and for someone named Ada, while the nurses with their caps resembling the spread wings of swans were helpless to do anything but shake their heads, say Hier spricht man Deutsch, and fly away.

No-one comes to visit Marisa. None of her family is left in Gorizia. Bruno, Letizia, Ada and Carlo leave on a refugee march towards southern Italy. Marisa dies in early 1918. She is buried in a common grave for the nameless at the cemetery in Ljubljana.

We left, Bruno says. We had to go to survive. Two hundred and twenty-five people died in the first seven months, he says.

Carlo is given a bar of dark chocolate, because he is small, nine. The others are given a half-loaf of bread. The column of refugees is a long one. They all walk single file. It rains for days. The roads are mud-soaked. Their legs ache. Their feet blister. In front of Bruno walks a man with a thick bandage around his neck. A plaster collar, rigid and brown with clotted blood. Bruno asks him whether he is wounded, and the man wheezes and gesticulates. Bruno cannot understand what the injured man is saying. He asks again. The man wheezes terribly. A bullet pierced his voice box, says a woman in front of the wheezing man who is walking. There are ten badly wounded people in the column, they are on stretchers. They aren’t moving. They do not move their heads. Maybe they are dead.

The column is setting off in the direction of Latisana, Udine, Padua, someone says. Bruno has no idea where. He is not familiar with Italy.

In Palmanova the streets teem with refugees. There is a great crush. They are all given cups of coffee. A woman lies, unconscious, in a wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow is pushed by a boy. The wheelbarrow rocks, tips. That woman will fall out, Letizia says. She’ll fall out and people will step on her, Ada says. The boy is wearing a brown, short-sleeved shirt. The rain pours down. Wo ist Mama? asks Carlo.

There is a huge cauldron of hot tea on the square. The cauldron sits on the square like a church, like a chapel. Around it gather muddy refugees in muddy tatters, silent. A German plane dips out of a grey cloud and hovers halfway up the sky. The plane sprays machine-gun fire through the crowd on the square. The soldiers and nurses keep doling out tea. A woman in a garden to the left of the square drops, and with her drops the child she is holding by the hand. The woman and child tumble among the wilting sunflowers, as if they are from Latisana, Latisana is full of sunflowers. The woman and child disappear behind the fence as if they are puppets in a puppet theatre, out of sight. The plane lands on the square, shot down by an Italian machine gun. The refugees step back from the tea cauldron. The pilot has been shot, too. He is a German pilot. Both his legs have bloomed like a bouquet of crimson roses whose petals are dropping in bunches, softly. A French soldier comes running over, shoves his face into the German pilot’s face and howls Vous êtes fou! The French soldier saw the woman and child fall among the sunflowers, which is why he is shouting. The Italians pull the pilot from the cockpit. It is a small plane, a three-seater, so the cockpit is cramped. While the Italian soldiers pull out the German pilot with his crushed legs, the French soldier comes even closer and shoots the German pilot in the forehead. The women working for the Red Cross stop doling out the tea. Empty tea cups swing from slender hands in the air like silver balls on a Christmas tree. New refugees stream into the city. The city is crowded with refugees who will move on the next day. There are carts pulled by oxen, there are donkey carts, people jouncing in them, eyes open, apparently alive. Others cling to their bundles as if they were newborn babes. The column leaves the town. The battlefields are not far off. There is shooting. An old, grey-haired village woman walks behind Bruno, straight and tall like a white flag on a mast, wrapped in serenity and severity. She trudges alone through mud that is getting deeper and thicker. This is not going to end well, she says. There are no more wounded in the column. Someone has unloaded them somewhere, at a hospital maybe. The rain comes pouring down. It is November 1917.

The road is blocked. The column crawls along for another three kilometres, then turns into a field all shiny with dampness and the wet. Someone says: This is a strategic point. Now the rain pelts. The field becomes a swamp. Bruno coughs. Carlo coughs. The mud is slippery between my toes, Ada says. There is no shelter, only the faraway sky. A doctor comes running out with his arms raised high, as if preparing to dive into the sea. Non ho i medicinali per i feriti! Trovatemi i medicinali! he shouts. Everyone is silent. The whole column is silent. When will the Germans come? asks Bruno. Wann werden die Deutschen kommen? No-one answers. Then an old man says: Das da ist mein Haus. Wenn ich weggehe, werde ich alles verlieren. Aber bleiben kann ich nicht... He gestures with an open hand, as if onstage, as if in some dramatic scene, he waves at a little grey hut over which the dark rainwater comes down so that the hut resembles a convict in a striped suit. The old man sobs.

Night falls. The column still has ten kilometres to Latisana. In Latisana the Baar family board a refugee train for Bologna, which takes them southward. Meanwhile, young men from the newly defunct Monarchy, children who have gone to fight for their own liberty, languish in prisoner-of-war camps all over Europe.

At the camp the Baar family eat cold mutton goulash, which puts them off mutton for the rest of their lives. The goulash is covered in a layer of shiny, whitish fat, a miniature skating rink for the camp fleas and lice, on which Ada traces out with her finger the Italian words she is learning, until the cold, fatty surface cracks and the dark-red liquid from underneath spurts up. Ada dreams of Marisa: ada goes to the cemetery, she is happy she’ll see mama marisa, she tells the flower seller, make me a big bouquet with lots of branches. the flower seller asks, why the branches? i’ll leave them on a tree, ada says. mama comes down the hill over gorizia and shouts, wait for me, ada, wait for me!

Ada is no longer a child. When she gets back to Gorizia she will be eighteen.

The Austrian and German camps scattered around the former Monarchy are also full of refugees and prisoners of war. The Italian boys mostly dream of food, just as all those who have lost their liberty dream of food. Some sleep on straw mattresses, some have sheets. They send home testimonies, little pieces of the puzzle that make up the panorama of history, edge pieces, corner pieces, without which the picture can never be framed. But History has no interest in frames. History wants to remain open. So that it can be filled in and multiply. Emanuele from Sigmundsherberg writes asking for chocolate, warm socks and tobacco, he complains of the frozen bread which cannot be sliced at fifteen degrees below zero. Gerolamo writes that they steal chickens, since all they are given is rice. From a camp in Celle, Antonio requests Maggi bouillon cubes, butter, thread, needles, buttons, a mirror and a comb. Sandro wants ten packs of cigarettes and two packages of Maryland tobacco, ricotta cheese and eggs, a kilo of white flour, three kilos of ravioli and twenty-five lire. In the Ostffyasszonyfa camp, Guido would like basil pesto, while Nicolà asks for black beans, figs and dried pears with a few walnuts. Antonio urgently requires a kilo of butter, tomato juice, twenty tubes of soup concentrate, grated cheese, two kilos of rigatoni, five cans of fruit salad, condensed milk, he wants cookies with hazelnuts, fresh sheep’s cheese and a kilo of mostazzola. Aside from the jumpers Ruggero asks for, and the woollen socks, gloves, mufflers, a jacket and a cap (no smaller than a size 59), he craves dried mutton, while Luca from the lunatic asylum in Cogoleto writes out his existential hunger, his physiological and philosophical enlightenment, in broad strokes, asking for money, two pigs and a goat (for the milk), “because I am seriously ill”. So food, the compelling huckster, illusion-maker of belonging, of being special, of survival, of return, of redemption, spreads out a bed in the tomb of nostalgia for our hunger, our folly, as cure and as a way out. We obediently make ourselves comfortable in that endlessly terrifying space of existence, seeking what we already have.

Is not your time

as irreversible as that same river

where Heraclitus, mirrored, saw the symbol

of fleeting life? A marble slab awaits you

which you will not read. On it, already written,

the date, the city, and the epitaph.

Other men too are only dreams of time,

not indestructible bronze or burnished gold;

the universe is, like you, a Proteus.

Dark, you will enter the darkness that awaits you,

doomed to the limits of your travelled time.

Know that in some sense you are already dead.

Borges

The war ends and what is left of the Baar family returns to Gorizia, to the new border rife with invisible malignant cells resembling particles of atomic dust. Along that border, as along all borders, deep into the soil is thrust the steel axis of a Ringelspiel, a merry-go-round, a lively carousel doomed to repeat eternally the invidious drama of family sagas. History — that lying, traitorous mother of life — continues, logorrhoeically, to spin its tiresome story, secretly dreaming up new borderlands one after another. And a border, like every long, deep wound, even if it heals and does not turn into a wellspring of putrid stench, is streaked with proud scar tissue that separates the living from the dead. A border is a “land” of spirits howling as they seek a form to assume.

Ada finds a job in a stationery shop at the intersection of Seminario and Ascoli streets, near to what was once the Jewish ghetto. It is a small shop. From the ceiling hangs the dead Monarchy, so through the little shop spreads the past, burning down just as sticks of oriental incense gradually snuff out, turning into small mounds of light-grey ash. The shop has something of everything: newspapers in Italian, German and Slovenian, red and yellow sweets in thick jars through which the sun shines, capturing the sweets in its everlasting, loving embrace, chains for pocket watches, cheap cologne, tobacco from every place imaginable, an assortment of baubles, chocolates, razors, buttons, threads, pocket mirrors, combs that tuck into the pocket of a military uniform. Florian Tedeschi certainly has reason enough to frequent such a shop.

Gorica is now Gorizia, rather than Görz. Thus, Ada’s shop is visited more and more often by the soldier Florian Tedeschi, stationed at the garrison barracks on Via Trieste, at the east end of town, near the border with the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

The year is 1920. Politically and economically Italy is twisting and flapping like a flag snapping in a powerful gale. There are scuffles and clashes with police. Half a million workers take part in strikes that last nearly to the end of the year; 320 people are killed in the first six months. The harvest rots in the fields. The wine is bad. Ada has no idea of any of this, she thinks how she will unbraid her hair at precisely the moment when she catches sight of Florian Tedeschi crossing the street on his way to the door over which the little brass bell might announce the beginning of a new life, ding-a-ling. With her finger on the golden-yellow wooden countertop steeped in the fragrance of tobacco, the fragrance of honey and cherries, Ada traces out her future. A smile of close-held happiness and anticipation, rolled up in a ball, like the bell on the door, swings on her face. Though coming to them late, Ada is reading the plays, novels, poems and letters of Gabriele D’Annunzio, grand lover and seducer, a man barely five foot tall, a bald, one-eyed warrior with a little moustache like the tail of a frail swallow, a decadent with rotting teeth, a media manipulator, a pilot and a shyster, a cavalry officer, a champion of her Gorizia, a rumour addict and petty dictator, a Blackshirt. When the family comes home from the camp she happens upon all the books that had belonged to her mother Marisa who disappeared so mysteriously; there they are, untouched, on a shelf above the shelves with the walnuts and the flour for the macaroons. under the counter in the shop, out of view, Ada leafs quickly through a life that will pass her by. With her free hand, as she reads, she crumbles a slice of Gugelhupf purchased at the neighbouring bakery owned by Frau Arughetti, who forgot to leave town. Elusive images flick through Ada’s mind; she snatches at them, her breathing jagged, and the windows fog up at the La Gioia stationery shop in the winter evenings. For her — just as for virgins and mothers all over Italy into whose dark labyrinths of repressed lust strode that very same lover whom Paris greeted, ecstatically blind, arms and legs wide open — the borders between poetry and reality were erased with the smudge of a cheap eraser. Ada keeps the Toscanelli cigars, His favourites, in a special spot, under glass. Ah, all the actresses, duchesses, dancers; all the poets, journalists, singers and marquises whom He gets to know and love long after His first forays to local brothels at sixteen (when He pawned His grandfather’s watch); ah, Teodolinde and Clemenze, and Giselda Zucconi, and Olga Ossani; Maria Luisa Casati Stampa, amasser of exotic animals and bizarre furniture; oh, Ida Rubinstein, Isadora Duncan, the singer Olga Levi Brunner, and after her, the pianist Luisa Baccara, then wealthy American painter Romaine Goddard Brooks, who later comes out as a lesbian; then, oh Lord, celebrated Eleonora Duse; Elvira Natalia Fraternali Leoni, Contessa Natalia de Golubeff, who dies in 1941 from alcohol and poverty (for whom Ada, long since married to Tedeschi, cared not at all); Maria Gravina Cruyllas di Ramacca, mother of four sons who bears Gabriele a daughter, Renata; Giuseppina Mancini Giorgi, 1908, committed to a mental hospital; and just then, in 1920, Parisienne Amélie Mazoyer, still a hot item. Morphine addict Alessandra Carlotti di Rudinì, dubbed Nike, is another of them: after her brother and children die she takes her vows and dies a Carmelite in 1931. And Maria Harduin di Gallese was there all along, of course, as D’Annunzio’s lawful wedded wife.

Ada reads Il trionfo della morte, La figlia di lorio, Canto novo, II piacere, L’innocente, Terra vergine, Le primavera della mala pianta, Il fuoco, so she has no time to read the newspapers, meanwhile in the little town of Fiume people are strutting around sporting their newly tailored black shirts, and D’Annunzio, “il deputato della belezza”, recites his poems from a balcony, champagne flows under the blaze of fireworks, and syphilis spreads. In July 1920 rats come pouring out of the Trieste sewers: there are squadristi crawling all over the city. They set fire to the building of the Slovenian National Home. Agrarian Fascism is born. Trucks packed with squadristi come to villages at night, twenty of them, a hundred. Armed with guns and revolvers, they surround the houses of members of the Farmers’ League and left-wing unionists and, systematically, one by one, order the head of each household to step out, and if they have to wait too long, they say: Don’t toy with us, we’ll set fire to your home with your wife and children inside, and then out he comes, and they tie him up, throw him into the truck, take him to a secluded spot and beat him senseless; then they leave him tied to a tree somewhere, unconscious and naked. Fascism sweeps the masses as if they were caught up at a football match. In her lovely light-blue jacket, in yellow stockings and petite yellow shoes, which many years later Florian will remember with longing, Ada often visits her lover at his barracks on Via Trieste on the east end of Gorizia, near the Yugoslav border. When she isn’t reading D’Annunzio and when her bare bottom isn’t rubbing against Florian’s army blanket, Ada is out on a bicycle, for bicycling is a healthy sport because it strengthens the calves. And so it is that a new joie de vivre creeps into Ada’s soul like a moth into a trunk of woollens. Those were the happy days in my life of suffering, Ada would say to Haya in 1943, and maybe in 1944, too.

Haya’s father, Florian Tedeschi, comes from a wealthy and fully assimilated Jewish family, not like Haya’s mother, Ada, who comes from a poor and altogether unassimilated Jewish family. Among Florian’s ancestors there are experts on the Talmud, financiers, chemists, glass-cutters, sculptors, failed students, musicians, seafarers, collectors, anti-fascists and, fascists. Some of them are buried in cemeteries all over Italy, Catholic and Jewish cemeteries, while the bones of others were swept up into dancing clouds, dropping black pellets laden with grey dust, as fine as grimy confectioners’ sugar. Some are here in Goriza, though not in Gorizia, but on the other side in Gorica, in a valley that isn’t much of a valley, in a valley meant to be full of roses, and Haya Tedeschi doesn’t remember any roses in that valley, because she hadn’t buried any of her own there, because her mother said to her, it was in a dream but she did say to her, bury me in the Valley of Roses, in Valdirose, because Haya misplaced her mother Ada in death, just as she had lost her grandmother Marisa, whom she never met, what else could she do, she was young and there was a war on, besides, that’s a Jewish cemetery with many small upright stones, by now old and aslant, chilled under damp moss like the amputated limbs of a body long since dead. And her dead, Haya’s dead on her father’s side, have not been buried in such cemeteries, Jewish cemeteries, for a long time, a hundred years or so. Haya Tedeschi knows that in Gorica, in Nova Gorica, a man named Wilhelm Tedeschi who died in 1891 was laid to rest. Born in Mannheim in 1837, he was a sculptor who gave painting lessons in Piran, Trieste and later Gorizia, yes, Gorizia, and before that in Pula, where his bust of Admiral Bourguignon may still be standing. In that family of Haya’s, on Florian’s side there are musicians and iron-casters, too, thank goodness, who create compositions of some sort for listening and viewing which are presumably meant to express beauty, though Haya doesn’t understand of what kind. All trace, apparently, has been lost of those composers and the casters, too. So, while she waits in the old building at Via Aprica 47, while she shuffles through the cards of all those lives, lives that are sliding through her fingers as if she were playing solitaire, Haya shakes her head every so often and says, We are a family with no traces.

In 1922 Claudio Magris returns his protagonist Enrico Mreule, a professor of classical philology, from Patagonia to Gorizia. The K.u.K. Staatsgymnasium has been renamed the Liceo Vittorio Emanuele III. Professor Schubert-Soldern (whom Ada Baar also remembers) has left by then. He is in Austria with no nationality of any kind and is undecided about what to choose, after having lost two monarchies, now that Gorizia has become Italian and his native Prague is part of Czechoslovakia. Just possibly he is not discontent with life in the draughty vacuum created by the cyclones and anticyclones of history. Enrico arrives, others depart.

On 30 October, Fascism officially takes its seat on the throne.

At the Vittorio Emanuele III Gymnasium, Italian is taught by Nerina Slataper with whom Ada Baar begins going out for sweets to the pastry shop on Via Municipio every Wednesday evening after she shuts the stationery shop. That is when Nerina tells Ada of her brother Scipio, who died near here, at Podgora, on 3 December, 1915, it seems so long ago, but it’s as if it were yesterday, Nerina says, when an enemy Croat shot him with a fragmentation bullet from a distance of only a few metres, when the bullet plunged into his throat, blew him to pieces and killed him instantaneously; then she gives Ada Scipio’s slender volume Il mio Carso, published a few years earlier, which Ada reads immediately and the next Wednesday tells Nerina that war has many truths, or perhaps no truths at all. Nerina tells her how she and her friends Bianca Stuparich, Maria Schiller and Lucilla Luzzatto spent a full three years, and the war was raging, she says, my brothers were at the front, Guido on one hill, Scipio on another, she says, they called us the “floral foursome”, she says, recalling how in their Trieste house at Via Fabio Severo 45 (I’ll take you there one day to show you, she says), how they spent three years sewing a tricolour, and how later, when the war was over, when the victory of the 39th Battalion and the 11th Regiment was being celebrated on 1 November, 1918, they had gone into the street and waved their flag and how the flag had billowed and how they had given it to the Bersaglieri.

Enrico Mreule says — or is it Claudio Magris? Haya is no longer sure, time is melting in her mind like chocolate—someone says that Monsignore Fogar, their religious teacher and now the Bishop of Trieste, is doing as much as he can to protect Slavs from Fascist oppression and violence, but that the Slavs retreat behind an impenetrable wall, and he says that a Ceccutti, the only other lay teacher among the cassocks, is furious at the squadristi, who also gave his cousin the castor-oil treatment, and says that they who are furnishing the squadristi with money without dirtying their own hands, the big estate owners or top civil servants, are far worse than the squadristi themselves.

Gorizia is in a new phase of its coming of age. Who can say how many phases there have been since its beginnings? It is baulking and petulant, caught up in rebellion against its parents, who leave it, return, then leave it again. Different lives are taking tiny ballet steps (petits pas) in Gorizia. Some trip and stumble, cave in. For instance, the life of Enrico Mreule who walks around barefoot, like a sort of Christ figure, in order to buy off his destiny, or with an open umbrella, to shield himself from both his destiny and Gorizia, from its caprice with light and dark. Other lives drip. They make notches and grooves, the edges of which they erode and undermine. They make scars which gape into wounds and then heal over again. Yet other lives lie down, arms and legs spread wide, and let themselves be washed by the rains from the nearby mountains, they go back into the Soča.

Florian Tedeschi tells Ada Baar his brief history. He arranges and sets out his brief history, making space for the future, which will become Haya’s past, which will be lost, which now, eighty-three years later, she searches for, arranges, orders, catalogues, this here, that there, something into the rubbish, something on to the desk by the window, to shine like a tiny light. Florian tells his story, and Haya is already wiggling in Ada’s belly. Florian speaks about how his father Paolo Tedeschi marries Emilia Finzi, daughter to Emma Teglio and Constantin Finzi, all of them from the most prestigious Italian Jewish families. Some are annihilated and others are not. Some convert, others do not. Later, books are written about them and films are made, and Haya watches the films after all the horrors have supposedly passed. She watches, and then again she says, There was a war on, what else could I do? The Teglio family have an entire fishing empire today stretching across several continents, which were conquered, thank goodness, without war, circumventing war, despite war, thanks (?) to war. Florian has had word from time to time of Elsa Finzi,* his aunt, though he has never met her. She is always winging around the world in the company of remarkable women, particularly an Englishwoman named Sylvia Pankhurst and a German woman named Rosa Luxemburg, who also travels from one country to the next, and Elsa doesn’t ask after him to see how things are going in the wasteland of Gorizia where he hasn’t even adequate pocket money, let alone the wherewithal to start a family. Furthermore, Elsa Finzi is always up in arms about one thing or another, fighting for some kind of so-called equality for everyone, and it bothers him that she is alive while her sister, his mother Emilia, is not.

Ada listens and says, That is a stupid sort of equality. Lets forget about Elsa Finzi. And this Aunt Elsa of his, Florian Tedeschi says, is a show-off, as if her family coat of arms were special, but it isn’t, it is a perfectly ordinary coat of arms, a coat of arms like any other, he says, un albero di pepe fra due leoni, and he can’t remember whether the family of his father, Paolo Tedeschi, have a coat of arms, which wouldn’t be bad if they did, and Ada asks, Why weren’t you circumcised? And what is Elsa after, anyway? says Florian. She has a baby, but she won’t marry, and besides, children irritate her, and Ada says, Our child will be called Haya. If it is a boy his name will be Orestes, and Florian says, Orestes is a dangerous name.

Haya remembers Elsa Finzi. She no longer recalls her funeral, which as far as she is concerned never happened, because Elsa only allowed the select to come, to attend the funeral, so around the grave stood a little cluster of senile former revolutionaries in rumpled trench coats, bedraggled partisans, that is what the papers wrote, so Haya did not go, and even if Elsa had permitted her to be there Haya wouldn’t have gone; instead she would have sat as she is sitting now, locked in her locked-up world, waiting. Haya remembers Elsa’s flat at Via Santa Maria alla Porta 11 in Milan. She remembers (from Nora’s letters) that Elsa’s husband throughout all of 1944 plies Ada with Pierrot absinthe (once she had wearied of the revolution Elsa did marry, after all, but someone else), and how in that year, 1944, her family in Milanino drank liqueurs instead of water, so they were cheery but ate very little, mostly carrots and cabbage, their bellies often ached and the bombs fell.

In the inside pocket of his uniform, one might say close to his heart, Florian keeps a sepia photograph, by now already creased, covered in a web of white lines through which stares a tight-lipped, black-haired woman. Emilia Finzi (Tedeschi by marriage) awaits her death in style. Barely thirty, she dies on 13 November, 1910, at St Moritz, the “magic mountain”, at the Schatzalp sanatorium for wealthy patients afflicted by tuberculosis. She is buried at the Jewish cemetery in Milan. In a tin box resembling a miniature coffin, Florian keeps several more photographs and this postcard of the Schatzalp sanatorium, which Haya pats and says, What a nice place for dying.

O, i giorni felici, whispers Florian into the scant evidence left of what was once a crowded landscape of devastated memory. Yes, happy days. Back in 1904, in their De Dion-Bouton, Paolo and Emilia go for afternoon spins along village roads that run between two rows of sycamores, when the sun is mild and there is a gentle breeze. Meanwhile, the servants make hot cocoa, bake amaretti, petits fours, from time to time the more dramatic ganache and obligatory Linzertorte, that delicate marvel, the work of Jindrak, an Austrian confectioner. In the evening, wearing a gown of emerald-green shantung with a high collar of black lace, Emilia reads I promessi sposi aloud yet again, first published, what a coincidence, in Gorizia, a distant and unknown place as far as she is concerned, in another empire. The Monarchy is mighty. Within it, from Voralberg in the west to the easternmost village of Bukovina (1,274 kilometres), from the smallest Czech town in the north to the Dalmatian fishing villages in the south (1,000 kilometres), order, serenity and a single currency reign. All across this great and happy land the same products and the same brands are distributed, the same food items of equal quality, with only the names adapted discreetly to the language of each of the peoples: in Hungary the Julius Meinl chain of shops is called Meinl Gyula, while Jules Verne becomes Verne Gyula; Knödel become knedliky in Czech; the Wiener Schnitzel is called bečka in Croatian and in Italian, cotoletta Milanese. The distant centres of the Monarchy, its balls, waltzes and its coaches, schnapps and Sachertorte, its painters and its imperial family, all this becomes intimate and dear in the provinces as soon as it is ever so slightly Italianized, Croaticized, Magyarized, Bohemianized; die grosse glückliche Familie, oh, happy days.

As a naval engineer, widower Paolo Tedeschi ventures to Libya, where he finishes installing some sort of electric generator, meanwhile sending his son Florian off to the Beretta boarding school on the western shore of Lake Garda, in the little town of Salò, which would become the seat of a small puppet Fascist state some twenty years later called Repubblica Sociale Italiana, otherwise known as Repubblica di Salò. On a visit to his boy, Paolo makes the acquaintance of Rosa Brana, a Catholic school teacher, and for the sake of peace in bed he relinquishes his Judaic faith in which he had not, to be fair, placed much stock to begin with. Meanwhile, Paolo goes bankrupt, so he and Rosa live off her modest income and have more children, three new Catholic children bearing the Jewish surname Tedeschi, who would, when the moment came (with the exception of Ugo, the flautist), first salute alla Romana, then shout Sieg Heil, and live until their deaths in the romantic little town of Salò on the shore of Lake Garda. Florian continues his schooling at the Collegio San Alessandro in Bergamo and grows a moustache. He enrols in the military academy in Rome in 1919, and off he goes in 1920 to do his military service, first in Mestre, then in Gorizia, where he meets the love of his life, Ada Baar. When Ada’s bulging belly can no longer be concealed, Florian asks his father Paolo to bless the marriage, but Paolo declines. Ada is poor, she has no pedigree. Ada is a Jewish woman and screws extra-institutionally. Florian relinquishes his right to his mother’s inheritance, which includes villas and factories, paintings and books, silver cutlery and money, hardly a negligible legacy, and marries Ada Baar the day before Haya is born, on 8 February, 1923. A new life begins.

Florian works at all kinds of jobs. He sells typewriters in Gorizia and then in the evenings on a 1915 model bicycle — precursor to today’s mountain bike and designed by acclaimed Edoardo Bianchi for the Alpini and the Bersaglieri — he delivers his daily takings to the factory outside town, then he picks up copies of Gazzeta dello Sport and Lo Sport Fascista, and stops in at the Taverna I Due Leoni or, less frequently, at the Doppolavoro. He sips a glass of home-made red wine to relax. He listens to the news broadcasts people listen to in Gorizia at the time in the café bars and taverns, and he is indifferent to what he hears. Sundays, when he listens to a broadcast of a football game, Florian is far from indifferent, he is captivated. The tavern is lively and stifling. The customers wrangle, then quarrel and shout. Reporter Niccolò Carosio invents a new football language, much like the new culinary language Marinetti has already ushered in. Florian is a Juventus fan, though perhaps he shouldn’t be. He begins to have second thoughts about football and “his” club after the World Cup in Italy in 1934, when Mussolini orders presidents of football clubs to be members of his political party. Leandro Arpinati holds the Italian football federation, the FIGC, in a stranglehold for years. In 1926, Il Duce pulls off the famous “carta di Viareggio” move, which means every team can take on only one foreign player per season; in 1927 every foreign player who is not a “son of Italy” (the homeland) is sent packing. After that there are almost no Hungarian players left on the Italian team, which Florian regrets, because they are his favourites. In 2006 Haya happens to be watching television when she sees Paolo di Canio take the defeat of his Lazio like a hero, greeting the Livorno players with the “Roman salute”; his fans wave their swastikas, the Livorno fans wave their red flags. This never ends, Haya says.

Haya is not fond of football.

Obsessed with radio equipment and radiophony in general, Florian gets a job in 1925 at a shop called Marconi. Florian listens to the speeches by Guglielmo Marconi, whom Mussolini, the best man at his wedding, names President of the Royal Academy of Italy. When Marconi weds his second wife Maria Cristina Bezzi-Scali in June 1927, Florian listens to the broadcast. While they are playing Wagner’s wedding march, Il Duce’s dog Pitini can be heard barking in the background. A year earlier, Florian also hears over the radio that Mussolini is introducing a tax on bachelors. Lucky I have Ada, he says.

Ada goes out into the nearby woods and picks mushrooms and sings the opera arias that come back to her. She goes to her stationery shop. Under the counter she reads various magazines, mostly ones with photographs. In La Rivista Illustrata del Popolo d’ltalia an article about Margherita Sarfatti at the Venice Biennale XV catches her eye. Margherita Sarfatti praises a painting by Oskar Kokoschka. Several years later, two world leaders will declare that same painting to be degenerate. Ada regularly reads the monthly Rivista delle Famiglie, because it prints many articles dedicated to woman and her family, and family is everything to Ada: Haya and Florian — my greatest riches, she says. Haya has kept an issue from 1936, and she leafs through it with her dry fingers as she sits by the window and rocks. Then she puts it down on the little desk.

Ada regularly brings Il Giornale della Radio Leonardo Bottinelli home from the stationery shop, because this newspaper publishes the Italian radio schedule and listings for another ten European countries. Aside from that, the paper registers cultural events of note, and since nothing of note ever happens on Gorizia’s cultural scene, Ada at least reads of the notable events. Once the race laws are introduced, Jewish names no longer appear in the listings, particularly those of musicians and singers. This, however, happens later, after the Tedeschi family move south and when they are no longer so small. The Tedeschis are an entirely respectable and appealing family with four children, when Ada tells Florian, Perhaps we should be baptized, and when Florian tells Ada, I went to the fascio and signed up. There, in the south, they mainly read Il Mattino Illustrato, because it is published in Naples. It comes out on Sundays and has engaging fashion articles, cartoons (Haya remembers them) and beautiful pictures of both ordinary and high life. There are political articles, too, but the Tedeschi family skip over them.

In the late 1920s Trieste is already ailing. Its breath rattles, as if on its deathbed. It is crippled. German schools are closed, street names are changed or Italianized. Trieste is becoming a little world inside a little world. Its centripetal forces are dwindling, it is sucked in by forces separating it from its very self, its organs are near collapse, it is dispersing into microparticles of its history that do not know where to settle or what to latch on to. At the beginning of the twentieth century people abandon it as it lies motionless abed with sores: Conrad, who writes about its dockers, Joyce and Trakl and Rilke and Freud and Mahler and Mann and Slataper; Thomas Mann tinkers with the Buddenbrooks at Hôtel de Ville, Egon Schiele paints a red fisherman’s scuttle moored in the harbour, Rainer Maria Rilke composes his Duineser Elegien. Back then, and still today, with an occasional twitch, as if nodding to its late great friends and summoning them, come, as if pleading with the few friends it has left, stay, Trieste is becoming an exit point, a city opening its gates so people can flee, leaving the elderly and small house dogs to count out their days in peace and quiet.

Then, during and after the Great War, some leave Trieste to be killed, some leave to kill themselves, some leave in search of a better life. Others arrive because they have nothing better in mind. Because that is how it is with cities, they flow on eternally, this way or that, so books say.

Francesco Illy, an accountant of Hungarian extraction and a soldier for Austro-Hungary, spent the first part of his war service along the Soča, then in and around Trieste. The war ended, Illy looked around and said, This is a wonderful city. I will learn Italian, so he went about selling first cocoa, then coffee. People just sit there, downing the black stuff, he said, as if they were Turks. Francesco invented an espresso machine so he could achieve it all: to serve all those leisurely customers. We’ll call the little machine the “illetta”, he said, after which the empire of fragrances and tastes opened its doors to him. Today one of his descendants, Riccardo, otherwise known as Sonnenschein, waves his red flag from time to time at raving right-wing Trieste, olè! Time for a revolution.

Il Caffè San Marco on Via Battisti serves its first guests in January 1914. During the war it is completely demolished and only in 1920 do the coffee drinkers come back. Saba stops in, so does Giotti, and Svevo the merchant, also known as Ettore Schmitz, comes by. Joyce no longer sits at the Caffè Pasticceria Pirona, but the cakes and wine are still Viennese, and the coffee is Illy. After having made the rounds of several such spots, which seem to be peaceful innocent gathering places to Florian, the proprietor of Caffè degli Specchi at the Piazza Unità tells him, Come tomorrow at seven. The Tedeschi family are living in a flat at Via Daniele, a short and dark street, and the church of Santa Maria Maggiore is close by, which is handy for family attendance at Mass.

Haya is six years old and recalls little of Trieste from this time. She remembers her father Florian as he inches, legs rigid, between the tables, holding his tray high above his head, as if collecting the rain. She remembers how she waits for Florian to finish his shift at Caffè degli Specchi in Piazza Unità on Sundays, so they can go for ice cream at an ice-cream stand, because the ice cream there is cheaper. She remembers a family, dressed in finery, dignified somehow, and she remembers how she wants to live in a family like that. Haya observes the woman in her dark striped suit with a cloche hat perched on her head, taking a little mirror from her purse that catches the rays of the sun, and how the lady smiles at her sons in a way that Ada has never smiled at her. Haya watches the boys in their little blue suits and wants to ask them What language are you speaking? She wants to say to them, I am Haya and I can sing to you in Slovenian if you like:

The gentleman doesn’t smile at his sons, because he is reading the paper. He has white hands. He has a moustache and an elegant grey suit with a sheen. The boys drink hot chocolate and Haya suddenly wants some, too. She’d like to sip hot chocolate at the Caffè degli Specchi in Piazza Unità, and swing her feet and admire the brand-new patent leather shoes she doesn’t have. Haya remembers her surprise and her curiosity, Who are they? Then, just as when a mirror slips from the fingers, the image shatters. A man from a neighbouring table rises to his feet, the chair tips over, he takes two marching steps, stands behind the man who is reading the newspaper and shouts, he shouts terribly loudly, and he is scowling and his eyebrows are tangling into writhing leeches, and his mouth opens into a small tomb that flashes and all the while he is holding a large cup of coffee in the air as if he were at the Olympics preparing to heave a hammer that looks like a bomb but isn’t, it is a white porcelain coffee cup from the Caffè degli Specchi on Piazza Unità full to the brim with aromatic Illy coffee, then he swings and the cup smacks the gentleman below the shoulder and the black liquid starts to steam and soak into the grey suit — to get warm? to hide? — leaving a large, dark, wet splotch.

Schiavo! howls the person who flung the cup. Schiavo, qui si parla solo italiano! The boys jump to their feet, pull out handkerchiefs, dip them in the water from their father’s glass and mop his back. The coffee flees, sheds its aroma, spreads around the man’s belt, trickles down his right trouser leg and wriggles to the ground like a small dead snake. On the light grey suit an image is left resembling a squished cow pat.

One damp Trieste evening, as Florian Tedeschi strolls along the deserted sluices, staring with horror at the empty belly of the port, nearly touching the sundering of the city which joins with his own sense of fragmentation, which, this rift of his, this schism, sinks perilously into rigidity like the calcified spine of an elderly stroller, he catches himself repeating, to the beat of his footsteps: vorrei dirvi, vorrei dirvi,

one, two,

vorrei dirvi,

I am a businessman,

not a waiter,

I am a soldier,

in every businessman,

in every soldier

hides an ache from which the soul cracks like frozen glass.

Florian Tedeschi turns into Via San Nicolò and stops at Number 30, where the sign Libreria Antiquaria Umberto Saba still stands today, but Umberto Saba is no longer in Trieste and there is a ribbed iron curtain drawn over the display window of the bookshop.

Tell me about a life and everything

that happens in it

in murky madness

of vainly discordant voices

says Florian Tedeschi staring at the tips of his waiter’s shoes.

Words exhaust themselves

he says

I remember everything, but understand nothing.

Time has shrunk like a jumper rinsed in hot water.

It is getting tight.

The next day, on 15 November, 1932, Florian Tedeschi goes to a branch office of the Banca di Napoli and to a friend from his army days, Luciano Grauer, says: Get me out of here.

In the 1930s there are about five thousand Jews living in Trieste who quickly leave the city, particularly after 1938. One of the four centres in Italy for the study of the Jewish Question is in Trieste, hard at work “profiling” the Italian nation, so Jews start scattering in every direction. Those who stay are captured efficiently by the Nazis and transported to camps all over Europe. Of the more than seven hundred Trieste Jews who are herded on to the freight cars of the trains that pull regularly into Trieste train station, fewer than twenty return after the war. The Tedeschis get out in time without even realizing it.

In late November, the Tedeschi family sail on the ship Ganga, or it may have been the Marco Polo, arranged through an association known as the Società Adriatica, from which a sticker remains, from this Adriatic association, the Adriatic ocean liner, whatever, and the sticker is remarkably preserved, torn no doubt, which was later lost without trace, travelling on its own to a world Haya never knew. from an item of family luggage, no doubt, which was later lost without trace, travelling on its own to a world Haya never knew. The Tedeschis arrive in Naples. For Haya, Naples is an image of blurred colours that mean peace of mind. There are no outlines, here and there a spark.

Paula and Orestes are born. Florian works at the Banca di Napoli. Ada follows Enrico Caruso as he sings “O, sole mio”, and she cooks and washes and cooks and washes, and feeds fish and pasta to her children. After dinner Haya listens to Leoncavallo with her father Florian, Pagliacci is always in fashion, now especially when Gigli is singing, one of Mussolini’s favourites. Every 12 December the family go out to the square where the Giornata della Madre e del Fanciullo is celebrated, when the names are announced of the twenty-three most reproductively active mothers in Italy, each with at least fourteen sons, and the mothers are received at a ceremony and given a modest award by Mussolini and the Pope. One year their neighbour Amalia wins with her eighteen sons, but little red-haired Rita is not part of the competition, as if she were not even there. Life is beautiful. The house is roomy. There are oranges in the garden. The children are given a donkey called Kroo. There are many joyful photographs. Their mother Ada is wearing a white hat, tipped to the right in all the pictures. They ride bicycles. Papa Florian goes to work in a suit. One evening Ada cries as she takes off her wedding ring. Florian removes his wedding ring, too, but doesn’t cry. We’ve been ordered to, he says. Haya wraps in a yellow flannel cloth the silver coat of arms of Gorizia that had hung in her grandfather Bruno Baar’s winery, so Ada says, and which they had brought with them on the long trek to the camp where it had served them, flipped over, as a bread board. I will not give them Marisa’s earrings, Ada says. Florian shouts, You must. With a red-hot needle Ada pierces Haya’s ears, though her hands are trembling. This is all I have of Mother’s. There isn’t even a grave, she says, and so it is that the earrings with their wreath of tiny, poorly burnished, grimy diamonds do not go to Mussolini. Haya has been wearing them for seventy-two years. There, as if they’ve shrunk, she says and touches her ear lobes. Then she says Enough for today and goes to bed.

She dreams — the corpse opens like a book. it flips open by itself, like a magic box, and in it are tiny diamonds, a multitude of tiny diamonds like flakes of dead skin — light. then, like a river, they flow. in the corpse which refuses to die, in that now genderless dead person, everything is still except the light which flees. the lack of smell. an embalmed erasure. the skin on the face of the corpse is taut, the eye sockets dry and empty. the skull shows through the dried parchment envelope, in the open mouth the teeth are growing, they get whiter and longer. haya looks into the belly and sees her face in the thousands of miniature surfaces of colourless precious stones, distorted and multiplied

That year, 1935, a quarter of a million Italians donate their gold and silver for a better future, for the happy days to come. In Rome 250,000 wedding rings are collected; 180,000 in Milan. Benedetto Croce gives up his senator’s medal; the Cardinal of Bologna, Nassali Rocca, donates his bishop’s chain; and Pirandello, his Nobel Prize medal. A total of 33,622 kilograms of gold is amassed. That same year Mussolini gives three million gold francs to Albania with a promise of additional economic support to follow.

That year, 1935, the slogan “Buy Italian!” is pushed; an autarky is born; imported goods and foreign businesses disappear. Italy cleanses its digestive tract, feeds on purgatives, gloats with self-satisfaction, blossoms in its little corral.

Two years later the demographic campaign reaches its peak. Mussolini writes a cheque for 700 lire, a good month’s wages at the time, to every young man who decides to marry. The administration creates new jobs and welcomes in its embrace child-bearing Italians, pint-sized studs. Fecund mothers, those with at least seven sons, receive a cheque for 5,000 lire and a life-insurance policy. This is a time of wholesale fornication.

MINCULPOP is born, the Ministry of Popular Culture, and with it new dictionaries, orthographies, patriotism; the use of foreign phrases is banned, and they are replaced by Italian surrogates. Maxim Gorky is dubbed Massimo Amaro, but he is swiftly removed from the libraries and bookshops; Louis Armstrong becomes Luigi Fortebraccio, and Benny Goodman is Beniamino Buonuomo; shortly thereafter MINCULPOP bans all jazz performance and broadcasts.

Life in the Tedeschi family goes on. For Haya it is altogether ordinary, completely forgettable, as ordinary life is, until the day when, at the beginning of the school year in September 1938, her teachers Nella Negri, Amato di Veroli, Samuel Tagliacozzo, Massimo Pavoncello and Viola Sass do not show up to teach Geography, Mathematics, History, Italian and Physical Education. Until the day when Florian, after dinner, whispering in a conspiratorial hush, as if about to say something obscene, declares, We are Jews, and she asks, What does that mean?

So many shocks, so many tragedies, for centuries, with this meaningless fact that people hide even from themselves, or, conversely, of which they boast, as if it determines who they are and what they are, as if faith and blood are in and of themselves a blessing or a curse. She, Haya, has always felt nothing along those lines, or maybe just a little about being someone’s daughter or sister, someone’s mistress, someone’s friend, which does not imply unconditional devotion to those closest to her. She has always been somehow weightless, free of the heavy burden of mother tongues, national histories, native soils, homelands, fatherlands, myths, that many of the people around her tote on their backs like a sack of red-hot stones. Like little Sisyphuses they lug this wretched and perilous load through life, these clusters of tuberculosis and syphilis germs, these elusive, invisible, and oh so infectious containers of putrescence, they even leap into the containers voluntarily, choke on the sewage sludge in their own fermented excrement, imagining, perhaps, that they are duty-bound to do so, thereby expressing their gratitude that they are still here, as if they have been spared. Haya thinks back to a dwarf tree by the road, a diminutive tree with a round crown of violet-hued blossoms, much like a bright child’s cap as it stands there alone and smiles. That little tree is like a kiss, she whispers. Borders and identities, our executors. Married couples who sow wars, vast upheaval and death.

Instead of her lost faith, Haya, like Kosovel, believes in darkness.

If you had at least been killed for reasons of honour; if you had fought for love or to forage food for your little ones. But no. First they hoodwinked you, then they slew you in war. What do you want me to do with this France which you, like I, it seems, helped survive? What do we do with it, we who lost all our friends? Ah! If it had been to defend the rivers, the hills, the mountains, the sky, the winds, the rain, I would have said: “Gladly, I concur, this is our job. Let’s fight! All our life’s joy is in the fact that we live here.” But we defended a false name for it all. When I see a river, I say “river”; when I see a tree, I say “tree”; I never say “France”. There is no such thing, Jean Giono says, although he has been dead for thirty years.

A few months before the school principal fires him, in 1938, Amato di Veroli, Haya’s favourite school teacher, brings to class his friend, the mathematician Renato Caccioppoli.* It is May. Naples smells of “Santa Lucia”, freshly washed bed linen and lemons. Haya is fifteen. Professor Caccioppoli has a handsome face. Professor Caccioppoli’s fingers are stained with tobacco and he is thirty-five. He hops around as he talks. He grins. If you are afraid of something, measure what you are afraid of and you’ll see it is but a trifle, Professor Caccioppoli says. You will see, your fear is nearly nothing, almost too small to measure.

This is when Hitler starts out on his journey; the newspapers are full of Hitler. They speak of Hitler in history classes, in maths they talk of Hitler, in gym class they talk of Hitler. Hitler arrives in Rome, then comes to Naples; excitement runs high. Four trains follow Hitler’s train carrying five hundred foreign diplomats, generals, agents, party leaders and journalists, all in uniform, one uniform or another, an entire little army. Hitler is in a foul mood. He often scowls. He suffers from stomach pain, mostly gas, so he is forever gulping Mutaflor, prescribed by his faithful companion Dr Morell, but he takes scant joy in his encounter with “the little man”, King Vittorio Emmanuele. And so, as he is depressed, on his trip to Rome Hitler pens a will. He leaves the Party his personal effects, Berghof, his furniture and paintings, and to Eva Braun, his sisters, his other relatives, secretaries and servants, he leaves tidy sums from the sales of Mein Kampf.

At the border crossing by the little town of Brenner, the inhabitants greet Hitler’s five trains with enthusiasm; they wave banners, fling flowers on to the train carriages and smile, though it is difficult to say why (they smile). There are Italian soldiers here too, many Italian soldiers, and Fascist troops. A specially rehearsed orchestra plays both anthems, and the Duke of Pistoia, in the name of the king, holds a brief speech in which he tells the Germans how glad the Italians are to see them, and how very welcome they are in their beautiful country. The houses along the railway line are decked with banners sporting slogans that tout German-Italian friendship. The landscape is quaint, the many colours blinding.

Hitler does not enjoy himself in Rome. He is driven to the royal palace in a coach instead of a car, to a dinner with the queen, who sits next to him and to whom he says not one word; and, furthermore, he is irritated by the huge crucifix she wears around her neck, so he stares at her bosom. The king spreads all sorts of stories about Hitler’s odd habits, and reveals that during his first night there Hitler asks for a woman to be sent to his room, so that she can tuck him into bed as if he were a child.

A great military and naval review is prepared in Naples — that should brighten Hitler’s spirits. It is 5 May, 1938. The bay is full of submarines and torpedo boats. School has been cancelled. The pupils are ordered to join in the welcoming throng, to wave and shout. Haya says, I am not going. Ada and Florian say, That is imprudent. All of us will go.

Naples is tricked out gaily. There are flowers everywhere in classical style and colourful banners flap in the wind as if readying for Carnival. The façade of San Francesca da Paola at Piazza del Plebiscito is disfigured by dozens of drapes of red and black bunting; as they ripple in the spring breeze, the church beneath them looks maniacal, keening at one moment in deep grief, and at the next, laughing hysterically.

The Italian navy is doing its level best to wow the Führer, performing mock naval battles. The audience is enthralled: gasps of delight and wonder rise to the skies, aaahhs and ooohhs float in the air like little puffs of breeze. The submarines, like immense black cormorants, dive and surface, seeking imaginary prey; children shriek and cavort; older men and women sit on deckchairs brought from home, as if out to enjoy the sun. After every exercise hats fly into the air, men’s and women’s hats. Thrill reigns, a sense of community, a vast delight at belonging. To one country, one people, to two leaders. The city has donned its uniform. Secret agents, Fascist spies, the police, military guards, come pouring out of everywhere. The Neapolitan songs slip down under the cobblestones and quiver, crouching, silent, trampled by the newly born passo romano.

In the evening Hitler is taken to a performance of Aida, to relax. The next day they bring him back to Rome where on 7 May, at a banquet at the Palazzo Venezia, he grants South Tyrol to Italy in a generous gesture. In return, Hitler receives the Discobolus of Myron. Everyone is pleased. The visit is a success.

Late in the school year the students ask their teacher Amato di Veroli, When will you bring Caccioppoli back? Professor di Veroli says, That won’t be possible. They’ve locked him up in a madhouse.

Many years later, in the 1990s, Haya sees the movie Morte di un matematico napoletano with the excellent Carlo Cecchi, and from that, from the film, she learns part of the story of Renato Caccioppoli. The rest she uncovers on her own. But by then the war is long over. What happened is being forgotten.

All the same, unpaid bills keep arriving. The story of the famous mathematician comes too late for Haya. Only now, as she takes out a picture of that charming and impulsive genius, does she understand what he had said about fear. And something else he said long ago in 1938 at a mathematics class at the state Neapolitan Gymnasium: I do not know certainty, at best I discover possibilities.

Just before the Neapolitan parade, Renato Caccioppoli is embroiled in all sorts of antics around town, and there is talk of them which Haya remembers. Having returned to Naples in 1934 from Padua, where he had been head of the Department of Algebraic Analysis since 1931, Caccioppoli teaches group theory and mathematical analysis, works on linear and non-linear differential equations, elliptical equations, and so on and so forth, plays the violin and the piano both in private and in public, speaks of literature and painting, at times sports a beard, dresses in tatters and travels with empty pockets by train from one city to the next in third-class cars, is arrested for loitering and then released, then he goes back to his mathematics, his students adore him, he adores his students, after class they drink together and think.

At the time he looks like this:

Fascism attaches itself to life in the city like the tentacles of an octopus squirting jets of black ink. The police work with dedication; the prisons are crowded; (some) people flee. Caccioppoli measures his fear with mathematical precision and realizes he cannot find it. He protests against the dull, mind-numbing, caricature-like rhetoric of the regime, always the same, the same for centuries, he rebels against the deceptive toys made of nothing but empty sheen and simple melodies for the hungry and ignorant masses, but these are things Haya cannot see (she is only eight in 1931), her father Florian does not see, nor does her mother Ada. They believe that now that they are Catholics they are absolutely safe. They believe in a better tomorrow wrapping their lives in thick black fabric and they become huge silk caterpillars, trapped bugs with squashed lungs, convinced they are already butterflies. They believe in universal obedience. If they are ever bold enough to rebel, they deserve serious punishment, as serious as God’s. Caccioppoli shouts, Italy is a wretched cur on a leash! Then he goes down Via Chiaia, just when it is teeming with pedestrians, he passes under the old bridge raised in the early seventeenth century, as if he were passing through a small arc de triomphe and behind him on a rope he drags a fattened capon. When he is not pulling off stunts, Caccioppoli meets with his friend, the Communist Trotskyite Mario Palermo and at secret meetings held in the taverns of Naples, in private flats or the warehouses of denounced bookshops, he debates, and whenever he gets his hands on a piano or a violin, he plays. In 1937 he meets André Gide, who says of him, More than a man, he was a soul.

Just before the parade, two days after Haya’s entire school class, entranced by Renato Caccioppoli, decide to dedicate their life to mathematics (as Haya does later), Renato Caccioppoli and Sara Mancuso walk on to the terrace of a small restaurant in the centre of town on 4 May, 1938. The night is luminous, the orchestra plays first waltzes, then marches, then a few Neapolitan songs — for appearance’s sake. People are eating pasta, mostly frutti di mare, pizzas, melanzane parmigiana, little candles flicker on red and white checked tablecloths. It is Wednesday, an ordinary evening. Caccioppoli gulps down the house red wine, rises, approaches the orchestra, and says, Play the Marseillaise. It goes like this, he says and whistles a few bars. The orchestra strikes up. The forks held by the plainclothesmen and assorted guests stop halfway to their open mouths. You heard, Caccioppoli says, the hymn to liberty; to liberty that is being suppressed in this country; to liberty which Benito Mussolini does not acknowledge, who with his German ally… Sara and Renato are arrested immediately. The Special Court rubs its hands in gleeful anticipation. But the Caccioppoli family are well placed. Renato Caccioppoli’s aunt Maria Bakunin is a chemistry professor at the University of Naples; Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin is his grandfather. The family obtain “medical evidence” showing that Renato Caccioppoli is deranged. They place him first in a prison clinic for the mentally ill run by psychiatrist and university professor Cesare Colucci, then he is put in a private hospital established by Colucci’s late friend, also a psychiatrist, Leonardo Bianchi. The Bakunin family have plenty of experience with handling the threatened and those who threaten; their history teems with biographies of the “disobedient” who must be spirited away; Russian history and other histories; this is a story that flows on like a muddy river. Sara Mancuso, whom Caccioppoli later marries, is released. The world of the downtrodden and abandoned literally becomes Caccioppoli’s world. Renato has his room and a piano on which he plays the Marseillaise whenever he feels the urge, when he is not working with numbers or coming up with formulae which later (with his blessing) others publish under their own names, as Hermann Weyl does in 1940. The patients adore Caccioppoli. They sing in his chorus, which they dub the “nutcase choir”. The whole hospital sings. People from the unreal world sing songs different from the songs sung in the real world, which are not, in fact, for singing, because one can only march to them, not dance. Out there song is drying up; it is no longer song. It is being squeezed out, reduced to pomace. Caccioppoli works at the asylum. He is visited by friends, colleagues, students (though not all of them). Renato goes for brief walks in the mild sun and comes up with new calculations. Haya and her friends are too young, they do not visit Renato Caccioppoli, they are told, You cannot understand. And so Haya’s life passes by with her not getting it, or getting it wrong, or getting it late, so she now tries to dismantle this misunderstanding as if it were a magic cube, the pieces of which stay stubbornly clamped shut. She opens, dissects her not-getting-it way of getting the gist into tiny, tiny segments, delving into each and every cell of the vast honeycomb her life has become. She thrusts the slender needle of reason into each of these already empty little chambers, gradually, into one after another, but out of them creep maggots, pure rot.

Renato is visited by Carlo Miranda* and Gianfranco Cimmino.*

I go to see him every day. He accepts life among the patients calmly. He understands his incarceration as a special brand of human experience. But we are all concerned. Occasionally, when he is allowed to, we drive my car out into the country, have lunch at a little restaurant and speak of mathematics, war and women.

In 1938 Guccio Gucci (1881–1953) opens his first shop in Rome; his woman’s bag with bamboo handle is a hit.

In 1938 Italy wins the World Cup in football.

In September 1938 Mussolini abrogates the civil rights of Italian Jews.

In November 1938 a domestic version of the Nuremberg Laws comes into effect in Italy.

In 1938 King Vittorio Emmanuele III publicly supports Benito Mussolini in signing the Race Laws, according to which all Jews may be cleansed from the Government, the university, the army and other public services, and their rights to schooling and property ownership strictly limited.

In November 1938 Florian Tedeschi loses his job.

They know I am a Jew, he says. The night is balmy. The windows are open. The sea is murmuring. There is no moon.

At university they tell the professors Wear your black shirts, which does not appeal to most of them. Italian mathematics loses its finest people. Tullio Levi-Civita* is fired from the University of Padua, other universities fire Vito Voltera* Guido Fubini* and Beniamino Segre.* Enrico Fermi* goes to Stockholm in 1938 (with special permission from the Fascist government) to receive the Nobel Prize and does not return. Renato Caccioppoli is released from the asylum in 1943, organizes a railway strike and is nearly killed when strike-breakers disrupt the gathering. He takes part in meetings of the Italian Communist Party, sits often on the editorial board of Unitá, and with Unità’s editors, his friends Mario Palermo and Renzo Lapiccerello, he makes the rounds of the bistros, most often Gambrinus and out-of-the-way taverns where, until late into the night, with beer, grappa, cognac or Strega, he tries (with his friends) to work out what to do about the Nazis.

After the war, with many honours, as a member of scholarly academies and institutions, Caccioppoli returns to mathematics. He works on film. He plays music. He publishes. Sara Mancuso leaves him. He drinks. He drinks more. He often prefers to be alone. Occasionally, he goes to the opera with an old priest, to concerts of classical music, and then retreats again into his ravaged universes.

Into Euclidian realms and realms of his own. This is what he looks like:

On Friday, 8 May, 1959, around noon, he strolls along his favourite Via Chiaia, he has a short cappuccino and two grappas. He goes home. He waits for his best friend Giuseppe Scorzo Dragoni to arrive from Rome. Giuseppe is one day late.

That evening he shoots himself in the head.

The asteroid 9934 1985 UC is given the name Caccioppoli. Mario Martone makes a film about him. The Mathematics Department at the University of Naples is named Renato Caccioppoli.

Behind every name there is a story.

Frantic, on 14 December, 1938, Florian Tedeschi humbly requests to be received by the banker Pasquale Simonelli.*

Four days later Florian Tedeschi sits in a salon at Villa Simonelli and with a trembling hand he brings a cup of fine, nearly transparent Chinese porcelain to his lips. He quietly sips the black tea. Inanely, though maybe not, he says: My wife adores Gigli. And I, too, adore Gigli. Simonelli says not a word.

Simonelli is a large man, and what’s more, he’s portly. Next to him Florian is tiny. Florian is wearing a beige trench coat, rumpled and tattered, which he doesn’t take off while he sips Simonelli’s tea. Seven days later, Florian Tedeschi goes to Tirana where a job as an accountant awaits him at a large construction consortium. Everything is as it should be. Florian is not plagued by doubts. In 1938, of the 47,000 Jews then living in Italy, 10,000 are card-carrying members of the Fascist Party.

In early April 1939 Italy attacks Albania. The Albanian Parliament votes to be annexed to Italy. King Zog flees to Greece. In Naples Ada sells her furniture, bedding and rugs; she gives away their clothes. In May the family are reunited. Florian makes headway at his job. He is proud. He buys a new suit, Italian, a new trench coat, black, that he tightens with a belt. In Tirana they tell him You are being transferred to the Banca di Napoli. You are going to Vlorë. The climate is mild there and you can swim in summer. So, the Tedeschi family swim that summer.

Vlorë has many names which are differently spelt and pronounced, more names than Gorizia, and all of these names pour into the town on an inlet covered by a blue cloak of air, over which, at night, the mountains whistle. Aulon, Avlon, Avlona, Avlonya, Vallona, Valona, Vlona, Vljora, Vlonë, Vlorë. Olives, black and oiled like the eyes that open Haya’s first kiss with Ludovik, whose yellow shirt has a hole on the right shoulder. Ada’s vegetable pastries, lambs from Karaburun, cold yoghurt before leaving for school, where, as in Naples, there hang portraits of Vittorio Emmanuele and Mussolini, harapash, toasts with Falanghina. A new waystation on the journey, the route of which Haya cannot discern. Vlorë, like a pocket-sized Naples. An Italian school, Italian neighbours, Italian chocolate. A romantic trip to the island of Saseno where the troops are stationed (our troops, Florian says), the drip that jiggles on the tip of Ludovik’s nose, misted by Haya’s breath. Valona, fortified just like Gorizia. Her first visit to the theatre. Yet another language for the same departures, the same flights. Sea: det; touch: prekje; fear: frikë flag: flamur; Jew: çifut: war: luftë journey: udhëtim. Sadik Zotaj street, a bench beneath the window on which Haya kneels and waits, waits? Aron, a mohel from Corfu, arrives and circumcises Orestes, while Florian is off touring Banca di Napoli branch offices in the interior. Oh, yes, life is beautiful. It flows by the Tedeschi family, who find palms, sandy beaches and abundant fresh seafood in Valona to eat with Barilla-brand tortiglione. Many years hence, as so often happens in Haya’s old age, the past elbows into her wait like a blow, like a surfacing diver, breaking, transparent and wet, through an elusive wall (of memories), and Valona shimmers before her eyes, completely changed. The bygone decades have formed clusters of insights dwelling in the meanders, the warehouses, the hiding places of her consciousness, wrapped up in the ironed rags of logic, and now they start tumbling out of warped compartments, piling up, like rubbish, around her feet. She tries to bring order to this vast disarray, because after she retires from her job as a maths teacher at the Dante Alighieri Classical Secondary School in Gorizia, she has the time, yes, while she waits, she has the time to wonder How could I not have known? How could I not have seen?

The first banner of Albanian independence is raised in Valona back in 1912. When the Tedeschi family move to Valona in 1939, there are about 600 Jews living there, but she, Haya, remembers only Fanny Malli, because Fanny led a rabbit on a leash, and Ruben Ketz, because he had pockets full of black pebbles and spoke Albanian better than she did. In retrospect, she knows there was once a synagogue in Valona, which the Italians turned into a weapons armoury during the Great War, and there had been a Jewish cemetery, because before the bombs began to fall, while walking with Ludovik across a ploughed building site, she noticed a little tablet with a Star of David on it and oddly carved letters. Those are our enemies, Florian and Ada say, the Greeks and the Albanians, the partisan bandits. Haya believes there are enemies everywhere around them, although she is no longer a child. Italian boats sink in the Albanian port. The Italian confectioners shut down.

We are losing the war, Florian says.

The Germans don’t like us, Ada says.

In Tirana, Enver Hoxha closes his shop, called Flora, where he sells alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, sandwiches and tobacco, for the opening of which he had submitted the necessary paperwork to the (Italian) municipal administration, signed Envero Hoxha. In a rash of demonstrations, Albanian anti-fascists clash with the carabinieri and the local police. The newly sworn-in Albanian prime minister, Mussolini’s favourite Mustafa Merlika-Kruja, persecutes, arrests, tortures and kills all those who are against the regime. The Italians capture Koçi Xoxe and condemn him to death by hanging. The youth leader Qemal Stafa is killed. In Korçë, anti-fascists set fire to the barracks of the Italian Army, and on 24 July, 1942, they blow up an armoury with the weapons inside; the Tedeschi family run into the textile shop on the ground floor of their building and hide among the bolts of floral cotton; they themselves becoming a decoration, a pattern, in the growing maelstrom. At Tirana airport the spotlights are smashed; the Communists sabotage the central telephone switchboard and cut all telephone lines, and the organized uprising begins. Florian Tedeschi continues making the rounds of the interior branch offices of the bank where he is a loyal employee. Ada packs the basics. Orestes declares, I want to go for a swim. Paula skips rope in the living room. Nora says, I got my period. Down in the cellar Haya presses Ludovik’s icy fingers between her legs, then twists like the stem of a yellow gerbera and says ah. Her whisper and Ludovik’s whisper light up the woodshed, from which cats scamper, prowling for rats

syçkë pëllumb

lamtumirë

im verdhë ëndërr

të dua

të dashuroj

Ada’s breath smells of cheap perfume. The bus is full of women, children, farm animals. They rumble through the Albanian wilderness and remote mountains. The roads are ghastly. It takes them a week to reach Tirana. Florian locks up his desk as if he will soon be back to his bills, extracts, copies, calculations, interest rates, but he will not. He jumps into a car in Valona, sits next to an Italian general, who is also on the run, and before his family arrive he reaches the Dajti Hotel, only recently opened, orders sausages, un rocchio di salsiccia, a mixed salad of all sorts of vegetables, and blackberry and vanilla ice cream: Genuine Italian, nothing finer, winks the waiter. At dusk he strolls along Viale Savoia, A beautiful avenue, he says, and is breathless at the sight of the elegant villas nestled in Mediterranean vegetation. A new old chapter is being written, one of political intrigue, murders on demand, secret services, of people disappeared, families disappeared, stories never to be untangled, whose rotten threads like ratty street brooms poke along the ground and do nothing but smear the shit. Enver Hoxha is photographed more often, his two gold teeth flashing. Ada and the children abruptly forget their pidgin Albanian, and all they repeat is faleminderit shumë, faleminderit shumë, after which they fall suddenly silent. The Tedeschi family spend several nights on straw mattresses in the foyer of the Dajti Hotel, while around their heads stomp polished Italian boots. Later, in 1944, in chorus with Ada and Florian, Haya will tell their relatives in Gorizia, Those were terrible times for us Italians there.

It is already 1943. How time flies. In early September, when Italy is no longer any factor in Albania, when the director of the Banca di Napoli informs Florian, while they are still in Valona, that he is absolutely free to travel immediately to wherever he would like to go, the Tedeschi family secretly accept the help of a small Jewish anti-fascist group, which finds them accommodation near the airport, where, since the war is raging, planes keep landing and taking off and bombs drop like falling stars. Ah, our happy days are forever gone, hums Ada, swinging her hips and taking a long swig from a flask of brandy. Terrible, Ada says to her sister Letizia and brother Carlo after they return to Gorizia in late 1943.

There is not enough food or bread to go around. They use coupons to purchase coffee and sugar. The Albanians are speaking less Italian and more Albanian; some are even speaking German. These are a wild people, Ada and Florian say after they return to Gorizia, but a brave people, yes, indeed. The German troops attack. German bombs destroy. The Nazis count, catalogue, purify the population, filter it. Every day there are people hanging on the squares, swaying to the rhythm of the palm fronds. Ada believes all this to be a brief and cruel diversion, the work of unruly young men, so one day, after she has had a good swig from the flask that she now hides in the linen cupboard, under the bedding, she goes off to the German Military Command with Haya, convinced she can help free Florian’s colleague Sandro Koffler, the banker. Listen, Ada says, Sandro is an honest man. I am telling you. My last name is Tedeschi. The S.S. officer only glances up at Hitler hanging there on the wall, and waits. Tedesco in Italian means German, Ada says, I am someone you can trust.

Ja, Tedeschi, the officer says, ein jüdischer Name.

On their way home, Ada says to Haya, Let’s get some ice cream, while there still is ice cream to be had, while it is still Italian. And she also says, You can’t run from your name. Behind every name there is a story.

The Italian troops in Albania are now entirely out of favour. Former friends who are called Allies in wartime are arresting and killing soldiers. Some soldiers surrender, others flee, many die. The Tedeschi family move again, this time to the centre of Tirana, and prepare for departure, which is called repatriation. It is September 1943. Life dribbles by. Paula and Orestes go off to the abandoned palace of the fascist ministry in their neighbourhood, where they roller skate on the spacious marble floors, shrieking. For Paula and Orestes life is a thrill. The Nazis are stepping up their raids and searching flats. From a window on the third floor Haya watches a scene, as if from a movie. Later she faints. A young man in a yellow shirt with a hole on the right shoulder sprints towards her building, while across the street a Nazi lounging in an open-topped car lines him up in his sights. The barrage of bullets from the machine gun catches the young man two metres short of the front door. In an instant the yellow shirt grins red.

In un momento

Sono sfiorite le rose

I petali caduti

Perché io non potevo dimenticare le rose

Le cercavamo insieme

Abbiamo trovato delle rose

Erano le sue rose erano le mie rose

Questo viaggio chiamavamo amore

Col nostro sangue e colle nostre lagrime facevamo le rose

Che brillavano un momento al sole del mattino

Le abbiamo sfiorite sotto il sole tra i rovi

Le rose che non erano le nostre rose

Le mie rose le sue rose

P.S. E cosí dimenticammo le rose,*

whispers Ludoviko from Valona, while he watches Haya search for a lost earring in the sand by the sea, imagining himself to be Dino Campana and her to be Sibilla Aleramo, with their last dusk running out; and Haya (at the time), the goose, has no idea what he is mumbling.

The boy vanishes into Haya’s entranceway; she thinks she can touch him. The Nazis go from door to door, banging and shouting. As if the boy has been swallowed whole. The next day Haya ventures out to buy cornbread mixed with chaff, and on the square she sees more than a hundred neatly stacked bodies, some in civilian clothing, some in partisan uniforms. The passers-by do not look; they move quickly past with rubber tread. The men lie there as if sleeping, as if tired of war, as if they were tree trunks for a building project. There is no smell. There are no flies. The shops are open, banners snapping, the shutters on the windows are shut.

Ludoviko is not among those who were killed.

Koffler the banker is not released from prison. They take his wife Angela to the madhouse, because she yanks her hair out and bangs her head on the windowpane. For practically nothing, the Tedeschi family sell what little property they have acquired. Florian’s colleagues sail out of Valona, but do not reach Naples: the ship is bombed by British aircraft and sinks. The only survivor is a clerk named Leone Romanelli, who swims for three days to reach the shore, then arrives in Tirana to tell Florian all about it. He, too, loses his mind. His wife and three children are back there, on board, or rather in the sea, on the bottom of the sea. It is not wise to have many children. Then Leone Romanelli is placed in a madhouse. To keep Angela Koffler company. For ever, Haya believes.

Escorted by German soldiers, the Tedeschi family leave Albania and travel for three weeks to Italy. Behind them they leave their physical stench and dead armies, whose generals, Italian and German, lugging maps, registers, medical and army records, dental records and data on medical histories, dragging along with them a priest or two, wandering through the remote mountains and sandy coves of the land of eagles, come back twenty years later, through the mud and rain, the summer heat, regardless, looking for mouldering bones over which crops or skyscrapers have grown.

At the border between Albania and Yugoslavia columns of Italian Wehrmacht prisoners of war peer frantically about and beg for a crust of bread, while digging in sub-zero temperatures, seeking their way under mounds of snow, looking for a path, an exit. In thin voices that crack with the cold, they call to their loved ones and send them messages. Here, at the border whose encirclement ruptures, making it a passage, an exit, the Tedeschi family, with hundreds of civilians and soldiers on their way to Budapest, clamber into a railway car, never dreaming, not even wanting to know, what is happening just a little further north, what journeys there are, and to what end. Traversing Montenegro, Hungary and Austria, Florian and Ada and their four children arrive in Italy just before Christmas 1943.

The train stands in Budapest for several hours. Off it leap neatly pressed German soldiers, well fed and freshly shaven. The Hungarians toss portions of goulash, bread, milk and little bottles of rum in through the windows to the other passengers. Not three months later, from this same platform at Keleti station and several other smaller train stations in and around Budapest, other train carriages, locked freight cars, cattle wagons, with a hundred people in each, with a bucket for piss and a bucket for drinking water, will depart for a walled-in station, a blind track leading to a cosmic twilight. From early spring to early summer 1944 the crematorium at Auschwitz will work at full capacity, and daily it will vomit up the remains of 6,000 people, murdered, who will float away like gray eiderdown into the sky. And so it is that in two and a half months 400,000 Hungarian Jews will leap on board the “messianic timetable placed on the Index by the new order”, in a “wretched reworking of the antediluvian evacuation, this landlocked, earthbound reprise of Noah’s ark”, which was written for them by an unknown man in long black tails, in a shirt with a “stiff celluloid collar, yellowed like an old domino, the headwaiter’s tie with a bohemian knot, swinging his cane high in the air, swaying on his feet like a ship’s mast, staring into space”, a gentleman by the name of Eduard Sam, a gentleman who, with a glance at his watch “with a dial and Roman numerals showing the exact time”, steps out of the “frame of the drama and farce of which he is writer”.

The way lives interweave yet never touch, only to collide in mutual destruction, inconceivably distant in their simultaneity. In 1944 the former senior inspector of the state railways, by then a “retired senior railway inspector”, author of a timetable, Eduard Sam, steps along in a “column of the miserable and the ill, among horrified women and terrified children, going with them and alongside them, tall and bent over, without his spectacles, without his cane, which they had taken from him, staggering along with uncertain steps in the queue of the sacrificed, as a shepherd among his herd, a rabbi with his flock, a school teacher at the head of a group of school children…” So Eduard Sam moves towards the trains, towards the train carriages, whose departures and arrivals he has so often calibrated, checked, supplemented, coordinated, perfected, and now, as he walks, the times of train departures and arrivals, of routine departures and arrivals, run in his head like a refrain, like a ditty, much like the clacking of wheels, in close harmony with his broken step, like a song that will determine his fate, and to himself he repeats those arrivals and departures of trains, those routine departures. And, while Eduard Sam strides to his finality, high-level Nazi officials in Berlin, Cracow, Warsaw, everywhere, the perfect bureaucrats Dr Albert Ganzenmüller, State Secretary of the Reich Transport Ministry, and his superior, S.S. General Karl Wolff, Himmler’s personal adjutant, obediently apply the special, newly composed timetable to the new order. S.S. official Dr Albert Ganzenmüller, without a trace of malice, earnestly, with devotion and meticulous attention, crosses out, annuls Eduard Sam’s timetable of trains, of special trains, which had been honed for years, and in the serenity of an airy office composes his own Fahrplanordnung 587, Fahrplanordnung 290, and so on, special timetables of trains, of special trains, on which he stamps the official seal of annihilation.

Mr Ganzenmüller, you like trains?

Yes, Your Honour, trains are my passion, my obsession.

From 1928 you’ve worked for the German Railways, and as early as 1931, as a member of the Nazi party, you were involved in anti-Jewish activities.

I wouldn’t put it that way. Things were much more complex.

You scheduled civilian trains for deporting Jews to the camps. From 1942 to 1945 you supervised the German State Railway.

I was following orders from above.

You secured the unobstructed running of trains to the death camps. Thanks to you Operation Reinhard ran smoothly.

Operation Reinhard? I only heard of Operation Reinhard after capitulation.

You personally drew up many and varied timetables. Such as a timetable for transporting elderly German Jews to Theresienstadt.

That was my duty, to see to the unobstructed movement of trains. Besides, composing timetables was a hobby of mine. Like solving challenging crossword puzzles.

In 1942 a vast “purge” of the ghettoes begins throughout the General Government.

About that I know nothing.

In June and July there are construction works on the railway line leading to Sobibor — a mass extermination camp. There is an unplanned halt in the transports, and on 16 July S.S. General Karl Wolff seeks your help.

I don’t remember.

Instead of sending 300,000 Warsaw Jews to Sobibor you redirect them to Treblinka. After 22 July a train runs daily with 5,000 Jews from Warsaw to Treblinka, while another train runs twice weekly from Przemysl to Belzec. Further, on 28 July, 1942, you, Albert Ganzenmüller, Secretary of the Ministry of Transport — Reichsverkehrsministerium, and Deputy General Director of the German Reichsbahn, report to S.S.-Gruppenführer Wolff on the measures you have taken.

Have you proof?

We have your correspondence with Wolff. On 13 August, 1942, Wolff writes:

Warm thanks, both in my own and the S. S. Reichsführers name, for your letter of 28 July, 1942. I was especially delighted to hear from you that already for a fortnight there has been a daily train, taking 5,000 of the Chosen People to Treblinka, thus enabling us to carry out this movement of population at an accelerated pace. I have personally contacted all the agencies involved in the process so that the job can proceed without impediment. I thank you again for your efforts regarding this question and also request that you continue to bring your personal attention to every detail, for which I will be particularly grateful. Sincerely yours and Heil Hitler! W.

I do not recall this correspondence.

So you claim you received Wolff’s letter, stamped as Top Secret, a letter from the second highest official in the Third Reich, and you did not read it? Three million Jews were taken to their deaths in that operation.

I know nothing of Treblinka. I did not realize that Treblinka was a mass extermination camp. I thought it was a Jewish reservation, so Himmler explained it to me. I knew nothing of the fate of the Jews. I saw nothing. I worked in my office. I was not out strolling around.

This is drivel, Ganzenmüller. In May 1942, before the camp was set up, we knew something was going on at Treblinka, and the information was given to us by German railway workers. Some S. S. officials arrived at Treblinka in May 1942 and arrested a hundred men, Jews from both Treblinka and its neighbourhood, and ordered them to clear the land. The Ukrainian guards arrived right after the prisoners. The S. S. claimed that the inmates would work on damming the River Bug to build a new military installation, but the German railway workers stubbornly insisted it was going to be an extermination camp for the Jews.

Yes? And who are you?

Franciszek Zabecki, head of the civilian train station at Treblinka. A member of the Polish resistance movement. I followed the arrivals and departures of trains. I noted them down. On 22 July, 1942, I received an official telegram stating a short, regular and very frequent line would run on the Warsaw-Treblinka route. This line was supposed to transport new “settlers”, the telegram said. The trains would be made up of sixty covered cattle wagons, or rather closed goods wagons, it said. After unloading, the trains were to be sent back to Warsaw, it said. Why “settlers” in goods wagons, I ask you? Behind bolted doors and narrow slits covered in barbed wire instead of windows; crammed in like livestock, so packed together they couldn’t even crouch. That telegram was signed by you.

I don’t remember.

You are the person who drew up the train timetable, Mr Ganzenmüller. This was your timetable, Mr Ganzenmüller. There were between eight and ten thousand men, women, the elderly and a lot of children in the first train which arrived on 23 July, 1942. A lot of small children, infants. When it spewed out its freight, the train returned to Warsaw. Empty. To pick up new “settlers”. When the horrors became unbearable, and I could tell you about them, the horrors, day and night, you halted all regular passenger traffic to Treblinka, Mr Ganzenmüller. Surely you remember that, Mr Ganzenmüller, you drew up that schedule. After September 1942 the only trains that reached Treblinka were military and deportation trains, there were no picnickers, no excursions; civilians did not come out on nature tours, Mr Ganzenmüller. The trains were met at the station by S.S. men with sleeves rolled up and pistols drawn. Tempo! Schnell! they shouted. The number of passengers was marked on each wagon with chalk. I wrote it down. For two years I wrote this down, from one day to the next, and I added it up. I know, while others guess. I am the only living witness who was at Treblinka from the day when the extermination of the Jews began to the day the camp was closed on 16 August, 1944. All the German documents were burned, but I copied them. One million two hundred thousand people were killed at Treblinka. There is no doubt about it.

Even after the rebellion, the transports did not cease. You don’t remember Mr Ganzenmüller. You don’t remember how you again changed the timetable of trains. How after the rebellion you redirected the trains to other camps, and you turned Treblinka into a transit station. I remember.

Transport PJ 201: 32 wagons, Bialystok-Lublin via Treblinka, 18 August, 1943.

Transport PJ 203: 40 wagons, Bialystok-Lublin via Treblinka, 19 August, 1943.

Lublin via Treblinka, 19 August, 1943. That same day, transport PJ 204: 39 wagons from Bialystok to Lublin, stopping at Treblinka.

Transport PJ 209: 9 wagons, for Lublin via Treblinka, 24 August, 1943.

Transport PJ 211: 31 wagons left for Lublin on 8 September.

Transport PJ 1025: 50 wagons of Jews from Minsk Litewski were sent to Chelm, in fact to Sobibor, 17 September, 1943.

I don’t remember.

On 22 August, and on 2, 9, 13 and 21 September wagons departed from Treblinka loaded with the clothing of the murdered Jews. The liquidation of the camp begins. They cart away the boards, construction material and quicklime. They take away the dredger. Five bolted wagons take away the remaining “workers”, meaning prisoners, to Sobibor on 20 October and 4 September, 1943. On 31 October, the metal structures and liquidation equipment were taken away. Everything is recorded here, Mr Ganzenmüller. More than one hundred wagons of goods and material left Treblinka.

Mr Wolff, they call you Karel?

Yes, Your Honour. Karel is somehow softer than Karl.

Like Ganzenmüller, you too claim that you knew nothing, yet recently in a B.B.C. documentary, The World at War, you talked about how you were present in 1941 at the execution of Jewish prisoners in Minsk and described the splatter of brains on Himmler’s coat.

I remembered that later. They reminded me.

When did you first hear of Operation Reinhard?

From Himmler?

I had no idea there was an Operation Reinhard. This is the first time I hear of it. Here in Nuremberg.

And the camps in Lublin and Auschwitz, did you know of them?

I heard for the first time of those appalling places on 19 March, 1945, when I came to Switzerland. With horror my Swiss friends gave me newspapers that reported on the atrocities perpetrated in those camps.

When were you transferred to Trieste?

On 9 September, 1943.

Did you belong to the circle of Himmler’s close friends?

Yes.

Did you hear Himmler’s speech in Poznan in October 1943?

No, Your Honour. At that time I was already in Trieste.

And in Trieste that speech was never talked about?

No, it was distributed to officers who were at the front.

Did you ever hear about Russians and Poles, who were not Jews, being killed and exterminated, did you ever hear about that?

No, I have never heard anything about extermination. Your Honour is probably referring to systematic, planned extermination.

Exactly.

I know nothing about that.

So this is the first you have ever heard of it?

Please? I don’t hear well.

Is this is the first time you’ve heard about the mass extermination of people?

They asked me about it after capitulation. That was the first time.

Have you any idea of the extent of the exterminations?

Not precisely.

All the evidence points to several million victims.

I am very grateful, Your Honour, for the information you have just given me.

Did you ever visit the Warsaw Ghetto?

No.

Czerniakow in his diary provides the day and hour of your arrival in Reichsführer S. S. Heinrich Himmler’s company.

Ich bin ein alter Mann, Your Honour. I cannot remember everything.

Herr Wolff, I consider you responsible for the deportation of 300,000 Jews to the Treblinka concentration camp during the summer of 1942 and I sentence you to fifteen years in prison and ten years’ loss of civil liberties.

Too late, Your Honour. I was released for good behaviour.

The Tedeschi family go on living in the illusion of ignorance. Those who know what is happening do not speak. Those who don’t know ask no questions. Whoever asks gets no answers. Then, as now. Hence, since they don’t know, the Tedeschi family don’t ask, so there is nothing for them to find out, so there is no reason for their getting unduly upset.

In the 1970s Haya, for the second time in her life, enters the belly of Budapest by train, at that same station, at Keleti. The space is now completely changed yet it is the same; it pulses to the rhythm of the walkers lugging a burden different from that wartime cargo. The light in the station sways, trembles, grabs for the little bits of glass embedded on the ceiling, which gleam like a honeycomb, and then glides speedily off, as if saying, I’ll be back. The faces of the travellers are serene, nearly motionless, but their bodies sway mischievously, almost cheerfully. Not like back then, when a terrible paralysis reigned, with fear swaying in its lap. For, in the 1970s, Haya finally learns of (some) events she knew nothing about in the 1940s, although like cataclysmic floods and earthquakes, with a horrible noise, they were rumbling here, right beneath her window.

Ah, train stations, both a convergence point for and bisector of the clusters of cocooned little worlds that tumble headlong, smashing, nervous and angry at times, jovial at others, bursting apart like the volvox, spewing their contents over the rails, sliding off all over the world. Train stations, tombstones, borders between the living and the dead, between infinitude and the hermetic world of the city, city gates, cities unto themselves. When identities vanish, train stations sprout. If every border had a train station of its own, what marvellous confusion would ensue, what a crush, what mockery.

The Tedeschi family arrive in Venice as the city is coming under attack. Haya expects hands in the air, welcoming formations of waving hands; she expects flowers and hugs, tearful eyes, sad smiles and sighs of consolation, our poor ones, what terrible times you’ve been through, benvenuti a casa. Nothing of the sort. The train pulls into a vast empty station along whose tracks rolls only the huffing of time, as if an owl were sitting on the moon, glowering. The world has forgotten us, Haya says and stands in line with her family at the station for food and a free ticket to return to Gorizia, to return home.

3

Haya’s grandfather Bruno Baar is gone. He dies at the age of seventy-two in 1939, when the Tedeschi family are embarking on the ship for Valona from Naples, so Ada does not attend her father’s funeral. Haya’s grandfather Paolo Tedeschi is in the Republic of Salò with a fascist membership card in his pocket, which is becoming less adequate as a camouflage for his Jewish origins. Gorizia, along with Rijeka, Trieste, Udine, Pula and Ljubljana is part of the new German province Adriatisches Küstenland, Litorale Adriatico, and this is a part of the Reich that eagerly revisits the dream of Mitteleuropa. Haya gets to know her relatives. In a whisper Ada describes her life in Naples and Valona to her sister Letizia, and at night switches her plum brandy for grappa. Florian sells umbrellas retail and wholesale at the Delle Tre Venezie shop at Piazza della Vittoria 7 (telephone no. 8–17), and on Sundays, with his boss Francesco Poletti, he goes to the stadium on Via Baiamonti to cheer for the local second leaguers of Gorizia (Busani, Blason, Cumar, Auletta II, Sessa, Ciuffarin, Gimona, Beorchia, Bonansea, Auletta and Zanolla). Who else could he cheer for? Later, when he leaves for Milan in the autumn of 1944, he supports Milan.

Trieste becomes the centre of the O.Z.A.K. (Operationszone Adriatisches Küstenland). At about the same time as the Tedeschi family arrive in Gorizia, Christmas 1943, a whole crowd of old acquaintances is gathering in Trieste. They need to be sent somewhere after Operation Reinhard is shut down in Poland, so Himmler dispatches them urgently to Italy. There are about a hundred men and women from Einsatzkommando Reinhard in Trieste, as well as a number of S.S. troops from Ukraine. Einsatzkommando Reinhard opens offices designated by the abbreviation “R”. The Trieste group is R1, the Udine group R2, and the Rijeka group is R3.

Elegant old villas are refurbished, furniture is renovated, servants hired, banquets and balls are held, singers and dancers rehearse a repertoire of entertainments, new films arrive, operas and philharmonic orchestras tour, celebrated chefs prepare delicacies at the newly opened clubs. Trieste lives its schizophrenic moment again, in war, its parallel lives, real and unreal, contradictory.

The Nazi police and soldiers of the Nazi Army stroll around Trieste. On 1 October, 1943, the political and administrative authority of the Adriatisches Küstenland is in the hands of Gauleiter Friedrich Rainer.* Trieste is ailing and, much like a person, it does not want to die without a fight. It struggles to survive as best it can. Abandoned by Italy in 1943, it flails and succumbs, distraught. The restaurants in the harbour gleam, they serve fish such as dentex and gilt-head bream; in return for coupons from the 209–201 series one can get a kilo of potatoes for three lire, or 500 grams per person; the theatres are packed: Wagner’s Lohengrin and Lehár’s Merry Widow are the hits of the 1943–44 season; the Istituto Enenkel at Via Battisti 22 (telephone no. 8800) offers accelerated courses in the German language for children and adults, courses in typing and stenography for young ladies, and, after strict security checks, the young ladies translate secret and public documents for the Nazi police; third-rate painter, “agreeable” Angelo Brombo at the Trieste gallery exhibits his picturesque oils with motifs of a joyous Venice, while his colleague Zoran Music, born in Gorizia, is off to Dachau shortly thereafter; the “new staff” at the Salone Villa on the Piazza Ponterosso styles and dyes hair in the latest fashion (blonde); football is played with euphoric zeal: Ponziana-Triestina (2:11); Giacomo Cipci, conductor of the full orchestra of Trieste Radio, goes off for a friendly visit to his Viennese counterpart Max Schönherr, after which Max Schönherr visits Trieste, a city in touch with the world; at the Fenice theatre they stage matinees for children, especially Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; the movie Venus vor Gericht (The Trial of Venus) shows at the Nazionale cinema, produced by Bavaria Filmkunst of Munich, with Hansi Knoteck in the role of Venus, followed by the documentary Die Bauten Adolf Hitler (The Buildings of Adolf Hitler), all in German, of course; and Trieste again loses its mind, its compass, looks into itself, horrified, and asks, Who am I now? To whom do I go? Who is coming to me? The morass inside it is deep and dark and sick, so sick that no-one and nothing dares go there, so all-embracing that Trieste itself is engulfed.

The old companions from the administration of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka kick back in Trieste and the surroundings, have their last good times, their happy days, under the watchful eyes of Christian Wirth, the first man of the Trieste Einsatzkommandos, who is laying the foundations for their efficient work as early as September 1943. Christian Wirth comes to Trieste with a team of experts who were working with him on the operation known as Aktion Tiergarten 4, which means that since 1939 he has been exterminating the “terminally ill”, first in Germany, then at the camps.

Christian Wirth, S.S.-Sturmbannführer (major), was born on 24 November, 1885, in Oberbalzheim. He is a carpenter and construction worker and, after 1910, a policeman. During World War One he fights on the Western Front. In 1930 he becomes a member of the most vicious unit of the Stuttgart police, already known, even then, for their brutality towards prisoners. A member of the National Socialist Workers’ Party, 1931, and part of the S.S. by 1939, when he is given the rank of Kriminalkommissar in the Stuttgart Kriminalpolizei, a section of the Gestapo. Soon thereafter, as Kriminaloberkommissar and S.S.-Obersturmführer, he is transferred to the Grafeneck psychiatric clinic to head their euthanasia programme, which is already up and running. At Grafeneck, Wirth makes the acquaintance of Josef Oberhauser, who is in charge of supervising the work of the crematorium, and he becomes Wirth’s right-hand man in the death camps throughout Poland. At Grafeneck, Wirth also gets to know the head of the kitchen, Kurt Franz, later commander of the Treblinka concentration camp; then he meets Lorenz Hackenholt and Willi Mentz, with whom he will enjoy the Mediterranean climate of Trieste and its environs, along with Franz Stangl, the brutal commander of Sobibor and Treblinka, revelling in brothels and nightclubs.

Wirth is transferred in late 1939 to Brandenburg an der Havel to be chief administrator, where, in a former prison adapted to become a euthanasia centre, the first gassing experiments take place: a group of mentally ill patients is gassed to death using carbon monoxide. Philipp Bouhler, a member of Hitler’s Chancellery, comes up with a revolutionary suggestion: gas chambers camouflaged as showers. Shortly thereafter Wirth returns to Grafeneck to be promoted to supervisor of all euthanasia centres in Germany and Austria.

Before Christmas 1941, Wirth arrives in Belzec, a little place in the far south-east of occupied Poland, and is made its first camp commander, with the task and ambition of exterminating all the Jews there. They call him Christian the Terrible. Horrible stories circulate about his savagery.

There is not much information available about Belzec. The atrocities committed in Belzec are slipping into oblivion. Belzec is a forgotten camp today. One of the two men who survived Belzec, Rudolf Reder, testifies at a trial of war criminals in May 1945:

Wirth was a tall, broad-shouldered man in his middle forties with a vulgar face. Wirth was a beast.

Kurt Gerstein, an S.S.-Lieutenant, then head of the Technical Disinfection Services of the S.S.-Waffen, testifies:

I arrived in Belzec in late summer 1942. I was supposed to improve gassing methods and implement a way to disinfect clothing. A transport of Jews had just arrived from Lvov and all of them were immediately sent to the gas chamber. Wirth stood on a small platform and hurried the prisoners along with a whip, slashing them across the face.

Chaim Hirszmann also testifies:

Once, when a transport of children arrived in Belzec, Wirth ordered all the children thrown into a huge pit and buried alive.

I am Werner Dubois. At Belzec I drove a truck as an S.S. officer from April 1942 to April 1943 and supervised the work of the gas chambers. Wirth was brutal. He bellowed and threatened all the members of the German garrison and often struck them on the face. Only Oberhauser was not afraid of him.

In August 1942 Odilo Globočnik, leader of Aktion Reinhard, names Wirth as inspector of the S.S.-Sonderkommandos of Aktion Reinhard. Wirth’s first task is to reorganize the Treblinka camp, which, as a result of poor management, is not functioning well. Wirth brings his colleague Franz Stangl from Sobibor and puts him in charge of Treblinka. Globočnik orders a temporary hold on the transports from Warsaw. Treblinka is expanded, the killing methods are perfected, larger gas chambers are built. Lorenz Hackenholt comes over from Sobibor and brings his sketches, drawings and blueprints. Erwin Lambert of the S.S., an expert at building gas chambers, oversees the construction.

In late 1942 Wirth manages the work camps in the Lublin district and moves into a two-storey villa near Lublin military airfield, which was not working at the time. At the airfield Wirth sets up three hangars where all the confiscated property of the victims of Aktion Reinhard is sorted. It is then taken by train to Berlin.

In the summer of 1943 Wirth is promoted to S.S.- Sturmbannfuhrer and, after the Treblinka Revolt of 2 August, 1943, he is transferred to Trieste.

Near Kozina, on 26 May, 1944, on his way from Trieste to Rijeka by car, Wirth is killed by partisans of the 1st Battalion of the Istrian Division, led by Maks Zadnik. Another eleven S.S.-Sonderkommandos, members of Aktion Reinhard and Einsatz R, are killed in combat in northern Italy. All are buried first at the German military cemetery near Villa Opicina, but then between 1957 and 1961 they are exhumed and, with another 21,000 German soldiers, re-interred at the new German military cemetery near Costermano, on the eastern shore of Lake Garda. Although their names have been expunged from the list of war victims and from their headstones, once a year unknown visitors place flowers on their enumerated graves (Wirth’s is 716) and salute them with the Nazi salute. To this very day.

Continually obsessed by the “Jewish Question”, Wirth installs the infrastructure for proceeding with mass killings. He builds an efficient little crematorium. In and around Trieste he puts to use the methods developed in Poland, and sets up a new concentration camp at the San Sabba rice mill, an abandoned complex of buildings, a former rice-husking plant in the Trieste suburbs. An expert at building crematoria, Erwin Lambert, arrives in Trieste and successfully applies the experience he has gained in Poland to the rice mill. The ovens are inaugurated on 4 April, 1944, with a celebratory test run incinerating seventy bodies of hostages killed at the Villa Opicina shooting range the day before. Wirths staff is experienced not only in burning prisoners, but in torturing them to death, beating them brutally, while children are ordered to collect firewood for the ovens in which they, too, will burn.

The German occupation makes Trieste a gift of fourteen legally registered brothels under the medical supervision of Italian doctors, and 200 registered streetwalkers. The registered brothels allow in only members of the military (and their previously screened guests), while the unregistered brothels are left to civilians. In the registered houses of passion, the passions are efficiently controlled. Upon entering the brothel the “consumer” would receive a form (in duplicate) in which a “secretary” would officially enter his name and unit, his rank, the date of the visit, the name of the “institution” and the name of the prostitute, after which the customer would be medically examined to make sure he had no pubic pests or gonorrhea or, heaven forbid, syphilis; then he’d undergo prophylactic treatment consisting of a wash with soap and water and mercury bichloride, followed by an intraurethral injection of 2 per cent protargol and an application of calomel powder. Finally, he would be handed a condom, after which, with an intrepid Heil! off he would go to satisfy his sex drive. But managed prostitution is an activity the S.S.-command does not succeed in implementing successfully across the board, not in Trieste or Ljubljana or Rijeka or Gorizia or Pula or Udine. Pretty girls from decent families are strolling around, well dressed, spirited and free; and hunting for prey is what soldiers are trained to do. So syphilis and gonorrhoea flourish, children are born out of wedlock, and little psychiatric clinics sprout secretly in the suburbs of the cities and towns of the Adriatisches Küstenland, where S.S. men could be treated for their hysteria, and their war and sex traumas.

The Nazi plan for conquering the world is built on secrecy, founded on institutions, confidential documents, dark experiments, obscure war plans, mystical phantasms, occult dreams, hidden factories, camouflaged camps, fake hospitals and cryptic conferences, on dubious industry and esoteric production, vague warfare and ambiguous military campaigns. And at the centre, the axis around which this rotten cosmic vision spreads, ever more like the gigantic cocoon of some freak insect, are sexual organs, the cunt and the cock, their utilitarian and market value, their messianic mission, their battle cry, in other words — fucking, coitus vulgaris, which is designed to create a new man and a new age. The cunt makes a difference, the cock defines the difference. Castration, sterilization, controlled procreation, fornication and prostitution are the most powerful weapons of the Reich, the greatest obsession of the Reich, and, furthermore, of the Church.

Whether this took the form of an inflatable doll or a Salon Kitty or a Lebensborn farm is immaterial. The brothels in 1943 function smoothly for Himmler’s unmarried and married warriors along all fronts, including the Adriatisches Küstenland. To the more than one hundred official houses of ill repute, faced with a shortage of local floozies, vamps and easy women, they bring in puellae publicae, dedicated to the “great cause of mankind": women from Paris, Poland, Bohemia, Moravia, even Berlin, some under coercion, some lured by promises, six hundred of them or more to service at least fifty clients a day, while those from the bordello on Klosterstrasse in Stuttgart, for example (and not only they), are put to work for science, using diaphragms in which they collect the semen of their studs for future (secret, of course) experiments.

The Trieste courts under German jurisdiction work at full throttle. There are no verdicts of not guilty. People play the lottery. The newspapers are full of classified ads: all sorts of things are being sold, clothing, jewellery, artworks, houses, as if a huge general migration were under way, although many have already been moved.

Life is stronger than war. For most people, for the obedient and the silent, for those on the sidelines, for the bystanders, life becomes a small, packed suitcase that is never opened, an overnight bag slipped under the bed, baggage going nowhere, in which everything is neatly folded — days, tears, deaths, little pleasures, spreading the stench of mould. For those on the sidelines there is no telling what they are thinking, whose side they are on, because they do nothing but stand and watch what is going on around them as if they don’t see a thing, as if nothing is happening, as if there is nothing going on. They live according to the dictates of everyone’s laws, and when the wars end this serves them well. There are many bystanders. They are the majority.

Blind observers are “ordinary” people who play for low stakes. They play it safe. They live their lives unimpeded. In war and skirting war, these blind observers look away with indifference and actively refuse to feel compassion; their self-deception is a hard shield, a shell in which, larvae-like, they wallow cheerfully.

They are everywhere: in the neutral governments of neutral countries, among Allies, in occupied countries, in the majority, in the minority, among us. Bystanders. That is who we are.

For sixty years now these blind observers have been pounding their chests and shouting, We are innocent because we didn’t know! and with the onset of new wars and new troubles, new observers crop up, armies of young and powerful bystanders are born, blindfolded, feeding on their innocence, on their indestructible compatibility, these yes-men, these enablers of evil.

Little stories are forever surfacing.

When Herbert von Karajan dies in 1989 at the age of eighty, Haya learns of his membership of the Nazi Party, which made it possible for him to conduct whatever orchestra he wanted. Although Karajan is banned from working after the war, the ban lasts only until 1948, after which the audiences flock to his performances again and applaud him with rapture. Ten years later, in 1958, Karajan is named lifelong conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. His popularity soars and the soil soaks up the past like rain sinking into its belly.

Haya learns of Tom Stoppard, too. She hears that Stoppard was born Tomás Straussler in the town of Zlin, Moravia, where Bata sets up his famous shoe factory. She learns that until 1999 Tom Stoppard has no clue he is Jewish; then (by chance) he finds out that he is. Tomás’ father Eugene Straussler works at the factory hospital as a physician. Immediately after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, in 1939, Mr Bata decides to save his employees, including the physicians, by sending them off to the branch offices he owns all over the world. The Straussler family relocate to Singapore, but before the Japanese occupation, Marta Beck (Straussler by marriage) leaves with her two sons and goes first to Australia, then to India, while Eugene Straussler boards a ship full of refugees somewhat later. The Japanese shell his ship and with it sinks Eugene. In India, Marta Straussler meets a British officer by the name of Stoppard who asks her to marry him. He gives her boys his last name and together they return to his homeland, England, where they live happily ever after, as if their earlier life had never happened, as if there had never been a family, a war, camps, another language, memories, not even a little Czech love. In 1996 Marta Beck (Straussler by marriage, Stoppard by marriage) dies, and at that moment Tomás, no longer a boy, born Straussler, re-born Stoppard, starts digging through his past now that he is tired of writing plays or now that his inspiration has dried up — who knows? — and time unfolds before him. In the Czech Republic Tomás learns that his grandfathers and grandmothers, uncles and aunts, cousins, all of them disappeared as if they had never lived, which, as far as he is concerned, they had not, and he goes back to his lovely English language and his one and only royal homeland, to sort through his impressions of this excursion into his own life.

Or Madeleine Albright, born in 1937 as Madlenka Jana Korbel, who also learns, with a sixty-year delay, that she is Jewish and that her grandfathers and grandmothers, her uncles and aunts, cousins, have disappeared as if they had never lived. Madeleine learns this only when she is contacted by the descendents of a Mr Nebrich, who, though never himself a member of the Nazi Party, lives comfortably throughout the war as a citizen of the Reich (a bystander) in a spacious and luxurious flat in the heart of Prague, at Hradcanski Námestí 11. Madeleine doesn’t learn she is Jewish even when her father Josef Korbel returns to Prague in 1945, after having fled to London in 1939. The new government gives Josef Korbel Mr Nebrich’s expropriated flat with all the furniture, Persian carpets and paintings. Today Karl Nebrich, a citizen of Austria and a powerful industrialist, son of the bystander Nebrich, is accusing the late Josef Korbel of absconding with art worth millions of dollars, art that by now late father, including a Tintoretto and an Andrea del Sarto, and then seeking political asylum in the United States for himself and his family.

Then there’s the Red Cross, which helps the Nazis launder the money of their deported victims, and the Ford Motor Company, which spreads the infectious poison of anti-Semitism, and Singer, and Bayer, and Krupp, and Jena, and Agfa, I. G. Farben, Siemens, Bayer AG, B.M.W., Daimler-Benz, Volkswagen, there is no end to the list of firms and their owners who exploit starving camp internees for material gain, for the love of their homeland, before the Nazis say This way to heaven, ladies and gentleman. This way to the showers.

The Tedeschi family are a civilian family, bystanders who keep their mouths shut, but when they do speak, they sign up to fascism.

In Trieste, in September 1943, the new head of the S.S. police for the Adriatic Littoral, Gauleiter Odilo Globočnik,* lives at Via Nizza 21. Reichsführer-S.S. Heinrich Himmler, head, at the time, of the Gestapo and Minister of Internal Affairs, orders his friend Globočnik to push political, racial and anti-partisan repression throughout the district. Three doors away is Casa Germanica at Via Nizza 15, and there Globočnik, while waiting for the arrival of his new fianceé Lora Peterschinegg, who is president of the Carinthian League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel), enjoys the occasional black risotto, goulash with bread dumplings, or rabbit stew, takes in a nice film from time to time, and jokes with the servants, because Globočnik is an unusual policeman, a mischievous policeman, fond of social life. Haya meets Globočnik in May 1944 when she comes to the Casa Germanica with Mr Kurt to watch the Austrian movie Eine Frau wie Du, and when Mr Kurt holds her hand in the dark, in secret.

Haya cannot remember the house in which she lives at the time. Some details she has no recollection of, while others she recalls clearly. The winter of ’43 and ’44 is cold and snowy, a harsh winter, that much Haya remembers. In February 150 grams of cooking salt is distributed per person, and one Wednesday she goes to get cheese with her coupons from the 243 series, and buys a piece of Gorgonzola for 18 lire, Provolone for 19 lire and Montenara for 20 lire. This she remembers. In fact, Haya remembers that February clearly. Ada’s friend Lucia de Martin receives 8,000 lire from Mussollini in gratitude for bearing and raising fourteen sons, of whom four are fighting at the front, one is a prisoner of war with the British, one is unfit for work because he suffers from war-induced trauma, and the other sons are in the Fascist Night Guard (the Isonzo Istituto de Sorveglianza Notturna, Corso Verdi 28). Haya remembers how a shipment of cooking oil comes in, with a decilitre allotted per person, per month, and tomato paste, 50 grams each. She recalls that the theatre season is lyrical. At the Teatro Verdi they give Aida, La Traviata, Rigoletto, The Barber of Seville and Carmen, sung by Favero, Malipiero, Casteliani and Filipeschi; she goes to La Traviata, after which she cries in her cold bed until dawn for altogether different reasons, not the least operatic. She remembers the curfew from 10 p.m. to 5.30 a.m. and how she hurries home… She remembers how the whole family fear thieves and Tito’s partisan bandits, bandits most of all. Haya doesn’t know how the Germans occupied Gorizia, because at the time, in September 1943, she was not living in Gorizia, so this is not her concern. The cinemas are working: Cinema Teatro Vittoria, Cinema Savoia, Cinema Moderno and Cinema Italia. All of them are owned by Gaier and Gnot, and they show the latest hits, Italian and German, whichever. Gale-force winds howl, the snows pile up, and when she closes her shop, the tobacco shop, the stationery shop, whatever, there at the intersection of Seminario and Ascoli, the shop where her mother worked twenty years before, though the owner is no longer Zora Hochberger, who got lost along the way, but Caterina Cecotti, when Haya shuts up shop, she plunges, bundled like a Russian countess, through the dreamy white silence, into worlds which, she already knows, will elude her grasp. Oh, yes, she remembers, she remembers, and even when she doesn’t, here at her feet in the red basket are all manner of old programmes and tickets, two for some shows, one for others, big and little colour posters and black-and-white posters, photographs of movie stars, a coaster or two from the La Perugina sweet shop, all of it arranged for old age, for memories, which now that Haya rummages through them, seem to be porous memories, hollow and spent.

Ah, Kristina Söderbaum, so golden-haired, blue-eyed and virtuous, the perfect incarnation of Aryan femininity in La Città d’Oro (Die Goldene Stadt), so cruelly punished for a small digression from the “natural” female environment, like Haya, isolated, rejected, abandoned, broken, because of dreams of another life. Oh God.

Haya knows nothing of Kristina Söderbaum, born in Stockholm in 1912, except that Kristina Söderbaum is beautiful the way she, Haya, would like to be beautiful and that Kristina is most certainly as happy and famous as she, Haya, would like to be happy and famous, or maybe only happy, that year, 1943, in her little Gorizian existence, built on the most ordinary of lives. Why should Haya back then, in 1943, have known that Kristina Söderbaum was starring in bad Nazi films, some of them shorts, others feature-length, all of them moralizing Nazi films of the Third Reich? Haya did not go to see the anti-Semitic historical melodrama Jud'Süss, because when it was released she was in Valona, and the movie Jud'Süss did not come to Valona; no, definitely not, because had the anti-Semitic historical melodrama been on the repertoire of the Valona cinema she, Haya, would definitely have gone to see it. And Haya doesn’t read the autobiography, Kristina Söderbaum’s autobiography, Nichts bleibt immer so, in which she counsels people to change, to move forward in life, especially after they have done their patriotic duty, made their patriotic efforts, no matter what these efforts might be, no matter how little, innocent and artistic, such as, for example, acting in the movies. Haya does not read this autobiography written much later, in 1983; in fact, after 1943, Haya no longer keeps track of Kristina Söderbaum’s life story, because after 1943 she gets her own life, a life altogether different from the life she had dreamed of. And when Haya learns, in 2001, already moored in her Gorizia outward calm, paralysed by her wait, which has been eating at her just as rust or salt eat little holes, soundlessly, in base metals, so, when from a German newspaper (she still reads the German papers) Haya learns that Kristina Söderbaum has died as an accomplished fashion photographer, that the post-war trial of her husband and director Veit Harlan has been completely forgotten, she merely rocks a bit harder, a little nervously in her rocking chair, One more yellowed page of history, she says, and that’s that.

But when, sitting under a hood dryer having her hair done at Marisa’s styling salon in 1973, Haya reads in a magazine that Hungarian-German-American diva Käthe von Nagy, born in Subotica in 1904, had died of cancer at the age of 69 in California, she lets out a brief glassy cry Oh Käthe! In her memory, there at the base of her skull, a long-preserved image, all fashioned of dreams — shatters.

Kristina Söderbaum was going to be the model for the famous “disinfected rubber doll in natural size” to be manufactured by Franz Tschakert and Company, the birth of which is the brainchild of Reichsführer-S.S. Heinrich Himmler, fanatic Catholic and poultry farmer, in order to preserve the health of his potent soldiers, so that they do not mate with the “infectious female herds” while dreaming far from home of their stolid and fertile spouses, who never unbraid the braids coiled around their ears, even when their legs are spread, so they won’t mess up their Schneckenfrisure. The doll could just as well be a brunette, suggests the Dane, S.S. physician Olen Hannussen, and psychiatrist Dr Rudolf Chargeheimer exclaims, Of course! What matters is that the doll offers our soldiers relief, because struggle and only struggle is their goal! So playful Käthe von Nagy enters the competition with Kristina Söderbaum, except that Käthe von Nagy says Out of the question. I am not giving my face away to anyone. So it is that athletics stars, Olympic medallists Wilhelmina von Bremen and Annette Walter, are ultimately selected. S.S. physician Joachim Mrugowsky is withdrawn from the Geheime Reichssache, the project cloaked in the highest level of secrecy, because he is off voluntarily to do the most important task of all — running medical experiments on prisoners from various concentration camps. Later, in 1947, he goes, though not voluntarily, to Nuremberg, where he is condemned (nevertheless) to die. When Mrugowsky leaves the project, the Dane Hannussen exclaims, But, no! Certainly not beauties! The doll must in no way supplant the honourable mother and the wife, the protectress of family sanctity, the family hearth, the angel of our tomorrows! When a soldier makes love to Borghild (is the doll called Borghild because she is female cyborg Hilda?), when a soldier copulates with Borghild, this has nothing to do with love! Borghild will have a boyish haircut — she is part and parcel of our armed forces. She is a field whore, not the Mother of our Homeland. Borghild is to be produced in three types: Type A (5’6"), Type B (5’9") and Type C (5’11"). They decide to start serial production with Borghild B first, but the members of the project are of two minds as to Borghild’s breasts. The S.S. favours them round and full, while Dr Hannussen says, I want little tits in a rosehip shape; tits that fit snugly in the hand. Hannussen prevails. In September 1941 Borghild B is born, a Nordic type par excellence. The première of Borghild in Berlin is greeted with enthusiasm by S.S. officials, and Himmler immediately orders fifty. Terrible things happen, however, on the Eastern front, and the Borghilds never reach the soldiers. The only Borghild throughout the war is the prototype, left to languish in the office of her father Franz Tschakert, without satisfying a single lusty soldier. Then, in February 1945, Borghild disappears in the rubble of Dresden.

Going back to the 1930s in Berlin, at Giesebrechtstrasse 11, a fabled (and swanky) brothel run by Madame Kitty Schmidt, known as Salon Kitty, is working flat out. Foreign diplomats and the cream of German public, quasi-social life stop in at Salon Kitty: bankers, industrialists and politicians. Discretion is guaranteed, the services are first class, and the prices are out of this world. But Hitler grows ever more powerful and Kitty Schmidt gets nervous. By 1939 Salon Kitty is no longer frequented by refined Jewish businessmen, because the Brownshirts are beating up the refined Jewish businessmen, shutting down their companies, destroying their property, and then, rough and ready, sweaty and drunk, they come barging into Kitty’s to “get relief”. The police are running raids more often. Kitty is no fool. Kitty is, in fact, alarmed, and her business losses mount. Through Jews who are leaving Germany, and whom Kitty Schmidt is secretly helping to escape, she transfers her considerable takings to British banks and on 28 June, 1939, she leaves Berlin, meaning to join the riches that await her in London. But the Gestapo functions without a hitch. Kitty Schmidt arrives at the German-Dutch border, where she is immediately arrested by members of the secret police and taken straight to Walther Schellenberg, cunning and powerful head of the Sicherheitsdienst, the State counterespionage service, later a major general of the Waffen-S.S. and one of the organizers of the hunt for the Red Orchestra Soviet spy group. They introduce the 57-year-old madam Kitty Schmidt to the darkness of the infamous Prinz Albrechtstrasse, where Walther Schellenberg shoves a fat file under her nose that bulges with her subversive and illegal activities. Now take a look, dear Kitty, Walther says. These accusations guarantee you an unlimited amount of time at some cosy concentration camp. But, Walther Schellenberg continues, if you do something for us, perhaps there is something we can do for you.

Come on, forget those dolls, forget the Borghilds, chuckles S.S.-Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, organizer of the “Night of the Long Knives” and the brain behind the Einsatzgruppen, chairman of the conference at Wannsee, later known as the Butcher of Prague, who at this juncture is head of the S.S. Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt (R.u.S.H.A.), the race and settlement office, transformed as it was from an unprepossessing institution into a powerful organization wielding authority over a broad network of informants with thousands of dossiers on Communists, unionists, social democrats, on rich industrialists, Jews, even members of their own Nazi Party and S.A. (Sturmabteilung) henchmen. Reinhard Heydrich, the reclusive sadist, accomplished gymnast, skilled fencer, fearless pilot, is raised in high society in a family of musicians and artists. Forget the dolls! exclaims Heydrich. We have genuine, first-class ladies ready to give their all for their homeland! After the war, while in prison, Walther Schellenberg pens his memoirs, which he calls Labyrinth, and in which he asserts that “their” women, who worked at Kitty’s, were qualified and cultivated ladies from the Berlin demi-monde, but that there were others, too, from the cream of German society, women prepared to serve their homeland without reservation. On account of his liver cancer, Schellenberg is released from prison after serving two years of a six-year sentence, and in 1952 he dies in Turin, convinced that he has been one of the most successful spies of all time.

The war is fast approaching. Information leaks now and then, with wine and beautiful women, in the throes of coital passion, all sorts of things slip out. So Reinhard orders Walther: Put pressure on Kitty Schmidt. Kitty Schmidt hands over her famous house of ill repute to the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and signs a secret statement, according to which she will ask no questions and do whatever she is told. She also signs that she understands, should she fail to obey, that they will execute her immediately. And so, although prostitution is expressly banned, or rather strictly forbidden, workmen move into the house at Giesebrechtstrasse 11, following Walther Schellenberg’s orders. A complete refurbishment ensues; a new, more beautiful, luxurious, perfect brothel is built; a high-class whorehouse for V.I.P.s and spies. All the rooms, from the corridors to the boudoirs on the third floor of the building at Giesebrechtstrasse 11 have double walls into which surveillance equipment is installed, and from it hidden cables run down to a bricked-off portion of the cellar where there are five monitoring desks, each with two record turntables and wax discs spinning on them, which means that conversations from ten rooms can be recorded on those wax discs simultaneously.

Then S.D.-Untersturmführer Karl Schwartz sets out to snare personnel. These unprecedented raids on whorehouses, nightclubs and streets corners multiply. Young women are pulled aside and grilled in a rigorous selection process. Doctors, psychiatrists, linguists and university professors all help Schwartz whittle his shortlist of ninety breathtakingly beautiful potential “activists” down to twenty first-class women. Under lock and key for seven weeks in a sealed-off wing of the Sonthofen Officers’ Academy, amid thick forests, small lakes and natural wonders, which they have no chance to appreciate because of the snow, surrounded by fresh air they have no time to enjoy, the beauties spend their nights engaged in a fundamental re-education. After gruelling training in foreign languages, marksmanship and unarmed combat; after instruction in politics and ideology, and courses in international and domestic economics; after the study of secret codes and cyphers, and memorizing countless charts of military insignia, uniforms and decorations, twenty peerless Nikitas of Nazism and counterintelligence are born, o temporal o mores! R.u.S.H.A. finally inserts them into the redecorated Salon Kitty in March 1940, and they write reports after every instance of sexual intercourse, unaware that they, too, are being recorded.

Madame Schmidt receives her final instructions. Carry on as before, Schwartz tells her, or was it Schellenberg, either way. Welcome all your old customers. Keep on your existing girls. But every so often we will send along special guests, might this be Schwartz speaking? On no account are you to introduce them to one of your regular girls. Show them this album of twenty girls, Schwartz, apparently, says. When they choose their lady friend, phone for her. She will arrive in ten minutes. You will not discuss their clients with these girls, and they will leave immediately after the special guest of yours, of ours, has left the building.

How will I know this is a special guest? asks Madame Kitty, because she can barely wait for work to begin again.

Our guests will use the codeword “I come from Rothenburg”, Schwartz says, or was it Schellenberg?

Where is Rothenburg? asks Kitty Schmidt.

Schellenberg immediately reminds Kitty Schmidt of the secret agreement she signed, and Kitty Schmidt no longer asks questions, she just coordinates the work and feigns naïveté. A soldier who is genuinely from Rothenburg shows up once at Salon Kitty He is no special guest, but this soldier receives first-class sexual services with the lady listed in the album as Number 7, and though the soldier from Rothenburg does climax, he gives away no information to anyone, he merely climaxes as he never has; and even after the magnificent orgasm, while he sips champagne, nibbles caviar and whispers foolish promises in the ear of beauty Number 7, he betrays no secrets, because he has none to betray, but the wax discs in the cellar spin, around they spin, recording only moans. Until late 1942 Kitty is visited by various prominent people, domestic and foreign powermongers: Count Galeazzo Ciano, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and their Spanish colleague, Minister of Foreign Affairs Ramón Serrano'Súñer, then S.S.-Major-General Sepp Dietrich, a particularly demanding guest who asks for all twenty girls at once for a party, a huge orgy; the cables on the “bugs” are red hot from his sexual potency and physical stamina. The confidential staff in the cellar are astonished and agitated. The only time the recording and listening equipment is turned off is during Reinhard Heydrich’s regular, in fact, frequent “tours of inspection”. Spies stop in at Salon Kitty, such as Roger Wilson, a British spy who gives his name as Ljubo Kolčev, a staff member at the Bulgarian Embassy. He happens to trip over a surveillance cable while workmen for the secret service are running it from the cellar of Giesebrechtstrasse 11 to the offices of the main staff of the Sicherheitsdienst (S.D.) on Meinekestrasse, in the close vicinity of the building where Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertész happens to live today, a man whose fate was probably tailored by Eichmann in the mid-1940s right there at Meinekestrasse. Upon seeing other things besides sex going on at Salon Kitty, Wilson, the British spy, secretly introduces his own secret British service of counter-espionage. Forget poor Borghild. Those were the days, my friend. In 1940 alone, more than 10,000 men take the stairs up to the third floor of Number 11 on Giesebrechtstrasse in Berlin. In just one month there are more than 3,000 orgasmic sessions recorded. But as time passes there are more and more special guests; they outnumber the ordinary clients, and the “special ladies” work full steam, spending more time at Madame Kitty’s parlour. They drink more, report less, discipline dwindles in the sexual headquarters of counter-intelligence, the Gestapo send in additional quantities of food and drink. This all costs a pretty penny — there’s a war on — and Heydrich’s dissatisfaction grows. In July 1942 a bomb falls on the building on Giesebrecht-strasse, and the Gestapo wash their hands of the operation. The bugging apparatus is hastily removed. Kitty and all the girls, the special girls whose golden carriages have overnight turned to pumpkins, and the ordinary Cinderellas who have been with her for years, set up shop on the ground floor of the building and go on working. Until her death in 1954 Kitty never breathes a word about the entire operation. Twenty-five thousand recorded discs in the Gestapo archive mysteriously disappear after the Russians enter Berlin, and word has it that they end up at Stasi headquarters, and the war waged via cunts proves yet again to be without effect.

Ah, yes, Haya also remembers Marika Rökk, the Hungarian, who conquers the great compact heart of Nazi Germany in Die Frau meiner Träume, Leichte Kavallerie and Der Bettelstudent; who dances and sings and acts in the movies until the 1960s, when she does the same in theatres here and there, everywhere, but the troupes with which Marika Rökk performs do not tour Gorizia, and all Haya is left with is a poster from 1944 and a tinge of melancholy when she hears over the local Gorizia news of Marika Rökk’s fatal heart attack at some point in 2004, by which time Marika Rökk is well into her nineties. She takes with her to eternity the jubilee Bambi Award 1948 and the jubilee Bambi Award 1998, named after the much-loved book by Felix Salten, born Jewish as Sigmund Salzman, who begins his career as a writer by sending poems, letters, stories and essays to several Viennese newspapers, using an array of pseudonyms. Bambi, the book of Haya’s and Nora’s childhood, is a big hit when it comes out in Vienna in 1923, and for a decade and more children are crazy about Bambi, but it is suddenly banned in 1936, because the Nazis decide it sends the younger generation all sorts of terrible messages, and no filthy Jew is going to stir up their fount of life. So Bambi was not a childhood favourite for Haya’s sister Paula and her brother Orestes, who listen instead to the tales of Snow White, Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood, because these are enduring stories, written by brothers whose last name is Grimm (not someone whose surname is Salzman), boys of fine, pure blood. This Salten is a prickly fellow. In 1902 he riles the public with his in memoriam to Emile Zola, and in 1910 he ruffles the feathers of the townspeople of Vienna when he criticizes the city’s recently deceased, beloved mayor of many years Dr Karl Lueger, a member of the Christian Social Party and a flagrant anti-Semite, a favourite of Hitler’s, whose bronze statue stares straight into Café Prückel, where celebrated cabaret artists — Jews — performed in the cellar before they were sent off to the camps, and whose ring road, the Dr-Karl-Lueger-Ring, still encircles the heart of old Vienna.

So it is that Marika Rökk goes off into oblivion with an award for life’s work; for her contribution to the German film industry. It is not important, concludes Haya. Chaos rules everywhere, regardless.

Then there is María Mercader in the film Finalemente soli, and Doris Duranti as Contessa Castiglione, and Ernst von Klipstein, whom Haya doesn’t like much because of the long face, and the celebrated Margit Dayka in that movie, what was it called? in which she plays an orphan who learns when she grows up that she is probably Jewish, so she cannot marry her boyfriend, who, like all those actors, is tall and fair-skinned and healthy and strong and has gleaming white teeth, and she loves him so much, and he is forbidden from loving any Jewish woman, no matter what she looks like, even though there are blonde Jews who are tall and healthy, with teeth every bit as white, but there is no chance, absolutely out of the question, and then the girl, Haya thinks the name was Rozsi, yes, this Rozsi played by Margit Dayka plans to kill herself, but everything turns out fine in the end, because it transpires that Roszi is actually not Jewish after all, so she can freely marry her beloved. Such a tender film gives Haya hope for a more beautiful life on those bleak nights in Gorizia. In 1944 Haya is dreaming about the future, sometimes while under the covers, sometimes in the darkness of half-empty cinemas; while up there, on the silver screen, which grows and spreads in the dark, stare countless penetrating blue eyes, men’s and women’s eyes, and she looks back at them, and observes all those mother-of-pearl complexions, the wavy hair, and follows the valiant destinies, Lord, what a world of enchantment in the middle of little occupied Gorizia, in mid-winter, oh Lord, with all of them here it is impossible to be alone.

Meanwhile, neighbours are disappearing.

Francesco Bevk (who lived for a time at Via Montesanto 26) is no longer around, says Amalia Valich, new owner of the building, and Ada cannot find his children’s book, the one in Slovenian, and she would really like to find a copy, because now that she is drinking grappa and Strega more often and hiding it less, so much so that even spraying her mouth with cheap perfume doesn’t mask it, now, when things are as they are, in war and poverty, the voices of her ancestors, the poems her mother Marisa used to read to her, flit through her thoughts, and it happens that Ada lies there for hours, overcome and whimpering, and then, dishevelled and snivelling, she natters on about things no-one understands…

Nemiren sem, ko voda, ki šumi,

razbit ko slap, ki v brezdno moč prši

in sam si šteje kaplje bolečine,

ki padajo vse dni, vse dni…*

Today in Nova Gorica, something Haya knows, the central square is named after France Bevk, and there is a statue to France Bevk there, and the library there is also called France Bevk Knjižnica.

Costatino Costatini, the architect who used to live at Via P. Diacono 51, has apparently moved away somewhere, Florian Tedeschi says one morning, sweetening his coffee with condensed milk, which he gets through a contact, though in limited quantities, fifty grams per person every month. I was thinking about building a partition to divide the children’s rooms.

Carlo Hakim de Medici, a sculptor who lives at Via Petrarca 3, does not mange to finish work on the tombstone for Ada’s father, Bruno Baar; at the clinic of Ada’s and Letizia’s family doctors, Luigi Bader and Glauco Bassi, the patients are received by some new doctors. Giovanni and Luigi Fuchs, the goldsmiths at Via Rastello 28, do not seem to be opening their shop.

Enough! says Florian Tedeschi and turns up the radio, because it is 2 p.m. and they are broadcasting the giornale radio in lingua tedesca on 263.2 megaherz.

Life knits circular pathways. It submerges in a repetitiveness without which it would die. Like her mother Marisa twenty years ago and more, Ada bakes crescent rolls and macaroons, and takes them to the club at the Aosta barracks on Via Trieste, although the image is a little blurred, because Ada’s hair doesn’t ripple; Ada has limp hair with no shine and Ada does not sway her hips provocatively, and her shoes are old and all of it, all the palaver that for twenty years has stretched like thin, sticky dough, the smiles drawing out the lips, the wait for life to begin, all this is beating Ada down, she doesn’t feel like doing much any more, there is no music in the house, no-one sings, not even Gigli. Colonel Scharenberg, commander of the German forces in Gorizia, awaits Ada with a smile, slips his hand into the napkin-covered basket, as if preparing for seduction, stuffs two rošćići cookies into his mouth, and says Danke as he chews. The sweet crumbs dance mischievously on his whiskers. Ada points to them and says, Staubzucker. The same way each time.

Transports have been running for a long time now.

Quietly, almost conspiratorially, the freight trains run through Gorizia at night, when the moon draws a black veil over its face. Gorizia is blocked. One can enter or exit only with special permission from Gauleiter Globočnik, which means almost never. The names of the residents are put on lists. There must be order. Colonel Wellhausen, commander of the operative zone, issues a directive on 23 September, 1943, according to which all who have moved to Gorizia since 8 September must leave.

The station slumbers by day and by night it dies in the phantasmal light of the lanterns of the train dispatchers, which sway, so everything on the platform looks as if it is dancing, the tracks, the train cars, the hanging baskets with flowers, as if in a wild, musicless Tanz in which outlines twist and fracture, sliding along the entire fenced-in area, which turns into a gigantic human face contorted with pain, shedding no tears.

Transport 3

The train leaves Cairo Montenotte camp (Savona-Liguria) on 8 October. It arrives in Gusen on 12 October, 1943, and in Mauthausen on 23 January, 1944, whence it departs the next day for Auschwitz. On that train there are 999 people of Italian nationality from Gorizia, Trieste and Kopar.

Transport 48

The train leaves Trieste on 31 May, 1944—destination Dachau. It stops along the way in Gorizia and Udine, where new internees are boarded: civilians, anti-fascists who have been arrested, partisans and Italian soldiers. The train arrives in Dachau on 2 June, 1944, and there are between 342 and 352 “travellers” on board. Ten wagons leave Trieste, and the German authorities add another eight in Udine.

Transport 58

The convoy leaves Gorizia on 27 June, 1944, and arrives in Dachau three days later. There are 194 people on board; 190 of them reach the destination.

Transport 79

The convoy leaves Trieste on 29 August, 1944. It stops in Gorizia, where new internees and prisoners are loaded on board. Number of deportees: 289.

Transport 87

The convoy leaves Trieste on 2 October, 1944—and arrives in Dachau three days later. It stops in Udine and Gorizia to take on more people. Number of deportees: 289.

Transport 101

The convoy leaves Trieste on 15 November, 1944, and arrives in Dachau on 17 November. It stops in Udine and Gorizia to take on more people. Number of deportees: 42.

Transport 109

The convoy leaves Trieste on 8 December, 1944. It arrives in Dachau on 11 December, 1944. The train stops in Gorizia and Udine, where additional deportees are boarded. Four hundred and fifty people arrive in Dachau. There are 200 prisoners in the convoy from the Trieste Coroneo, as well as a group of Slovenes and Croats under S.S. guard. The convoy leaves Gorizia at about four o’clock in the morning.

Transport 120

The train leaves Trieste on 2 February. It arrives in Mauthausen on 7 February, 1944. New internees and prisoners are loaded on board in Udine and Gorizia. Number of deportees: 365. In this convoy is the youngest deported resident of Gorizia, three-month-old Bruno Faber. He is killed at Auschwitz on 26 February, 1944.

Of the 123 convoys that leave from Italy for the Nazi camps, 69 of them depart from Trieste, right here, next to Gorizia, practically in its immediate vicinity, not counting the 30 convoys that travel to the forced labour camps. More than 23,000 former soldiers are distributed throughout the camp factories in which they are bringing to life the light and heavy industry of the Reich. By mid-1944 half a million Italians are working for the German war machine.

The transports continue to run until the end of February 1945. The army and police of the Republic of Salò puppet state and the Third Reich transport to the concentration camps about 40,000 Italians, of whom 10,000 are Jews and 30,000 are partisans, antifascists and workers arrested after the massive strikes in March 1944. Of the 40,000 deported, 36,000 men, women and children are murdered or die.

So, this is the winter of 1944. Battles flare around Gorizia. A civilian is killed now and then by a German bullet. From time to time Nazis march small columns of dangerous partisan bandits through town, probably to a firing squad, or prison, or the former rice mill, but these are isolated incidents, or so Haya believes since she reads no newspapers. Had she read them, she would have learned that these are “great war victories for the Nazi Army in Gorizia”, because the Trieste paper Il Piccolo has a special page entitled “Cronaca di Gorizia”, and aside from that Il Piccolo has a local editorial board in Gorizia on the 1st floor at Via Crispi 9, where one can go to hear the latest news, or even to bring in an interesting news item, which the police are constantly urging citizens to do, to bring news in, to rat on each other. Haya, therefore, has no idea what is going on around her. While it snows outside, and while she waits for customers to turn up, she works on maths problems and keeps track of changes in the cinematic repertoire.

The high commissar of the Adriatisches Küstenland, Gauleiter Friedrich Rainer, has big plans for “his” district. After the war all of Friuli province is to flourish. Trieste, this “little Berlin” at the heart of Rainer’s future provincial paradise, is to spring to life, it will awaken and take flight (within limits). The artists and writers will come flocking back, except the Jews or decadents. The port within the structure of the new German empire will be a pure and virtuous port of a new age. The new man will work there in earnest. He will be supernatural, strong, robust. Rainer will not be able to separate all the ethnic chaff from the golden grain of his imperial periphery. The Slavonic, Slovenian and Croatian corncockle will linger; the Italian Friulians will linger; the rather crude Cici and Morlaks, with their unfortunate allies; the belligerent Cossacks, whom Gauleiter Rainer has compelled to come from the East, promising them the Heimat they never had, their own little Cossackland at the foot of the Carinthian alps in the rugged and impoverished area around Tolmezzo and the River Tagliamento, to which they drag their horses and their tents, their women and their children, until 1945 when nearly all 50,000 of them are repatriated to the Soviet Union and killed, without succeeding, as Gauleiter Rainer had hoped, in defending the Friuli-Venezia Giulia province from the incursions of crude partisan bands, unbridled bandits and infidels. But in 1944 Rainer is hard at work building a compact Furlanentum, carving out a Furlani nation in which Trieste is to become part of German territory, even though the entire province, this special sunny oasis on the edge of the empire of Mitteleuropa, is tainted by the inferior Slavonic race, which, thank God, is in the minority. The workers need better living conditions, Rainer insists, so he is particularly attentive to them. Even Florian, who is selling umbrellas, is not so badly off. Perhaps that is why he doesn’t complain. Rainer sees to it that Italian and Slovenian workers have new (workers’) clothing and new (workers’) footwear, since they are soon to become German workers. The clothing and footwear the workers have been wearing make them look like tramps, and the workers are the heart and soul of his (Rainer’s) project. Rainer has an almost communistic vision of how to set up his provincial realm. He establishes canteens and kitchens, Werkküchen, in which workers are to be given more generous and tasty portions than the rest of the non-working population, so they can bring verve and efficiency to their labours, with a song on their lips. Florian is satisfied. These shoes are excellent, he says, though I am not fond of brown, and he wears Rainer’s workboots when he has to and when he doesn’t, at home, for instance, while listening to Rainer’s radio broadcasts, while leafing through Rainer’s propaganda newspaper, and while smoking Rainer’s cheap cigarettes. We’re not so badly off, Florian says then, at least everyone has an umbrella. The office for labour, at an order from Friedrich Rainer, introduces a special supply of cigarettes for Rainer’s workers, because although some may claim that tobacco is not essential for life, as Rainer declares in his new newspaper, Deutsche Adria-Zeitung, cigarettes are certainly one of those little things that make our everyday life, especially this wartime travail of ours, more bearable, and bring it a touch of brightness, as Rainer says in Deutsche Adria-Zeitung. And aside from that, as a student of the Law, Rainer had undoubtedly come across the notion of mens sana in corpore sano, so he introduces numerous cultural and recreational activities, in factory halls as well as at stadiums, such as those Werkskonzerte of his that are held during lunch break, which all workers, the local managerial staff and representatives of the Nazi administration, are obliged to attend, charged with noting down who comes and who does not. Health matters. Gauleiter Friedrich Rainer knows that health is key: an ailing population becomes depressed and sluggish, productivity diminishes, and with it, patriotic fervour. That is why everywhere in “his” district Rainer has built playgrounds and parks. He organizes competitions and little local festivities, which are advertised along with the broadcast of marches and sentimental hits that alternate on the new hour-long local programme Die Stunde der Friulaner, so that the listeners can dream out their Austrian dreams and navigate the healing waters of saccharine nostalgia. Meeting the cultural needs of the working class is just as important as providing adequate compensation for human labour, Friedrich Rainer says in his Deutsche Adria-Zeitung, because man does not live by bread alone, Rainer says. Rainer’s paper, the Deutsche Adria-Zeitung, is delivered regularly after 14 January, 1944, to Haya’s tobacco shop and Haya takes the Zeitung home and Florian reads it, often aloud, so that everyone in the house can hear, so they will take note of what Rainer recommends and not forget their, his, Rainer’s, German language. In order to secure peace among the civilians, for he has enough headaches with the partisans (Italian, Slovenian and Croatian), Rainer starts a local, separatist weekly called La Voce di Furlania, co-opts Slovenian and Croatian collaborationists, and re-opens the Slovenian schools, so the Tedeschi family get a free set of fourth grade textbooks for Orestes, over which Ada then pores, searching for (and not finding) the lost, distorted time of her mother Marisa (neé Brašić) and her grandmother Marija (neé Krapez). The final issue of Deutsche Adria-Zeitung comes out on Saturday, 28 April, 1945, but Haya doesn’t open up her little shop that Saturday, because she is already touched by a fate from which, as Saba says, one does not die but loses one’s mind instead.

If he were alive, Haya’s grandfather Bruno Baar would probably have told her which of the Gorizia newspapers he read, what papers piled up in the house, which ones Marisa used to wash the windows or to wrap what was left of her set of drinking glasses as they got ready to evacuate the city, back in 1917. And Ada would be able to tell her, tell Haya, which magazines and newspapers she had sold at her tobacco shop before they left Trieste, before fascism dropped the curtain behind which it tapped out the first steps of its diabolic dance, still tentative at that point and with no musical accompaniment, the audience mostly sitting in the theatre and waiting (and finally watching) the beginning of the dramatic second act. But Haya did not ask, Haya does not ask, and Ada soon forgets not only her own life, but life in general.

Before the Great War they read Gaberšček’s Soča and Primorec in Gorizia and Trieste. There is a political paper called Gorica, and Primorski Gospodar, and weeklies such as Novi Šas and Goriški List, and were she to poke around her grandfather Bruno’s now abandoned wine cellar, Haya would find old issues of the monthly Cvetje among the dry barrels, with essays by Škrabec, the Franciscan monk, on the Slovenian language. She would find dusty bottles draped with sheets of paper from Naši Zapiski and Veda, crumpled vestiges, traces of a time that was only just birthing, as if that time were a premature infant which the war was compelling to rest, swaddled, waiting. And now here is another war, the campaigns follow one upon another like the seasons; the commands from invisible powers spurt in brief, sluggish sprays and well-worn history flows like lava down the streets and squares, seeping into rooms and turning people to stone. Like Trieste, Gorizia lives its maddened parallel lives again, careening along railway lines from which the rails have been stripped. In it, in that accursed blot on the three-way border, at the intersection of four languages and invisible pasts, carelessly buried, dispersed or swept aside like squandered alluvia, only occasionally does ordinary life gleam forth, like a flash from the sky that sticks to the windowpane and on it, dies.

The underground press printed illegally by the partisans is not, of course, delivered to Haya’s tobacco shop, so as far as Haya is concerned that sort of press, anti-fascist, focused on national liberation, in Slovenian, Croatian and Italian, does not exist. Had she by chance stumbled upon papers such as those, she would have learned that the German Army was suffering losses, that the German generals were gradually losing their patience, and becoming more strict and brutal. She would have learned all sorts of things. She would have read about horrors, and her civilian life might have stepped out of the ordinary, or maybe not. In any case, for Haya the only newspapers are the official press, the papers read by the German soldiers and the Italian soldiers, and the other honest folk who don’t ask about things that aren’t their business. Nevertheless, throughout the Adriatisches Küstenland, all through the war, newspapers circulate, song books, dictionaries, children’s picture books, poetry and prose, cranked out on Cyclostyle machines in secret, in homes, warehouses, bakeries, carpentry workshops, are distributed despite the life-threatening danger to all those who know of them and want to know. Slovenski Poročevalec, Zakaj je Propadala Jugoslavija, Morje, Snežnik, Ljudska Pravica, Mladi Puntar, Mladina, Mladi Rod, Il Nostro Avvenire, Bollettino, Naša žena, Il Lavoratore, Otroške Pesmi, a whole library of another reality that always exists, everywhere, at every age and time.

Sometimes there is no running water in town, and sometimes the electricity goes out, but good Lord, things like that happen in peacetime, too. Haya’s Aunt Letizia says that in October the previous year (in 1943, right?) she happened to be near the Casa di Cura Villa San Giusto and she saw the Germans firing at the train station, for no particular reason, as if they were having a bit of a lark, and she saw the large clock topple off the front of the building, and time simply stood still, and time dies anyway during a war, she says. The heart of time beats in secret, she says. Time isn’t going anywhere, she says, so they don’t need that clock up on the railway station building anyway. She says that she kept walking along the Corso and happened upon two Italian armoured vehicles that were shooting left and right, like crazy, Letizia says, though there was practically no-one out on the street, only me with my five fresh eggs, she says, and she saw another woman, over there by the Parco della Rimembranza, and how the woman did not have time to run into the nearest entranceway, because they shot her. Letizia’s husband Parigi Puhaz says that on 22 September (he remembers exactly when) a shell hit the Braunizer house on Piazza Vittoria, and the next day one hit the Vittoria cinema. Four people were wounded, he remembers that precisely. Four. Then he says, You, Haya, you don’t have to see every single show. After that short conversation Haya’s uncle Parigi Puhaz goes to Vienna, where he dies in a flower shop in 1945, no-one ever finds out how. Florian listens to these and many of the other little stories that find their way into the dining room of the Baar family home, where the Puhaz family and the Tedeschi family are now living. He listens to these stories, these tales, fabrications which take a seat, uninvited, at their table, while they eat their rationed meals, more often than not in silence.

Haya’s brother Orestes, who turns ten in 1944, goes out with his pals and collects bits of shrapnel on the streets and in the parks, and already has an enviable collection of metal fragments, the exemplars of which he trades and hoards on a shelf in the kitchen in the large apothecary jar, the same jar in which Marisa used to keep her flour, but this shrapnel has nothing to do with what is real, these are just children’s games, reason the members of the household.

In February 1944 Haya goes to see Mrs Donati, who sells “exclusive” caps and hats, cappelli di lusso, at Grosso Valtz & Co., her fashion salon at Via Garibaldi 5, because Haya would like to replace her black knitted cap with a little blue hat, or maybe even a red one. There she runs into two ladies who are whispering while she tries on the hats in front of a mirror, and she overhears what they are saying, she can’t help it. The older woman says that Rina Luzzatto, a teacher, has been forced, meaning prematurely, into retirement, which immediately reminds Haya of her school in Naples, but heavens, after all the times are grim, and she hears how maestra Luzzatto is in un stato deplorevolissimo, because nearly all the Jews of Gorizia, or so says maestra Luzzatto, including her brother and some others from nearby towns, are arrested at first, because there are suspicions they are in league with the partisans, and then, on that terrible night of 23 November, 1943, they are thrown into cattle wagons headed for Auschwitz.

In February 1944 Haya has no idea about the terrible night of 23 November, 1943, because at that point she was not in Gorizia. Afterwards, while the war goes on, Gorizia shrinks, because of nights like that, turns into a tiny ball wrapped in a membrane of silence, and then oblivion settles over it like sodden snow.

But Haya remembers 18 March, 1944.

What does she remember?

It is a Saturday. The snow is melting. Spring is on its way. She goes to the Ospedale Civile for a check-up with Dr Boschetti, who says, Everything is fine. Come back in a month. Airplanes buzz over Gorizia at about eleven o’clock. At 11.30 the bombs begin to fall. Haya huddles under the counter in her tobacco shop.

At dinner Florian says, At least one hundred and fifty people were killed.

Orestes says, Enzo blew up into thin air.

Ada asks, Enzo who?

Enzo, my eight-year-old pal, says Orestes.

Enzo Vida. The son of that Gigette, daughter of Luigi Spanghero, Letizia says.

He is in the partisans, Florian says.

Then Orestes shouts, Today I collected a whole pile of nifty shrapnel!

Haya says nothing.

This is the day.

Yes, Gorizia lives a parallel life, parallel lives, fractured, schizoid, from the inside.

4

In 1991 Haya finds a book, Un Altro Mare by Claudio Magris, in her postbox, sent to her by Roberto Piazza, a former student of hers. Roberto Piazza writes that he wouldn’t be surprised if she, Professor Tedeschi, has no memory of him, because he was an average student, in fact a poor mathematician, but that doesn’t worry him at all. He, on the other hand, remembers his teacher, whom he hasn’t thought of for years, probably because he was busy with other things that had nothing to do with mathematics. All the same, Roberto Piazza says, when he read the book he is sending her, his former maths teacher Haya Tedeschi, when he read the slender but powerful volume he is giving her, his former teacher, as a gift, through the mail, like this, it hit him that in all the five years she taught them (from 1971 to 1976, right?), she, their teacher Haya Tedeschi, never once spoke of the war, or of the people who disappeared in town during the war, World War Two, you know? writes Roberto Piazza. Also, he writes, he is surprised that she, their maths teacher, never spoke to them, her students, the class of 1971–76, of Renato Caccioppoli, the famous mathematician, especially since word got around school that she, Haya Tedeschi, attended the gymnasium in Naples at roughly the same time Caccioppoli was living there, in Naples, and that he was an anti-fascist, isn’t that so? And the fascists arrested him and he had to hide out in an insane asylum, writes Roberto Piazza, but since she, their teacher was just an ordinary schoolgirl at the time, who maybe decided to become a mathematician later, you know, because of awkward things going on in her life, perhaps, you know, maybe it isn’t so strange that she doesn’t seem to have known anything about Professor Caccioppoli. He, writes Roberto Piazza, lives in Rome now where he works in graphics, in a manner of speaking — he is a graphic designer, and he is now working on the layout of a book about Gorizia’s famous people, and so he came across names which none of his teachers at the Dante Alighieri Gymnasium had ever mentioned during his five years there from 1971 to 1976, you know, while he, Roberto Piazza, was going to the Gymnasium more or less every day, and, writes Roberto Piazza, he finds this very surprising. For instance, writes Roberto Piazza, only when he read the book he is sending her, her, his maths teacher, only when he read A Different Sea, Un Altro Mare, did he understand that there are threads interwoven in Gorizia, the beginnings of which are impossible to divine, threads that can no longer be disentangled, in whose snarl lies an entire cocooned history.

His uncle, Bruno Piazza, writes Roberto Piazza, escaped alive from the San Sabba rice mill, unlike thirty-three members of his, their, immediate and larger family, and they are Alceo Piazza, Antelo Piazza, Angelo Piazza, Anita Piazza, Bruno Piazza, Donato Piazza, Edvige Piazza, Elio Piazza, Elisa Piazza, Elvira Piazza, Emanuele Piazza, Fernanda Piazza, Giacomo Piazza, Gina Piazza, Gino Piazza, Giuseppe Piazza, Maria Luisa Piazza, Rachele Piazza, Regina Piazza, Sed Angelo Piazza, Sed Camilla Piazza, Sed Cesira Piazza, Sed Consola Piazza, Sed Costanza Piazza, Sed Emma Piazza, Sed Ester Piazza, Sed Eugenio Piazza, Sed Leda Piazza, Sed Marco Piazza, Sed Rosa Piazza, Sed Sara Piazza, Umberto Piazza, Virginia Piazza, who ended up at Auschwitz and Dachau, among them his grandfather, also Bruno Piazza, writes Roberto Piazza. I lay on the floor, on boards, as his uncle, Bruno Piazza, tells it, writes Roberto Piazza, and they beat me until I passed out. At night voices reached my cell, telling me what was happening, and horrible things were happening, someone on the other side of the wall whispered: I am buried alive, no air, thirsty, tonight they’ll shoot me, Bruno Piazza says, but the next morning the man was incinerated, not shot, incinerated, Bruno Piazza says, as Roberto Piazza writes. Then a woman spoke up who said that every night they were shooting people in the back of the head, and after every shot the dogs barked something terrible, that was how they killed lots of partisans, but I got out, says his uncle Bruno Piazza, writes Roberto Piazza.

In the envelope are the names of about 9,000 Jews who were deported to Nazi camps between 1943 and 1945 or killed in Italy, writes Roberto Piazza. There are people from Gorizia, maybe his teacher remembers some of them, writes Roberto Piazza. On the list there are forty-four people with the last name Tedeschi: Ada Tedeschi, Ada Tedeschi, Adelaide Tedeschi, Adele Tedeschi, Adolfo Tedeschi, Alberto Sebastiano Tedeschi, Arrigo Tedeschi, Benvenuta-Ines Tedeschi, Bianca Tedeschi, Bice Tedeschi, Emanuele Amedeo Tedeschi, Emma Tedeschi, Emma Bianca Tedeschi, Ermenegilda Tedeschi, Ernesta Irma Tedeschi, Eugenia Tedeschi, Ezio Tedeschi, Francesca Tedeschi, Franco Tedeschi, Giacomo Tedeschi, Giacomo Tedeschi, Giacomo Tedeschi, Giacomo-Mino Tedeschi, Gino Tedeschi, Gino Tedeschi, Giorgio Eugenio Tedeschi, Giuliana Tedeschi, Gualtiero Tedeschi, Irene Tedeschi, Lidia Tedeschi, Lionello Tedeschi, Luciano Tedeschi, Mafalda Ida Tedeschi, Marco Tedeschi, Marisa Tedeschi, Natalia Tedeschi, Sabato Giuseppe Tedeschi, Salomone Tedeschi, Salvatore Tedeschi, Silvio Tedeschi, Umberto Tedeschi, Vittoria Tedeschi, Vittorio Tedeschi, Wanda Tedeschi, had his teacher, Haya Tedeschi, heard of some of these people? Had she known some of them? writes Roberto Piazza. Was his former teacher, Haya Tedeschi, aware of them? he enquires.

Since he is working on designing this book on famous Gorizians, writes Roberto Piazza, he thought of her as well, his teacher Haya Tedeschi, and he wants to take this opportunity to ask what the war years were like for her, his teacher, does she have any memories, and he would also like to ask her, the maths teacher from the Dante Alighieri Gymnasium in Gorizia, why she never took them in 1975 to visit the museum, which opened that year on the site where the San Sabba camp had been.

Roberto Piazza writes in detail to his former maths teacher from the Gorizia Dante Alighieri Gymnasium about the philosophy of Carlo Michelstaedter, though when she perused his little tractate in 1991 Haya Tedeschi hadn’t understood what it was all for. Michelstaedter came from a prominent Gorizia Jewish family, writes Roberto Piazza. He wanted to study mathematics in Vienna, but he went to Florence to study art history. She, his teacher Haya Tedeschi, must surely have heard of him, of Michelstaedter, writes Roberto Piazza. Today Carlo Michelstaedter is very popular, writes Roberto Piazza, he is even mentioned in the little Gorizia tour guides. He doesn’t want to tire her with philosophy and Carlo Michelstaedter’s biography, writes Roberto Piazza, but if she is interested in the life and philosophy of Carlo Michelstaedter, if she is interested in his paintings and poems, she will find plenty of material even in the modest Gorizia bookstores, he merely wants to remind her of the fate of his (Carlo’s) mother Emma Luzzatto, the fate of his (Carlo’s) sister Elda, the fate of his close friend Argia Cassini, to whom, in 1908, two years before he shoots himself with a pistol belonging to his friend Enrico Mreule, Carlo pens these verses in Piran

Parlarti? e pria che tolta per la vita

mi sii, del tutto prenderti? — che giova?

che giova, se del tutto io t’ho perduta

quando mia tu non fosti il giorno stesso

che c’incontrammo?

While Argia Cassini, Argia Cassini the pianist, in love with Carlo Michelstaedter, plays, writes Roberto Piazza, Carlo paints her portrait, a portrait of Argia Cassini, and on the piano a crystal glass of Picolit rings, and their lips touch and touch the marzipan and blackberries nestled in a warm Gorizia pastry. Argia has thick dark hair, writes Roberto Piazza, and she is twenty-one, the same age as Carlo. Argia Cassini is in the convoy that takes Elda, Carlo Michelstaedter’s sister, first to Mauthausen, then to Auschwitz, Roberto Piazza writes. When the Nazis arrest Argia Cassini and seize all of her property, writes Piazza, she entrusts her daughter forever to the care of her school and wartime friend Elsa Finzi. Roberto Piazza wishes to remind her, Haya Tedeschi, he writes, of her three compatriots, who were taken to Auschwitz that terrible night in November 1943, where Carlo’s eighty-year-old mother Emma and his eldest sister Elda die almost as soon as they arrive, while the third, Argia Cassini, the pianist, dies a year later, writes Roberto Piazza, and he wants her, his former maths teacher, to look for Professor Verzegnassi (he believes the man lives at Via Giovanni 1, if he is still alive) to tell him that he can trust his former pupil Roberto Piazza and send him the drawing of Carlo’s, which along with more of Carlo’s writings Professor Verzegnassi managed to preserve, through the war, from the Nazis, who were bent on destroying what they called degenerate art, because Roberto needs the drawing for the book he is designing, and he will return it to him personally as soon as he comes up to Gorizia, and he will write to him himself, all he needs is his teacher’s blessing, Roberto Piazza writes. He understands the fate of his teacher, Haya Tedeschi, and he urges her to comb through Carlo’s thoughts on persuasion and rhetoric, because in them she may find respite from her nightmares, but, of course, he is not advising her to kill herself. Small towns always have a contingent of chronically unhappy people, writes Roberto Piazza, and hence the general atmosphere of unhappiness leads to numerous suicides to which the weather conditions also contribute. In small towns people are always inclined to suicide. All of them have the feeling they are suffocating, because they are not able in any way to alter the situation they find themselves in. Bernhard says so, too, writes Roberto Piazza. He, Roberto Piazza, agrees with Carlo Michelstaedter that human life is formed of remorse, a guilty conscience, melancholy, boredom, fear, rage and suffering, and that all man’s endeavours show how much he, man, is a passive being who throughout his life re-works, revises and appends his own biography and the biographies of those around him, writes Roberto Piazza. Therefore he doesn’t blame her, his former teacher, for not knowing who was doing what and who was doing the killing at the San Sabba camp, while she, Haya Tedeschi, was going to the cinema and engaging in lovers’ trysts.

An infernal messenger flew just now along the avenue

to a chant of thugs; an orchestra pit,

firelit and arrayed with swastikas,

seized and devoured him, the windows,

shabby and inoffensive, though adorned

with cannon and war toys, are shuttered up,

the butcher who laid berries on the snouts

of his slaughtered goats has closed; the feast

of the mild murderers still innocent of blood

has turned into a foul Virginia reel of shattered wings,

larvae on the sandbars, and the water rushes in

to eat the shore and no-one’s blameless any more.

So this is how Roberto Piazza wraps up his letter, with lines from Montale, as if she, Haya Tedeschi, doesn’t get it. Long after the war, and until just a few years earlier, Haya Tedeschi had been reading all sorts of texts, even Michelstaedter; she read Heidegger and Wittgenstein; she studied the paintings of Kokoschka, Kirchner and Heckel, looking through those works for confirmation of her own rage at language, for her own revolt against the European logocentric tradition, which had proved to be deeply vacuous, if, indeed, vacuity has depth, seeking from these works endorsement for her campaign to confront language; out of many years of painful reckoning she emerged, faltering and mute, the loser. This much she sees. She is aware that her disdain for language subsides in a schism, much like a gaping wound in the middle of which swirls a terrifying silence, death transformed. Life is a delusion for those who function rhetorically, the scientist and merchant, the teacher, the priest and prophet, Michelstaedter says, and Haya agrees and wonders with him how to find again what has disappeared in the course of living, what has been lost, what perhaps never was, the nothing that begins to think, which says to itself I have my inner being, which I do not know. When a spirit no longer finds its identity anywhere, when everything it knows as constant, enduring, all values in their outward form disappear, it searches for the sole surviving identity, for the source of all values, the key to all valency. If the experience of historical events is, in essence, the experience of the self, then to possess oneself means to possess everything, Michelstaedter says, and Haya concurs. But self-awareness is an illusion, elusive and impossible to attain. Self-awareness leads to self-destruction.

Haya senses that a little cemetery is sprouting in her breast with a jumble of tilting tombstones like the ones at the old Valdirosa burial ground; she feels as if the already rotten, damp and blackened crosses and faded stars are knocking against her ribs; they are crowded, the crosses, the stones, the stars seem to be growing in her breast, reaching her throat and choking her, so she says, I’m having trouble breathing. There is a need to look inside, set to rights the proliferating hotchpotch before it breaks through her armour, before she, like a gigantic hedgehog, continues along the paths of her everyday life, before this cemetery of hers in her breast collapses and in its place yawns a chasm at the bottom of which, in the dark, beats a tired heart. She can no longer say whose heart this is.

In 1991 Haya Tedeschi is already retired, but fully in gamba. She goes off for walks, because the walks shorten her wait. She listens to symphonic music, because symphonic music has no words and everything that has no words is fine with Haya Tedeschi. She plays with mathematical formulas, turns them around and shifts them, comes up with new ones, remembers old ones, tries to tailor a new language using symbolic language. Words are quickly exhausted, Haya Tedeschi says. I no longer know what to do with them, she says

Je suis né. Je suis né de l’ombre,

je suis né dans l’ombre et mon désir

fut longtemps qu’on ne m’arrache pas

à l’ombre où je suis

and says out loud the words of Pierre Goldman as if they are hers. One should speak with the hands, using the language of the deaf and dumb, Haya says, there would be fewer misunderstandings, the messages would be short and terse, she says, and starts moving her twisted fingers, gesticulating with her wrinkled palms as if shooing or summoning shadows. Then she laughs aloud and says Bah!

Haya Tedeschi looks at the envelope sent to her by her former student Roberto Piazza, of whom she has no recollection. It is a thick envelope, bulging, and inside are only the dead. Haya Tedeschi shivered back then in 1991 and laid the envelope on the bottom of the red basket, as if lowering it into a grave. Now, in 2006, while she waits, while she sifts through the past as if opening dry beanpods from which the beans fall like sealed, enslaved little stories composed of images flitting by in flashes, while she digs through the red basket at her feet uncovering the crusty layers in the little piles of sealed lives, out slips the envelope, so she puts it on her lap and rocks it as if it is a stillborn child.

5

It is January 1944, a Wednesday. A darkness is descending all wrapped in snow-white sparks, resembling the crystals flying into the La Gioia tobacco shop when the door opens, and like magic dust it settles on the golden-yellow wooden counter steeped in the fragrance of tobacco, the fragrance of honey and cherries, over which Haya, like Ada before her, with her index finger traces out her future. With a smile of closely held hope, Haya awaits the last customer that evening. A thirty-year-old German in a uniform comes into her tobacco shop. Oh, he is as handsome as a doll. The German already has the Polish nickname Lalka, but at this point, when she first sees the dashing German, Haya knows nothing of that, the dashing German tells her later, I am no Lalka, you are my Lalka. The German is tall and strong and oh, firm and gentle. The German takes out his Voigtländer Bessa, leans over the counter, looks deep into Haya’s green eyes and says Ein 120 Film, bitte. Ein Kodak, bitte, softly, as if whispering to her breathless by an open hearth—Strip off your clothes. So, after twenty-one years, when the love story of Ada Baar and Florian Tedeschi is already spent and falling away in tatters, the little brass bell on the door of the La Gioia tobacco shop announces the beginning of a new life, ding-a-ling, the beginning of a new love story in the Tedeschi family. And so begins the war romance of Haya Tedeschi and Kurt Franz, because the dashing German second lieutenant, S.S.-Untersturmführer, is named Kurt Franz.

Kurt Franz is a passionate amateur photographer. From his Voigtländer Bessa jump all sorts of little black-and-white scenes, 45 x 60 millimetres; like, for instance, one shot from the Gorizia fortress in the spring of 1944, when Kurt takes a picture of his colleague Willi, after which the three of them, Kurt, Willi and Haya, go out for Kaiserfleisch at the Trattoria Leon d’Oro on Via Codelli. Kurt and Haya meet secretly, of course, in the private rooms of out-of-the-way inns, in the Gorizia suburbs, but they also go for a day’s excursion to Trieste when an engaging opera or operetta is playing, because Kurt likes music and after outings like that with Haya he is awash with a special tenderness. They go to see Lehár’s The Merry Widow, but also Wagner’s Lohengrin at the Verdi theatre. They take in a new film at the Casa Germanica and enjoy a good Apfelstrudel, because Kurt adores Apfelstrudel, because Apfelstrudel reminds him of his mother, whom he also reveres and loves, and Haya has nothing against sweets, but she does prefer panna cotta to Apfelstrudel and they did not offer panna cotta at the Casa Germanica at Via Nizza 15. They, Haya and Kurt, almost always go to matinees so that Haya can be back in Gorizia in time; so that no-one will suspect her passionate love, which, Haya knows, she needs to keep secret. Sundays, Kurt visits Franca Gulli, a violin teacher in Trieste, at Viale Sonnino, where he spends at most two hours playing simple, brief compositions by famous masters, such as a Bach minuet or the Brahms “Lullaby” (“Wiegenlied”), Op. 49, No. 4, or Gershwin’s “Summertime” (with Professor Gulli accompanying on the piano), or Shostakovich’s “Little March” from his pieces for children, because Kurt genuinely loves music. Haya, meanwhile, goes to church, each time to a different one. At church she makes a full confession, is given absolution, and then everything is fine. Kurt tells Haya all sorts of pretty tales. He talks the most to her about his dog Barry; his big beautiful mutt who looks like a St Bernard, but he had to leave it back in Poland, where he used to work at a park on the edge of a beautiful forest near a charming little railway station where there was a zoo with pheasants and rabbits, which he, Kurt, knew how to serve up like a master chef, because he was trained, among other things, as a cook, and where he took so many great photographs, which he keeps in a special photo album called “Schöne Zeiten”, meaning “The Good Times”, and under the title he writes “Die schönsten Jahre meines Lebens”, meaning “The most wonderful years of my life”, although now, while he is with Haya, he says he’s no longer so sure they were.

From Kurt Franz’s album, photographs given to Haya Tedeschi in Gorizia in 1944

Kurt Franz on an outing with Haya near Gorizia in May 1944

Kurt Franz, October 1937

Kurt Franz with his mother in Düsseldorf, 1937

Kurt’s beloved Barry, 1943

In late March 1944 the Tedeschi family move to Milan. Florian gets a job through his contacts there. Being a capo ufficio in a firm engaged in the distillation of molasses seems like dignified work to Florian, compared to selling umbrellas at the Della Tre Venezie in Gorizia. Haya says I am not going. I need to look after the shop, and she stays with Aunt Letizia; in good hands, her mother believes. From Milan Haya’s sister Nora writes and calls. Roses are not blooming, it seems, for them there. The family arrive in Milan by train on a cold and rainy night just as the city is under air attack, the same way the Tedeschi family arrived in Venice after leaving Albania back then — ah, these repetitions, these wartime coincidences, Nora complains to Haya, and there they all perch on their suitcases, she, Nora, Paula, Orestes and Ada, they are drenched for hours at night in the pouring rain at the corner of Via Broletto and Via Bossi, waiting for Florian to bring the keys to a flat, and the bombs are falling, incendiary bombs, Mama Ada says, who is drunk as soon as night falls, people die from bombs like these, she says. The office, the distillery — whatever it is, where Papa works — is on the outskirts of town, all the way out of Milan, Nora writes, and they live in a house that has been allotted to them as refugees, which she, Nora, cannot understand, because the people around them are Italians, although there are plenty of Germans, too — so how can they be refugees? But Ada says things are like that in wartime: civilians are forever on the run, mostly going to where they have family, where they think they’ll be safe, and she, Nora, no longer knows who is “them” and who is “us”, she writes, because in Albania at first they weren’t refugees, then overnight they were, writes Nora. It’s not very nice — the house where they are living — writes Nora. They are on the second floor, and on the first floor are some crude people who speak no Italian and greet them in German with Heil! Maybe these people are refugees, too, writes Nora, there is always shooting going on, so none of them — she or Paula or Orestes — attend school, too dangerous, Papa Florian says, and she is already old for school anyway, she writes, soon she’ll be turning eighteen. Papa, Nora writes, has found her a place in “his” company, and she is already working there as a translator from the German and as a typist, so now every morning she goes with Papa on the local train to work. The Underwood typewriter is so big and cumbersome to type on, writes Nora. There are no dictionaries and she often asks the German soldiers for help. They seem to be everywhere, writes Nora, and they aren’t the least bit unpleasant, in fact, they are courteous, there are even good-looking men among them, just as Haya told her about how decent Kurt is. The trains are packed, the electricity often goes out, and they travel an hour or more to work every day, and the bombs are always dropping, writes Nora, and besides they do not have enough to eat, life was better in Gorizia, she writes. One day Paula took Florian’s bicycle, Florian bought a new bike, really light, aluminium, writes Nora, and she went into a field to steal a few potatoes, but they saw her so she ran off and now they do not have the bike any more, writes Nora, and they are all turning yellow from the carrots. In early May Nora writes that on 21 April she and Florian barely survived when they were on their way home from work, they had heard shooting all day, which was pretty normal, but there was something terrible going on at the train station, total chaos, people were saying that Milan had fallen into the hands of the partisans, in any case, writes Nora, the Germans seem to know they are losing the war, some are even deserting, and she and Papa Florian walked for five kilometres, and, sure enough, the partisans showed up and shoved people around, they were really rough, they had the people line up and walk towards Milan; and they, Nora and Florian, did not walk along in the middle of the road, they walked along the edge, by the ditch; and she saw dozens of dead bodies, writes Nora, mutilated bodies, actually, in the ditch, the handiwork of the partisans for sure; and she writes that she was amazingly lucky to be alive, because she had on her a membership card for the Fascist Republic of Salò, and if the partisans had found it they definitely would have killed her, but luckily they did not touch her, writes Nora, and she writes how the partisans during those days did many bad things, and then, thank God, the Allies got there. She almost started crying, writes Nora, when she saw how in the courtyard of a school they were shooting a fascist whom they’d caught. They stood him up against a wall, writes Nora, and gave this ten-year-old boy a gun — the boy was no older than ten, not a day over ten, like our Orestes, writes Nora — and ordered the boy to shoot, because he, the fascist, had killed the boy’s father. Shoot! they shouted, and the little boy did not know how, writes Nora, and all that, the shooting, ended badly: the boy shot and shot and the fascist kept not falling, he just bled more, then they killed a few Germans who wouldn’t surrender, right there in front of us. This is what Nora writes.

Milan is mainly “cleansed” by March 1944, and the Tedeschi family are not under suspicion, because had they been suspicious they wouldn’t have been living in the house where they were living, in a flat whose previous tenants had gone off for a “long trip abroad”, as Florian’s contact had put it.

At San Vittore prison there are empty beds. At platform twenty-one of the main train station there are fewer freight cars waiting to be loaded. The trains are loaded at night, quickly, and in secret. The Tedeschi family know nothing about the morning of 30 January when six hundred people are pushed into a long train, including some forty children, big and small, and older people of whom the eldest is Smeralda Dina, 88, like Emma Luzzatto from Gorizia. Seven days later, on 6 February, the train arrives at Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Meister aus Deutschland calls out

… thrust deeper into the earth some of you the rest of you sing and play

… thrust deeper with your spades some of you the rest of you play on for the dance

… play your violins more darkly then you’ll rise like smoke into the air then you’ll have a grave in the clouds where there is plenty of room

and in only a few hours five hundred travellers fly off to their heavenly cemetery.

6

At a 1969 meeting in Zurich of secondary school mathematicians from Italy, Switzerland and Austria, Haya Tedeschi meets Elvira Weiner from Zurich. At the meeting there is talk not only of mathematics, but also of the past. There is always talk of the past, so that people can get to know each other better. That is how it goes. Conversations about the past are like little confessions, like unburdenings, after which the soul returns to the present on angel wings, fluttery and luminous.

This street is nice, but I don’t like train stations; there have been terrible train stations, Haya Tedeschi says to Elvira Weiner during a free afternoon when they go for a walk, window-shopping along Bahnhofstrasse.

Yes there have, says Elvira Weiner, let’s go and have a snack of something sweet, she adds. I was sixteen, says Elvira Weiner, and at home there was a lot of talk about trains, about coal coming from Germany through Switzerland, through the St Gotthard tunnel to Italy, and this was discussed in our family. There was a lot of talk, though more of it was a whisper, it was like an open secret — everybody knew. One day my mother said, There was a request made of the Swiss government to allow trains through Gotthard with people on them, but towards Germany, my mother told me, says Elvira Weiner, and my mother also said, They asked me, this committee, if I wanted to help, because they say there are people coming. We don’t know who those people are or where they are going, my mother said, says Elvira Weiner, but actually, that wasn’t the way it was, says Elvira Weiner. She knew. She knew who those people were. Come on, join us, this is a humanitarian effort, the trains will stop in Zurich and then we will distribute blankets and coffee and soup, they told me in this committee, my mother said, says Elvira Weiner. We thought, this is just a made-up story, we didn’t believe it, in 1944 I was sixteen, but there was more talk. And then finally my mother at one point came home and said to my father, I have volunteered, and I’m going to go and help, she said, says Elvira Weiner, and my father was against it, why get involved? he asked my mother, but she said, I feel I have to do this, I must, says Elvira Weiner, then later we heard that this was a deal, that the German and Swiss governments had made a deal, and the Swiss Red Cross got involved, their deal was that the trains could pass through Gotthard and not through the Brenner, since otherwise trains went through the Brenner, but the Brenner Pass was closed because of the snow and they couldn’t ship anybody through the Pass. Italians and Gypsies — yes, Gypsies too, who they were transporting through Germany and beyond, somewhere beyond, so the Germans had suggested using these empty coal carriages to ship them back with people, so they wouldn’t return empty and the Swiss Red Cross at that point intervened, and they negotiated a deal whereby these railway carriages would stop at night in Zurich, and they said, Fine, we agree, at night, the Swiss Red Cross said, and our people will give the travellers blankets and warm coffee and warm soup, so they can travel in greater comfort, the Swiss Red Cross said, says Elvira Weiner. Mama went around town and asked people to contribute their coffee, because coffee was rationed, and also she asked everybody if they could donate some beans. Beans were not rationed, but still, you couldn’t get them so freely, says Elvira Weiner. And these beans were used to make soup with a few carrots and potatoes, I suppose — yes, and potatoes. So we went around doing this, and then, another night, my mother said we were going to a meeting and I went along. It was somewhere in, I believe, a school building, I no longer remember which school, and at the meeting we got instructions about what to do when the trains arrived. And there was a Red Cross official, a lady, who told us the trains would come in at night, and we were supposed to bring torches, we were definitely supposed to bring torches, she said. We would be in teams of four, she said, and we would be stationed at certain marked spots along the platform, the lady from the Swiss Red Cross said, says Elvira Weiner, and we would have to bring all the goods — the blankets and the coffee and the beans the day before to the spot where they would be collected, the lady from the Swiss Red Cross said, says Elvira Weiner. I don’t remember where the collection point was, says Elvira Weiner, and we were also supposed to bring our gas masks, which I didn’t at all understand at that time, why we had to take our gas masks, says Elvira Weiner. Now everybody had a gas mask at that time. Every building had so many gas masks, but we never used them. Switzerland was neutral. So my mother did everything as the lady from the Swiss Red Cross said: she took all the coffee and all the blankets and all the soup in, and then the day came. We had no car and at that time there were constant blackouts so we took the tram and we had our gas masks, and we had also been told we would have to make a chain. Then we will bring you cauldrons of soup and big pots of coffee and you will ladle out the soup into smaller containers and you will hand them down from one person to the other, they said from the Swiss Red Cross, and there would be one person who would be stationed right next to the railway carriages, they said, says Elvira Weiner. So we arrived. It was about, I think, nine o’clock at night and we were four in our team — my aunt, my mother, the housekeeper and myself — and my mother was the one who stood next to the railway carriage. And I think there were maybe ten teams like ours and we were placed at intervals along the platform, and we waited. And when everything was done and when everybody was waiting, they brought out the huge containers of hot soup — I don’t know where they made it. Yes, I do know, at the Jewish community house. I am not certain, but I think my aunt told me the soup was made there. And then they brought vats of coffee. And my job was the soup. I had to ladle the soup into smaller containers — not plates, gamellas they called them. Metal ones. And so we waited, says Elvira Weiner, and then we saw them, the train carriages coming into the station, very slowly, and then they stopped. And somebody from the outside opened the door, because they were sealed shut somehow, the carriages, someone took off the bar and then unlocked the door and then the door slid open and we all were standing there, waiting, and a man came out and he stood and stood there; then he nodded that we could start and then I began ladling the soup. I remember it was very difficult, because I had put the torch on the ground, and the soup was hot, pretty hot. I had to ladle it and then I gave it to the housekeeper, her name was Ida, Ida Ban, and Ida would hand the soup to my aunt and my aunt to my mother and she to this man and the man turned around, and handed the gamella to someone in the carriage, because the gamella disappeared, that means that there were people in the train. And this went on for about half an hour, and the atmosphere was very tense, and we were told not to talk, absolutely not to whistle, not to do anything, it was a very tense situation, very, and I also remember I thought, What would happen if now all these people came tumbling out of the railway carriages? And I was trying to imagine, what it was like in these railway carriages? Did they have beds? Or chairs? Was there a stove in these railway carriages? It was very cold, very raw weather. And I was wondering, If they do come out, what are we supposed to do? Are we supposed to push them back in? Or would we keep them here in Zurich and maybe bring them home and I would share my bed with one of them, with a little girl or a young woman my age? Because my mother had brought home Jews, refugees who were living in camps, she often invited them at weekends. And I always had to share my room with them, so I thought maybe I’d have to share my room again, only now for a longer time. But nothing happened. When we had emptied the containers, says Elvira Weiner, when the soup was finished and the coffee was done, and the blankets were distributed, we went home, the same way we’d come, by tram. We had to keep to a certain time to catch the last night tram.

When everything was done, the train didn’t pull out, says Elvira Weiner, they bolted the door again and the carriages stood there. And then there was an article in the newspaper… the citizens with houses near the train station, near platform one, had complained about the noise, says Elvira Weiner, because those in the railway carriages shouted, Let us out! Let us get out! and inside the people were banging so loudly that the people living around the train station could not sleep, so they protested, and then it was suggested these transports should be left on the side of the Landesmuseum, all the way beyond the Hauptbahnhof, on Museumstrasse, because there were no people living there and the transports wouldn’t be disturbing anyone, that is what they suggested, says Elvira Weiner, because I don’t think we wanted to know what was happening. We knew these people were going to Germany, we knew there were Jews inside, we knew about the concentration camps, and we had helped them, so why were they hollering now at night? That is what we were thinking, says Elvira Weiner. We gave them blankets and coffee and soup, why are they protesting? That is not polite, we thought, they are making a racket and we can’t sleep. That is how our citizens wrote, you know, this was wartime, says Elvira Weiner, and we all had our worries and that troubles me today, says Elvira Weiner, because if we hadn’t left the people like that, if the Government had gone back on its word, if we had said, We are not letting these people go on to Germany, then I guess the other transports wouldn’t have followed — and they did come, there were many transports, I think they had about eight, maybe twelve, and I went once more with my mother and, sure enough, the carriages were far away, near the Schweizerisches Landesmuseum, on the last platform, and the same thing happened, the blankets, the coffee, the soup, the banging and shouting, and then my mother said, You can’t go to the train station any more. You have to think about school. You can’t be coming home so late. You have to get your sleep. I don’t know which people went there to help. We didn’t dare talk. It was verboten to talk, says Elvira Weiner. It was pretty dark anyway. We had only our torches, it was very dark, but I remember when the door opened on one of the carriages I saw a man with a white face at the door, with a terribly white face in the darkness. At that meeting I saw people I knew, people my age. I had gone skiing with some of them. The adults I didn’t know. My aunt knew them. I think there were Jews there, I knew one man, a lawyer, he said, Hello, kid, but there at that platform he pretended not to know me. The Swiss Red Cross contacted Jews, I think that the Swiss Red Cross contacted Jews in secret, I think the other people knew nothing about those transports, I think they had no clue, and the Swiss Red Cross felt they were making a grand gesture, a great humane gesture, besides the Swiss Red Cross behaved that way, as if it were the saviour, as if the Swiss Red Cross saved all those people with those blankets, that coffee and that soup. I don’t know if the Swiss Red Cross ever considered stopping these trains, freeing the people. I don’t know, says Elvira Weiner. We knew nothing, we knew only that there were Jews and Gypsies going to Germany and beyond — we didn’t know where beyond — and that they had to go through Switzerland, because the Brenner Pass was closed. That’s what my mother told me, but at the meeting somebody also asked, Why do they have to go through Switzerland? I mean, nobody was happy about the trains going through Switzerland, that Switzerland was involved, because Switzerland claimed to be a neutral country, and it turned out not to be so neutral after all, especially as far as the banks were concerned, that still remains to be proved, says Elvira Weiner. At the meeting someone said, Maybe they are political prisoners, but I knew, in my family we knew, we knew, we assumed that they were taking those people to concentration camps, we knew there were different camps: Dachau, Bergen Belsen, Theresienstadt. Theresienstadt was a good camp. They didn’t kill there, we could have done something, at the time I didn’t think that way, everyone was thinking that the blankets, and the coffee, and the soup, that this was enough. I was sixteen — I was going to school — when we were waiting as those trains came slowly in to the station. We waited for the doors to open, and I thought, What will happen now? What if all those people come pouring out? What if they push away that man in uniform standing at the door and they start jumping off the train? What will we do then? Will someone put them back into those carriages? I wanted the people to get free, but I didn’t want them to get out here, with us, like when you look at animals at the zoo, you feel sorry for them for being in the cages, but you don’t want them to get out right where you are, they should be set free in some wild place, you think, says Elvira Weiner. Later I wondered — not then, later — why I had been saved, and some others were not, now I know: no-one was saved. When the war ended, my mother didn’t want to talk about it, she wanted to forget. I would ask her, What do you think happened to those people from the train? and she would say, Oh, Elvira, those were bizarre times. All that happened in late 1943 and early 1944. It was very cold. Later I heard it was no coincidence, there are no coincidences. I looked for information about those people — later, when my mother died — I looked for information. I heard how the partisans tried to sabotage the freight trains and stop them before they entered Switzerland, and how the Nazis rounded up people in the villages and towns and offered them free cigarettes, and then arrested them and loaded them onto trains and shipped them to Germany to the work camps, I heard they were successful, occasionally, in derailing trains, saving some people, says Elvira Weiner. In the archives there is information. I looked for it. In the archives it says that traffic through the Gotthard Pass in 1943 and 1944 was intense, that German trains passed through Switzerland every ten minutes on their way to Italy, and then I searched the archives of the Red Cross, but there is not a line in the archives of the Red Cross about the trains that passed through Zurich, not a line about the organized support, about those blankets and the coffee and the soup, nothing about the little help to the Italian prisoners, which was really nothing to speak of. Perhaps that is why there is no information about it anywhere, as if it never happened… says Elvira Weiner. But somewhere I found a little document, says Elvira Weiner, a slip of paper on which it says that the representative of the Swiss Red Cross in January 1944 contacted the German command, some S. S. officials, someone named Globočnik and someone named Rainer in northern Italy, related to “coordination of effort to offer aid to Italian citizens”, and then I went through the archives of the Swiss railways, says Elvira Weiner. I didn’t find anything. At the archives of the Swiss railways they said that in 1960 they moved their offices and at that time all their information about the train schedules and the movement of trains during the war was destroyed. Destroyed, says Elvira Weiner. The worst is that the freight carriages were sealed. They could only be opened from the outside, says Elvira Weiner. Maybe that was the worst.

I, too, have train-station nightmares, train-station nightmares, nightmares, frightening dreams, repeats Haya, while she digs around in the red basket, then finds a little photograph that, back in 1944, slid in — she doesn’t know how, she doesn’t know how, how did it slide in? — among the pictures that S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz gave her. Here it is, she says.

7

On 31 October, 1944, at about 6 p.m., Ada’s sister, Haya’s aunt, Letizia Puhaz, shouts: Fanny, run and fetch Teresa from Via Caporetto! At 8.17 p.m. Teresa Cavalieri, a midwife from Via Caporetto 51, delivers Haya Tedeschi’s baby. Antonio “Toni” Tedeschi comes into the world.

Kurt Franz sees his son twice. In late December, leaning over the counter at La Gioia, Kurt Franz twiddles a lock of Haya’s light-brown hair between his index finger and his ring finger, leans in to her face and whispers: My little Jewess, we can’t go on like this. Oh, yes, I know, Tedeschi ist ein jüdischer Name. Besides, my fiancée is waiting for me at home. Heinrich Himmler, Minister of the S.S. Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt has finally granted me permission to wed. I am leaving for Düsseldorf at Christmastime, and when I come back, I will not be in touch. Please do not ask for me.

This is when Haya seeks out Don Baubela. Antonio Toni is baptized as every good Catholic should be, in the presence of Letizia and Laura Puhaz and Teresa the midwife, he is entered into the church books with his father’s name, yes, Kurt Franz, and is given the mother’s surname, Tedeschi. All of this should remain a secret, Haya says to Don Baubela. The times are risky, she says. Don Carlo Baubela probably says not a word, because that is the way of priests. Don Baubela dies in 1946, having lived to more than eighty. Gorizia believes that Antonio’s father has died in combat, but in whose army? On whose side? This doesn’t interest many. The times are murky.

Gorizia is a small town. Nevertheless.

On Friday, 13 April, 1945, Haya takes Antonio Toni, as usual, to the Duchessa Anna d’Aosta Asilo Nido in Via Veneto, in other words to a nursery where he is cared for by Iolanda Visintin, a friend of her mother Ada’s from elementary school days. At the front door the postman says, You have a letter. Your parents are sending you money from Milan. Sign here. When Haya turns around, Toni’s pram is empty. There is no-one walking along Via Veneto. Not a single passer-by. The morning is brisk, sunny, and the air is clear after several days of driving rain; the trees are shyly blooming in white and pink. The postman and Haya stare, appalled, at how this magic trick has happened. And so it is that, five months after his birth, Antonio Toni Tedeschi disappears, suddenly and quietly, as if he had never lived.

Oh yes, Haya searches for Antonio high and low, high and low. Gorizia is on its feet. The police investigate, dispatches fly, phones jangle, tears well, chaos reigns in her mind. The nights do not pass. The days do not pass. Time grows like yeast, time swells, then one day it overflows, pours out of Haya’s breast, clambers up on to a merry-go-round and off it flies. Nothing could be done.

History decides to hide, to go underground for a spell. I need a break, says History, turns its back on the here and now, sweeps up all its rattles, leaving a huge mess behind, a hill of rubbish, vomit everywhere, and with a satanic cackle, witch-like, it soars heavenward. On Saturday, 28 April the partisans kill Mussolini and Clara Petacci at Mezzegra and on Sunday they hang them head down on a gas pump at an Esso petrol station at Piazzale Loreto in Milan, somehow gauging this at precisely the same moment that Hitler swears his fidelity to Eva Braun “until death do us part”. On Monday, 30 April, 1945, Adolf and Eva kill themselves; Dachau is liberated by the Americans; and on Tuesday, 1 May the Yugoslav 4th Army and the Slovenian 9th Corps march into Trieste. Who has the time to look for one stolen child?

In 1946 Ada comes back to Gorizia with Paula and Orestes from Milan, and Florian and Nora go off to Salò, where old Tedeschi and his second wife Rosa have come through the war essentially unscathed. They burn their Fascist Party membership booklets, although they needn’t have; no-one asks them for anything.

After the war there are no heroes, the dead are forgotten immediately, pipes up Jean Giono. The widows of heroes marry living men, because these men are alive and because being alive is a greater virtue than being a dead hero. After a war, says Giono, there are no heroes, there are only the maimed, the crippled, the disfigured, from whom women avert their eyes, he says. When a war ends, everyone forgets the war, even those who fought in it. And so it should be, says Giono. Because war is pointless, and there should be no devotion for those who have dedicated themselves to the pointless, he says.

Listen, Romain Rolland says, war is not over, nothing is over; humankind is in fetters.

Old Paolo Tedeschi lives in a neo-Baroque villa on the shore of Lake Garda, but he is not at peace. The words Tedeschi ist ein jüdischer Name pound in his head throughout the war; they press against his chest. When events reach fever pitch, when Paolo Tedeschi feels they may reach fever pitch, he slips into hospital where his friend Dr Armando Bosi sets him up in the intensive-care unit. There, in intensive care, Paolo Tedeschi gets vitamins intravenously, a lovely view of the hospital garden and a sense of the seasons passing. When the birds chirp Paolo Tedeschi listens to the birdsong. When rain falls he listens to the patter and it lulls him to sleep. Then he is given a laxative and says, Ah, this, too, will end. Paolo’s stays in the hospital are brief and well rehearsed. After them, he goes home heartened and stronger. Paolo’s sons Sergio and Walter take their mother’s surname, Brana (after the war they take back their father’s, Tedeschi). In 1944 they report to the Italian branch of the German Army and manage mini-submarines, which attack the Allied forces. Paolo’s youngest son Ugo, otherwise a flautist, crosses over into neutral Switzerland before September 1943 to the little town of Untersiggenthal in the Aargau canton, and entertains the beer drinkers on a second-hand accordion in a local tavern. In the mid-1950s he sends his parents a postcard from the Gripsholm translatlantic Swedish-American ocean liner, writing that he is sailing on the Gothenburg-New York line, playing in the ship’s orchestra. In 1954 the Gripsholm is rechristened the Berlin, but Ugo no longer writes. Catholicized Jew Paolo Tedeschi dies in 1948, and his second wife, Rosa Brana, a Catholic born and bred, dies a year later. Paolo’s eldest son Florian remarries in 1963. Walter and Sergio find work in a nearby liqueur factory. Nora starts her own family.

As if there had never been a war.

Years follow in which deaths are what is remembered, some gentle and quiet, anticipated, peacetime deaths, some violent and maybe unjust. Haya attends the funerals of her closest family as if going off to shallow confessions from which she lugs back to Gorizia her bundles of deaf nausea and second-hand incredulity. Paula dies of cancer in Trieste in 1963; Florian, on the shore of Lake Garda in 1972. After Orestes graduates from secondary school in 1952 he abandons Gorizia. All of you are full of shit! he shouts, and as a member of the Red Brigades he dies in a Roman prison on 17 March, 1978, of a heart attack a day after he takes part in the assassination of Aldo Moro; while Nora, as a happy housewife, closes her eyes with God’s blessing in Brescia in 1990.

Ada is the first to go.

Ada drinks more in Gorizia. She drinks so much, especially in the afternoons, that she can no longer manoeuvre herself downstairs. She falls. She has cuts all over, especially on her face. Later they treat her at the hospital, stitch her up. And so the years pass. Ada’s face is scribbled with scars and the visible traces of surgical sutures, the knots tied to close her open wounds. Ada looks more and more like a patch, a rag, totally unusable. She often cries for no reason. Her words jumble into long, snotty, garbled sequences, which she swipes at with the back of her hand, but fails. She finds it hard to bring the fork to her mouth. Her food dribbles on to her bosom. Her clothing is covered in greasy stains. She is soiled and unkempt, the situation, in general, is serious.

So they commit Ada to the psychiatric ward of Gorizia hospital, where she decants absinthe, grappa, vodka or any alcoholic beverage she can lay her hands on, into perfume flasks, which, with great effort and cunning, she tucks into toilet cisterns, pillow cases, other people’s bags, through which she rummages frantically at night, barefoot and urine-soaked.

At this point, in 1953, Haya begins to study mathematics in Trieste.

Ada gets to know Umberto Saba at the hospital and they have long conversations, all sorts of conversations, while both of them stand, elbows on the sill, at a tall window with iron bars and sniff the fresh Gorizia air. Later, in 1961, when prominent psychiatrist Franco Basaglia comes to Gorizia, the iron bars are removed, the front door is left unlocked, the patients stroll around the gardens, some slowly as if dreaming, some spry, on their way home. Ada wears two sprigs of white oleander behind her ear and sings, then, when Basaglia comes to the hospital, as he indulges her little alcoholic binges. But by the time Basaglia gets there, Saba is gone. Saba dies in 1957, Ada dies five years later.

It’s nice here, Ada tells Haya when she comes to visit. Sad people live here. Jews, too. Umberto speaks of Trieste, where there is also plenty of sorrow, and

next to the hill there’s a graveyard

in ruins, which funerals pass

and where no-one’s been buried for as long

as I can remember

says Umberto,

my ancestors lie here,

he says, and he is a Jew, too, Ada tells her.

Umberto says, Trieste is a pungent and melancholy city, the strangest city, Umberto says, a city of boyish adolescence and rude charm, so he says, says Ada, then he takes me for a stroll, and we amble around Trieste, this isn’t the Trieste we lived in when Florian was serving coffee at the Piazza Unità, this Trieste is serenely innocent, so Umberto says, says Ada, it is a lovely world, Umberto says, and he paints that world for me, he paints me suppressed longing and aching love, so he says, I’ll paint you unspoken longing and aching love and exhausted words fiore-amore in that murky madness, Umberto says, in that madness in which vainly discordant voices reverberate, he says, this is a lovely Trieste, not the Trieste we fled, Ada says.

Where I dreamed of patent-leather shoes, and never got them, Haya jumps in, but Ada doesn’t hear, Ada is ambling around Trieste with Umberto, and Haya is skipping after her.

There, Ada says, we go off to the Ponterosso, Umberto and I, and we look at the birds, because Umberto likes birds, Ada says, and now I like birds too, though the stuffed birds Grandfather Angelo had were frightening, their dead glassy eyes, Ada says, and he takes me, Umberto, to Via Riborgo or Via Pondares, I forget, to the house where he was born, in what was the Jewish ghetto then, but those houses are gone now, the house I was born in is gone, Ada says, today that’s an altogether different house — houses are disappearing, Haya, people, too, now I see — and we make the rounds of the trattorias Umberto remembers, and we have a grappa at the Alla Bella Isoletta, I am a little island, too, Haya, a barren little island, left behind, but it wasn’t always like that, no. Then we go to where Carolina was born, she was Umberto’s wife, and Umberto talks about her a lot, and he talks a lot about Lina — Linuccia — he uses pet names for her, I never used pet names for you, Haya. We were always in a hurry. We had no time for tenderness. I don’t know how that happened, that we were left without time. What would I have called you? Haya, Hayuccia, Hayichen? asks Ada and starts to sob, then through the tears, she says, You could have brought me another couple of bottles. These bottles are so small. They are very little, these bottles you bring me. And Umberto ran away, you know, just like we did, he ran away from fascism, so he tells me,

We ran into fascism, Haya interrupts, but Ada doesn’t hear.

and he hid in attics. I hid everywhere, Umberto says, in attics in Paris, in Florence, in Rome, says Umberto, says Ada, and she also says, The next time you come, bring some ampoules of morphine for Umberto and little bottles of rum for me, and when I die, bury me at Valdirosa, over there, in Slovenian soil. And he, Umberto, talks to me, you know, says Ada, he tells me about train stations we didn’t know about, and he asks me,

Stations, do you remember? At night, full

of final farewells, unchecked weeping,

crammed with people the transport takes.

The order “move” given by the

sob of a trumpet;

and ice, ice around your heart.

but I don’t remember, Haya, I don’t, says Ada, maybe it’s the drink. And, you know, says Ada, Umberto’s last name isn’t Saba anyway, though that is exactly what he is called, Umberto Saba, because his name is actually Umberto Poli. Did you know that? Though he might have been Umberto Coen. He could have, says Ada. He could have been Coen, because his mother was Jewish and her last name was Coen, not his father’s, his father’s was Poli, says Ada, and he left them, Umberto and his Mama Rahela, a nice name, Rahela, says Ada, Jewish, she says, and then Umberto declared, I will take the name Saba, because none of this matters anyway, you know, what your last name is, he said, though I’m not so sure it doesn’t matter, I am not so sure, and that is how Umberto takes the last name Saba, because he had a nanny whose name was Pepa and he loved her a lot and she was Slovenian, like my Mama Marisa, my Mama Marisa from Gorizia, your grandmother, Haya, who also disappeared. Oh Haya, how people vanish. It’s so painful, and Umberto says there are no unborn or dead, there is only the living life for eternity; pain that passes, happiness that stays, Umberto says, whose last name is Saba, though really his last names are Poli and Coen. There is pain that passes, Umberto says, and so it is that your pain will pass, Haya, and so it is that Rahela sent Pepa packing, and Pepa’s last name was Sabaz, and then Umberto declared, That will be my last name, after my Pepa from Gorizia, because it doesn’t matter anyway what your name is, says Umberto, says Ada. Sometimes he doesn’t feel like talking, Umberto, Ada says, so he, Umberto, recites poems about birds for me, and we look at the trees and I listen to his poems about birds, and he recites for me his poems about birds, and I long to be a bird, and Umberto says,

the leaving, this year, of the swallows

because of a thought my heart will squeeze,

and he says,

my loneliness will be bereft of swallows,

and love at my advanced age will freeze,

says Umberto, and then we go on looking into the garden, which is shadowy, and we observe those trees, and then I say to Umberto, Look at how shadowy this garden is. We could hide out there, if they allowed us to walk around it sometimes, around the shadowy garden, and he says, There is no shadow where my tiredness could find shelter. But I am tired, too, Ada says, and she says, Haya, don’t forget to bring me rum. They think they’ll cure me. They will not cure me. I don’t want to be cured, because I’m not ill, but Umberto says, If you feel like drinking, drink, they won’t cure you here. Though it isn’t bad here, though I would like to go for a walk, maybe even sing. For the time being I sing softly, more to myself, then I ask Umberto, Am I crazy? because sometimes it seems to me that all this, this life, my life, your life, that all this is a serious madness, but Umberto says, says Ada, Umberto says that Dr Weiss says (and I trust Dr Weiss, Umberto says), Dr Weiss says, Craziness is a dream from which a person doesn’t awake. That is what Dr Weiss says, Umberto says. Haya, bring some rum for sure. If there’s no rum, buy gin, in a little bottle, a mini-bottle, in several little bottles, and bring Umberto morphine. He sometimes sits and whispers a poem that isn’t his. He whispers a poem that is called “Solitudine ”; then I see that everything is different from what it seems, because he sits and whispers:

But my shouts

strike

like lightning

the heaven’s

muted bell

they plunge back

down in fright

That is what he whispers. I think this is a poem by Ungaretti. Yes, it’s Ungaretti’s. It is called “Loneliness”, solitudine, solitude. Yes, then I worry about Umberto, because you see, I told you,

Behind Every Name There is a Story

~ ~ ~

The names of about 9,000 Jews who were deported from Italy, or killed in Italy or in the countries Italy occupied between 1943 and 1945

Abeasis Clemente

Abraham Hilde

Alalouf Mosè

Alhadeff Alessandro

Abeasis Ester

Fanny

Alati Concetta

Alhadeff Allegra

Abeasis Giorgio

Abraham Yvonne

Alati Gianantonio

Alhadeff Allegra

Abeasis Rebecca

Abrahamson Betti

Alati Liliana

Alhadeff Allegra

Abeasis Renato

Acco Allegra

Alatri Lionello

Alhadeff Amelia

Abel Otto

Acco David Dario

Alatri Vittoria

Alhadeff Aronne

Abeles Francesca

Acco Giacomo

Albertini Ida

Alhadeff Aslan

Abenaim Elia

Acco Marco

Alcanà Bianca

Alhadeff Baruch

Giuseppe

Acco Rachele

Alcanà Celebi

Alhadeff Bellina

Abenaim Ettore

Acco Sabino

Alcanà Celebi

Alhadeff Bellina

Abenaim Mario

Acco Vittorio

Alcanà Elia

Alhadeff Bezalel

Abenaim Mario

Acco Vittorio

Alcanà Esther

Alhadeff Bohor

Abenaim Oreste

Zaccaria

Alcanà Estrella

Alhadeff Bulissa

Abenaim Ottorino

Ackerman Feige

Alcanà Giacobbe

Alhadeff Bulissa

Abenaim Renzo

Adato Amata

Alcanà Giovanna

Alhadeff Caden

Abenaim Teofilo

Ades Elio

Alcanà Giuseppe

Alhadeff Caden

Abenaim Wanda

Adler

Alcanà Isacco

Alhadeff Celebi

Abenimol O.

Adler Albert

Alcanà Isacco

Alhadeff Chety

Abishous Caden

Adler Anita

Alcanà Maria

Alhadeff Davide

Aboaf Abramo

Adler Giuseppe

Alcanà Matilde

Alhadeff Davide

Marco

Adler Marion

Alcanà Rachele

Alhadeff Diana

Aboaf Achille

Adler Oscar Zeliko

Alcanà Rachele

Alhadeff Diana

Aboaf Gino

Adler Oswald

Alcanà Rachele

Alhadeff Donna

Aboaf Giuditta Rita

Adler Stefan

Alcanà Rachele

Alhadeff Elia

Aboaf Guido

Adler Zora

Alcanà Rebecca

Alhadeff Ester

Aboaf Ida

Adut Rosa

Alcanà Rebecca

Alhadeff Ester

Aboaf Regina

Afnaim Leone

Alcanà Salva

Alhadeff Ester

Aboaf Salomone

Afnaim Matilde

Alcanà Sara

Alhadeff Ester

Girolamo

Afnaim Regina

Alcanà Sara

Alhadeff Ester

Aboaf Umberto

Afnaim Salomone

Alcanà Stella

Alhadeff Ester

Abolaffia Rebecca

Afnaim Vittoria

Alcanà Viola

Alhadeff Ester

Abolaffio Adolfo

Afnaim Vittorio

Alcanà Vittoria

Alhadeff Estrella

Abolaffio Camelia

Agatstein Perl

Alcanà Vittoria

Alhadeff Estrella

Abolaffio Guido

Ajo’ Abramo

Alexander Gertrude

Alhadeff Giacobbe

Abolaffio Regina

Ajo’ Adele

Sara

Alhadeff Giacobbe

Abolaffio Simeone

Ajo’ Angelo

Algranti Giacomo

Alhadeff Giacobbe

Edgardo

Ajo’ Celeste

Algranti Rebecca

Alhadeff Giacobbe

Abolaffio Vanda

Ajo’ Elisabetta

Alhadeff Abramo

Alhadeff Giacobbe

Abouaf Allegra

Ajo’ Giacobbe

Alhadeff Abramo

Alhadeff Giacomo

Abouaf Clara

Ajo’ Grazia

Alhadeff Alberto

Alhadeff Giacomo

Abraham Arminio

Ajo’ Pacifico

Alhadeff Alberto

Giacobbe

Abraham Carlotta

Alalouf Caden

Alhadeff Alberto

Alhadeff Giamila

Alhadeff Giamila

Alhadeff Perahia

Alhadeff Viola

Almoslino Olga

Alhadeff Giovanna

Alhadeff Perahia

Alhadeff Virginia

Alphandary Bianca

Alhadeff Giovanna

Alhadeff Perla

Alhadeff Vittorio

Alpron Enrichetta

Alhadeff Giuseppe

Alhadeff Rachele

Alhadeff Zimbul

Alpron Ernesto

Alhadeff Giuseppe

Alhadeff Rachele

Alhadeff Zimbul

Alt

Alhadeff Giuseppe

Alhadeff Rachele

Alhaique Emilio

Alt Giovanni

Alhadeff Giuseppe

Alhadeff Rachele

Alhalel Brazo

Altaras

Alhadeff Giuseppe

Alhadeff Rachele

Alhalel Moisè

Altaras

Alhadeff Giuseppe

Alhadeff Rachele

Alhanà Abramo

Altaras Donna Ester

Alhadeff Haim

detta Lina

Alhanà Allegra

Altaras Jilian

Alhadeff Haim

Alhadeff Rebecca

Alhanà Estrea

Altarass Cesare

Alhadeff Hanula

Alhadeff Rebecca

Alhanà Estrea

Altaraz Sara

Alhadeff Herzel

Alhadeff Rebecca

Alhanà Giuseppe

Altberger Ester

Alhadeff Isacco

Alhadeff Rebecca

Alhanà Jochevet

Alter Leopold

Alhadeff Isacco

Alhadeff Regina

Alhanà Matilde

Altmann Ferdinando

Alhadeff Isacco

Alhadeff Renata

Alhanà Miriam

Altmann Giuditta

Alhadeff Israele

Reina

Alhanà Mirù

Altmann Giuliano

Alhadeff Jachir

Alhadeff Rica

Alhanà Mosè

Altmann Guglielmo

Alhadeff Jahiel

Alhadeff Rica

Alhanà Nissim

Altmann Hinde

Alhadeff Jahiel

Alhadeff Rica

Alhanà Rebecca

Altschueler Samuel

Alhadeff Ketty

Alhadeff Rosa

Alhanà Reina

Amati Alberto

Alhadeff Lea

Alhadeff Rosa

Alhanà Rosa

Amati Giulio

Alhadeff Lea

Alhadeff Rosa

Alkalay Hermann

Amati Letizia

Alhadeff Lea

Alhadeff Rosa

Alkalay Josif

Amati Michele

Alhadeff Maria

Alhadeff Rosa

Alkalay Miscia

Amati Rosa

Alhadeff Maria

Alhadeff Rosetta

Almagià Arnaldo

Amati Rosa

Alhadeff Maria

Alhadeff Rosina

Almagià Delia

Amato Alessandro

Alhadeff Maria

Alhadeff Ruben

Almagià Emma

Amato Aslan

Alhadeff Maria

Alhadeff Ruben

Almagià Enrico

Amato Caden

Alhadeff Maria

Alhadeff Ruben

Almagià Erminia

Amato Davide

Alhadeff Matilde

Alhadeff Ruben

Almagià Ortensia

Amato Ester

Alhadeff Matilde

Alhadeff Sadok

Almansi Adele

Amato Giacobbe

Alhadeff Matilde

Alhadeff Salomone

Almasy Vera

Amato Giacomo

Alhadeff Matilde

Alhadeff Salomone

Almeda Guglielmo

Amato Giuseppe

Alhadeff Matilde

Alhadeff Salvatore

Almeleh Abramo

Amato Giuseppe

Alhadeff Mazaltov

Alhadeff Samuele

Almeleh Alfredo

Bochor

Alhadeff Mazaltov

Alhadeff Samuele

Almeleh Bella

Amato Lea

Alhadeff Mazaltov

Alhadeff Samuele

Almeleh Bulissa

Amato Mardocheo

Alhadeff Miriam

Alhadeff Samuele

Almeleh Caden

Amato Matilde

Alhadeff Mirù

Alhadeff Samuele

Almeleh Fassana

Amato Michele

Alhadeff Mirù

Alhadeff Santo

Almeleh Giacobbe

Amato Mosè Behor

Alhadeff Moisè

Alhadeff Sara

Giacomo

Amato Nissim

Alhadeff Mosè

Alhadeff Sara

Almeleh Hahamaci

Amato Rachele

Alhadeff Mosè

Alhadeff Sara

Almeleh Haim

Amato Rahamin

Alhadeff Mosè

Alhadeff Sara

Almeleh Luna

Amato Regina

Alhadeff Mosè

Alhadeff Saul

Almeleh Mari

Amato Ruben

Alhadeff Mosè

Alhadeff Scemaria

Almeleh Matilde

Amato Sadik

Alhadeff Mosè

Alhadeff Silvia

Almeleh Mercada

Amato Samuele

Alhadeff Mosè

Alhadeff Sofia

Almeleh Miriam

Amato Sol

Alhadeff Ner

Alhadeff Stella

Almeleh Rachele

Amato Stella

Alhadeff Ner

Alhadeff Stella

Almeleh Raffaele

Amato Stella Esther

Alhadeff Nissim

Alhadeff Stella

Almeleh Rebecca

Amato Violetta

Alhadeff Nissim

Alhadeff Stella

Almeleh Samuele

Ambonetti Olga

Alhadeff Nissim

Alhadeff Vida

Almeleh Sara

Ambrosini

Alhadeff Perahia

Alhadeff Vidal

Almeleh Sara

Guglielmo

Americano Carolina

Anteras Salomon

Anticoli Letizia

Armani Heischmann

Amgyfel Riwka Sara

Anticoli

Anticoli Luciana

Adolf Umberto

Amiel Abramo

Anticoli Abramo

Anticoli Luciano

Armani Heischmann

Amiel Davide

Anticoli Adelaide

Anticoli Manrico

Gino

Amiel Isacco

Anticoli Adolfo

Anticoli Marco

Armut Edita

Amiel Isacco

Anticoli Alberto

Anticoli Marco

Armut Enika

Amiel Leone

Anticoli Alberto

Mosè

Armut Gustav

Amiel Maurizio

Anticoli Alfredo

Anticoli Mario

Armut Iva

Amiel Rachele

Anticoli Angelo

Anticoli Mario

Arnoldi Guido

Amiel Rachele

Anticoli Angelo

Anticoli Mario

Arnstein Ernest

Amiel Vidal

Anticoli Angelo

Anticoli Marisa

Aron Vita

Amster Rebecca

Anticoli Angelo

Anticoli Pacifico

Aronson Angiolina

Amsterdam Arthur

Anticoli Angelo

Anticoli Rosa

Cecilia

Amsterdam Israel

Anticoli Anna

Anticoli Rosa

Arouch Renata

Isidoro

Anticoli Aron

Anticoli Rosella

Artom Faustina

Amsterdam Selma

Anticoli Attilio

Anticoli Rosina

Artom Margherita

Sara

Anticoli Attilio

Anticoli Sabatino

Artom Riccardo

Anau Eloisa

Anticoli Celeste

Anticoli Salvatore

Artom Vittorina

Anav Adalgisa

Anticoli Celeste

Anticoli Sergio

Arughetti Caden

Anav Anita

Anticoli Cesare

Anticoli Vanda

Arughetti Giacobbe

Anav Eleonora

Anticoli Emanuele

Anticoli Vitale

Ascarelli Adele

Anavi Rebecca

Vittorio

Antmann Adele

Ascer Rachele

Ancona Achille

Anticoli Emma

Antmann Gelb

Ascer Salvo

Ancona Ada

Anticoli Emma

Charlotte

Ascer Sara

Ancona Ada

Anticoli Enrica

Antmann Josef

Ascher Rosa

Ancona Bruno

Anticoli Enrichetta

Anzer Sofia

Aschnowitz Otto

Ancona Edoardo

Anticoli Ester

Anzubel Jakob

Ascoli Adalgisa

Ancona Elisa

Anticoli Ester

Apelbaum Pinchas

Ascoli Alessandro

Ancona Gastone

Anticoli Esterina

Paul

Ascoli Alfredo

Ancona Giulio

Anticoli Fiorella

Apfel Davide

Ascoli Angelo

Ancona Guglielmo

Anticoli Fiorella

Appel Bojla

Ascoli Elisa

Ancona Ida

Anticoli Fiorella

Appelbaum Armand

Ascoli Emma

Ancona Ines

Anticoli Fiorella

Moise Herz

Ascoli Enrico

Ancona Irma

Anticoli Fiorella

Ara Coen Anna

Ascoli Ernesta

Ancona Margherita

Anticoli Flaminia

Araf

Ascoli Ferruccio

Ancona Marisa

Anticoli Fortuna

Araf

Ascoli Gabriella

Ancona Olga

Anticoli Franca

Araf Lazar

Fernanda

Ancona Roberto

Anticoli Gemma

Araf Marco

Ascoli Giacomo

Ancona Vittoria

Anticoli Gemma

Araf Matilde

Ascoli Irma

Andrzenczek Eva

Anticoli Geremia

Arany Giorgio

Ascoli Lidia

Angel Alessandro

Attilio

Arbib Alice

Ascoli Lidia

Angel Bella

Anticoli Giacomo

Arbib Enrico

Ascoli Margherita

Angel Bulissa

Anticoli Giancarlo

Arbib Rachele

Ascoli Marta

Angel Giacobbe

Anticoli Giuditta

Arbib Simon

Ascoli Michele

Angel Gioia

Anticoli Glauco

Arbib Wassi

Ascoli Olga Luigia

Angel Giuseppe

Anticoli Grazia

Arbisse Raimondo

Ascoli Vito

Angel Haim

Anticoli Italia

Archivolti Liliana

Ashabett Silvia

Angel Leone

Anticoli Lazzaro

Arditi Alberto

Ass Ester

Angel Maria

Anticoli Lazzaro

Abramo

Assa André Jacques

Angel Samuele

Anticoli Lazzaro

Arditi Clara

Assa Isaac

Angel Sara

Anticoli Lazzaro

Arditi Davide

Assael Rachele

Angel Signora

Anticoli Lello

Arditi Esther

Assael Regina

Anscherlik Augusta

Samuele

Arditi Gioia

Asseo Linda

Anscherlik Franca

Anticoli Leone

Arditti Giuseppe

Asseo Rachele

Anscherlik Paola

Anticoli Letizia

Arditti Masaltov

Astegiano Margherita

Astrologo Aldo

Aussenberg Sara

Bangen Mirella

Baruch Raffaello

Astrologo Anita

Austerlitz Laura

Bank Hersz

Baruch Rita

Astrologo Attilio

Avigdor Enrico

Baquis Giorgio

Baruch Sabetai

Astrologo Cesare

Avigdor Federico

Baquis Giuliana

Baruch Salom

Astrologo Costanza

Avigdor Giacomo

Barabas Silvio

Baruch Salomon

Astrologo Diamante

Avigdor Isacco

Baraffael Fiorina

Silvio

Astrologo Donato

Avigdor Miranda

Baranes Ida

Baruch Salvatore

Astrologo Emanuele

Avigdor Rachele

Barbout Fortunata

Baruch Susanna

Astrologo Ennio

Avigdor Rachele

Barda Barkana

Baruch Violetta

Astrologo Enrichetta

Avigdor Stella

Barda Giacomina

Baruch Zimbul

Astrologo Ester

Avramovic Mika

Barda Oliviero

Baruk Clara

Astrologo Fortunata

Avramovic Sarika

Ruggero

Basevi Adele

Astrologo Giacomo

Avzaradel Allegra

Barda Salomone

Basevi Attilio

Astrologo Giuditta

Avzaradel Baruch

Barda Simeone

Basevi Elena

Astrologo Giuseppe

Avzaradel Clara

Lionello

Basevi Emma

Astrologo Isacco

Avzaradel Esther

Bardavid Alessandro

Basevi Ida

Astrologo Italia

Avzaradel Gioia

Behor

Basevi Lazzaro

Astrologo Lamberto

Avzaradel Graziella

Bardavid Caden

Basevi Pasqua

Astrologo Lello

Avzaradel Irma

Bardavid Elia

Basevi Tullio

Samuele

Avzaradel Laura

Bardavid Ester

Basevi Vittorio

Astrologo Leone

Avzaradel Lea

Bardavid Mary

Bass Isamor

Astrologo Leone

Avzaradel Regina

Barnstein

Bass Stefania

Astrologo Letizia

Avzaradel Renata

Diamantina

Bassani Albertina

Astrologo Letizia

Regina

Baroccio Clara

Bassani Anna

Astrologo Maurizio

Avzaradel Rosa

Baroccio Virginia

Enrichetta

Astrologo Milena

Avzaradel Selma

Baron Emma

Bassani Bruno

Astrologo Pellegrino

Azicrì Rosina

Baruch Abramo

Bassani Carlo

Astrologo Riccardo

Azra Misa

Baruch Ada Sara

Bassani Clelia

Astrologo Rinaldo

Azria Luigi

Baruch Avram

Bassani Edgardo

Leone

Azzarelli Lina

Baruch Baruch

Bassani Edoardo

Astrologo Rosa

Baar Giulia

Baruch Behor

Bassani Franco

Astrologo Sara

Bacharach Elisabetta

Michele

Bassani Gemma

Astrologo Silvia

Bachi Aldo

Baruch Clara

Bassani Giulietta

Astrologo Vitale

Bachi Aldo

Baruch Elia

Bassani Giuseppe

Astrologo Vittorio

Bachi Annibale

Baruch Eliezer

Bassani Giuseppe

Atias Neta

Bachi Armando

Baruch Enrichetta

Benedetto

Atias Nora

Bachi Arturo

Baruch Ezdra

Bassani Lydia

Atlas Margherita

Bachi Arturo Enrico

Baruch Flora

Bassani Marcella

Attal Ada

Bachi Avito

Baruch Franca

Bassani Tina

Attal Benito

Bachi Luigi

Baruch Giacomo

Bassano Bianca

Attal Davide

Bachi Michele

Baruch Giorgio Elia

Bassano Rita

Attal Dina Bona

Bachi Pia

Baruch Giosuè

Bassi Alberto

Attal Fortuna

Bachi Roberto

Alessandro

Bassi Ettore

Attal Mario

Bachi Vittoria

Baruch Giuditta

Bassi Fanny

Attias Giacobbe

Bachmann Fritz

Baruch Isacco

Bassi Marco

Giacomo

Bader Elena

Baruch Isacco

Bassi Vittorio

Attias Giacomo

Bahir Moshè

Baruch Isacco

Basso Bruno

Attias Nella

Bakker Joseph

Baruch Isacco

Batschis Helene

Attias Sara

Balassa Elena

Mario

Batschis Olga

Attias Vitale

Balbi Nerina

Baruch Liliana

Battich Luciano

Auerhahn Israel

Ballatti Lina

Baruch Marco

Battino Giuseppe

Auerhahn Mosè

Balog Adalberto

Baruch Mosè

Bauer Isacco

Aufrecht Anna

Balog Anna Maura

Baruch Natan

Baum Lodovico

Augapfel Jacob

Balog Lodovico

Baruch Perla Allegra

Baum Olga

Aussenberg Chaskel

Ban Eleonora Irene

Baruch Raffaele

Baumann Margarethe

Baumwollspinner

Belleli Jossua

Benbassà Rachele

Bensussan Berthe

Wolf

Salvatore

Bendaud Jole

Bensussan Eleonora

Bayona Carlo

Belleli Lazzaro

Benedetti Elena

Benun Abramo

Bayona Davide

Belleli Lazzaro

Benedetti Jole

Benun Abramo

Bayona Dora

Belleli Lazzaro

Benedetti Luciano

Benun Alberto

Bayona Isacco

Belleli Marco

Benedetti Valentina

Benun Alfredo

Bayona Lucia

Belleli Moisè

Benezra Matilde

Benun Bianca

Bayona Rita

Belleli Nissim

Benghiat Maurizio

Benun Bulissa

Bear Rachele

Belleli Pace

Beniacar Bulissa

Benun Caden

Beck Irma

Belleli Pietro

Luisa

Benun Clara

Bedussa Regina

Belleli Pietro

Beniacar Giacobbe

Benun Comprada

Bedussa Rosa

Belleli Rebecca

Giacomo

Benun Davide

Beer Karl

Belleli Roberto

Beniacar Matilde

Benun Davide

Beer Lazar

Belleli Salvatore

Beniacar Moise

Benun Elia

Begaz Rosa

Belleli Stameta

Beniacar Perla

Benun Elia

Behar Allegra

Belleli Vittorina

Benigno Alberto

Benun Elia

Behar Berta

Bembassat Giacomo

Benigno Emma

Benun Esther

Behar Davide

Bembassat Vittorio

Benigno Eugenio

Benun Giacomo

Behar Donna

Bemporad Ada

Benigno Giulia

Benun Giamila

Behar Elisa Tovà

Bemporad Ada

Benigno Letizia

Benun Haim

Behar Giuseppe

Bemporad Adolfo

Benjamin Abramo

Benun Haim

Behar Lea Rebecca

Bemporad Aldo

Benjamin Anna

Benun Isacco

Behar Rachele

Bemporad Amedeo

Benjamin Clemente

Benun Isacco

Behar Rachele Rosy

Bemporad Anna

Benjamin Daisy

Benun Luciana

Bein Anton

Bemporad Annita

Benjamin Elisa

Benun Marco

Bein Salomon

Bemporad Arnoldo

Benjamin Ester

Benun Maria

Beiner Stefania

Bemporad Bianca

Benjamin Eugenio

Benun Maria

Belgrado Mario

Bemporad David

Benjamin Geltrude

Benun Maria

Belgrado Ubaldo

Giuseppe

Benjamin Giacomo

Benun Matilde

Belinkis Cecilia

Bemporad Elvira

Benjamin Hlafo

Benun Mazaltov

Bella

Bemporad Gemma

Benjamin Lidia

Benun Mordechai

Bellak Evelyn

Bemporad Gina

Benjamin Messauda

Benun Mosè

Bellak Giorgetta

Bemporad Giorgio

Benjamin Meta

Benun Nissim

Belleli Aldo

Bemporad Jole

Benjamin Mosè

Benun Nissim

Belleli Allegra

Bemporad Lelia

Benjamin Rachele

Benun Nissim

Belleli Anna

Bemporad Lidia

Benjamin Regina

Benun Nissim

Belleli Anna

Bemporad Liliana

Nella

Benun Rachele

Belleli Armando

Bemporad Marcella

Benjamin Renato

Benun Rahamin

Belleli Armando

Bemporad Mirella

Benjamin Samuel

Benun Rahamin

Belleli Armando

Bemporad Silvio

Benjamin Silvana

Benun Regina

Belleli Bruno

Bemporad Ugo

Maria

Benun Regina

Belleli Davide

Bemporat Lazzaro

Benjamin Smeralda

Benun Rosa

Belleli Dorina

Ben Aron Jenni

Benjamin Vittorio

Benun Sadok

Belleli Elio

Benaroyo Fortunata

Haim

Benun Salomone

Belleli Enrichetta

Benatar Baruh

Benjamin William

Benun Samuel

Belleli Enrichetta

Benatar Giuseppe

Abramo

Benun Samuele

Matilde

Benatar Lea

Benonsisso Nisso

Benun Sara

Belleli Enrichetta

Benatar Mazaltov

Benosiglio

Benun Sara

Rachele

Benatar Nissim

Benosiglio Levi

Benun Stella

Belleli Fortunata

Benatar Nissim

Benosiglio Morris

Benun Vittoria

Belleli Fortunata

Benatar Rachele

Mosè

Benveniste Abramo

Belleli Giulia

Benatar Regina

Benosiglio Moses

Benveniste Alberto

Belleli Isacco

Benatar Sara

Benrey

Benveniste Davide

Belleli Isacco

Benatar Sara

Benrey Moise

Benveniste Davide

Samuele

Benathan Giuseppe

Benscioan Ascer

Benveniste Estrella

Benveniste Estrella

Berro Amelia

Bivash David

Borger Riccardo

Benveniste Isacco

Berro Bulissa

Blanes Raffaello

Borgetti Ernestina

Benveniste Isacco

Berro Elisa

Blank Debora

Borghi Giorgia

Benveniste Linda

Berro Giacobbe

Blatteis Emilio

Borsetti Luigi

Benveniste Mosè

Berro Lea

Blatteis Massimo

Boton Malcunna

Benveniste Nissim

Berro Matilde

Blauer Massimiliano

Botton Ester

Benveniste Nissim

Berro Nissim

Blaustein Giorgio

Bottoni Maria

Benveniste Nissim

Berro Oriel

Blinder Etta Caterina

Brainin Giulia

Benveniste Palomba

Berro Rosa

Bloch Alessandra

Brandes Ernesta

Benveniste Paolo

Berro Ruben

Bloch Katherina

Brandes Regina

Raul

Berro Salvatore

Bloch Margarethe

Brandes Riccardo

Benveniste Roberto

Bersciadski Semil

Blody Rosa

Brandi Mario

Benveniste Sarota

Bertiner Berta

Bloede Gerson

Brasch Elsa

Benveniste Stella

Bertram Rifka

Blonder Sara

Brasch Heinrich

Esther

Beru Mazaltov

Blueh Ernestina

Brauer Jolanda

Benvenisti Giannina

Berussi Elisa

Bluehweiss Federica

Braun Berta

Bercu Anne Marie

Besso Elsa Jolanda

Blum Enrichetta

Braun Bianca

Berger Adolf

Besso Lina

Blum Gelweiler

Braun Carola

Berger Alberto

Besso Marco

Carolina

Braun Clara

Berger Arnold

Besso Menachem

Blumenfeld Elena

Braun Erminia

Berger Carlo

Bettmann Henriette

Blumenthal Jacob

Braun Francesco

Berger Elisabetta

Bianchi Emerico

Blumenthal Olga

Braun Giulia

Berger Erna

Bianchini Giulia

Boccara Sciaula Dori

Braun Roberto

Berger Eugenio

Bianchini Livia

Bodner Magda

Brauner Jolanda

Berger Geza

Bick Max Herbert

Bodner Mayer

Brender Hermann

Berger Giuseppe

Bick Sigismondo

Boehm Malka

Brennitzer Franz

Berger Giuseppe

Bick Sofia

Boehm Michelangelo

Bretschneider

Berger Hedwig

Bidussa Elsa

Bogner Anna

Magdalena

Berger Margarete

Bielenkzy Evelina

Bolaffi Annita

Breuer Edmondo

Berger Maurice

Bigiavi Edoardo

Bolaffio Amadio

Breuer Guglielmo

Berger Max

Bilis Caden

Bolaffio Giacomo

Breuer Rosalia

Berger Nora

Bilschowski Hans

Bolaffio Giulio

Brezel Giuseppina

Berger Rosina

Bilschowski Werner

Bolaffio Moisè Ettore

Briegler Maria

Bergmann Gino

Bincer Giovanni

Bonacar Giacomo

Brill Attilio

Bergmann Theodor

Bindefeld Clara

Giacobbe

Brill Davide

Berl Silvio

Bindefeld Mayer

Bonacar Giuditta

Brill Fortunata Argia

Bermann Abramo

Bindefeld

Bonacar Luna Malkà

Brill Sofia

Bermann Alfred

Sigismondo

Bonacar Sara

Bringer Paul

Bermann Enrico

Birkenfeld Ignaz

Bondì Alfredo

Broeder Elisabetta

Bermann Ermanno

Birkenwald Gabriel

Bondì Anna

Broeder Ernesto

Bermann Friedrich

Birkenwald Pinkus

Bondì Benedetto

Broeder Eva

Bermann Ida

Birkenwald Rachele

Bondì Elena

Brogi Giuseppe

Bermann Melania

Birkenwald Sara

Bondì Fiorella

Brosan Berta

Bermann Moritz

Birnbaum Max

Bondì Giuseppe

Brucker Samuele Noè

Bernau Ida

Birnbaum Rosa

Bondì Leone

Bruckner Olga

Berndt Elisabetta

Birò Alberto

Bondì Margherita

Brull Giulia

Bernheim Luisa

Birò Andrea Mario

Bondì Pace

Brunell Raymond

Bero Boaz

Biscardo Luigi

Bondì Umberto

Brunell Robert

Bero Davide

Bises Abramo

Bondy Ella

Bruner Bernhard

Bero Fani

Alberto

Boniel Stella

Brunner Egone

Bero Rebecca

Bisson Giulia

Boraks Gustav

Bryl Rosa

Bero Ruben

Bisson Vittorio

Boralevi Giuseppe

Buaron Ester

Bero Stella

Zadock

Borchert Carlo

Buaron Esterina

Bero Uriel

Biton Lea

Bordignon Giannina

Buaron Giacobbe

Berolsheimer Aldo

Biton Rebecca

Borg Irma

Buaron Hamus

Buaron Hlafo

Burlan Lella

Calò Elena

Calò Rosanna

Buaron Hlafo

Bursztyn Sara

Calò Elena

Calò Rosina Rosa

Buaron Leone Felice

Cabibbe Pia

Calò Elena

Calò Sara

Buaron Margherita

Cabilio Masalta

Calò Elena

Calò Sergio

Buaron Messauda

Cadranel Comprada

Calò Elena

Calò Virginia

Buaron Salma

Cadranel Lea

Calò Eleonora

Calò Vittorio

Bublil Zariffa

Cadranel Maria

Calò Emilio

Calò Zaira

Bucabsa Sarina

Cadranel Miru

Calò Enrica

Cambi Gisella

Bucci Alessandra

Cadranel Rachele

Calò Ernesto

Camerini Corinna

Bucci Tatiana Liliana

Caffaz Cesare

Calò Ester

Camerini Elda

Buchalter Aron

Caffaz Cipriano

Calò Ester

Camerini Emilia

Buchaster Haim

Caffaz Ida

Calò Ester

Lea

Buchaster Jakob

Cagli Bruno

Calò Eugenio

Camerini Letizia

Buchaster Manfred

Cagli Guido

Calò Fatina

Camerini Natalie

Bernhard

Cagli Laura

Calò Fernando

Camerini Olga

Buchbinder Rosina

Caimi Enrichetta

Calò Fiorella

Camerini Raffaele

Buchsbaum Clara

Caimi Leone

Calò Fiorina

Camerini Ulda

Buchsbaum Kurt

Caivano Angelina

Calò Flora

Camerino Adele

Buechler Ida

Calabi Adele Maria

Calò Giovanni

Camerino Aurelia

Bueno Dino

Calabi Benedetto

Calò Giovanni

Camerino Benvenuta

Bueno Silla

Calabi Pia

Calò Giuseppe

Camerino Elena

Bueno Sirio Renzo

Calabresi Enrica

Calò Giuseppe

Camerino Emilia

Buetow Wally

Calef Emilia

Calò Giuseppe Felice

Camerino Enzo

Burbea Abramo

Calef Joseph

Calò Grazia

Camerino Ettore

Burbea Beniamino

Calef Maurice

Calò Grazia

Felice

Burbea Daniele

Calef Raoul Raffaele

Calò Graziadio

Camerino Eugenia

Burbea Gabriel

Calimani Emma

Calò Graziella

Camerino Gilberto

Burbea Gazala

Geltrude

Calò Graziella

Camerino Italo

Burbea Giacobbe

Calimani Ida

Calò Ines

Camerino Jole

Burbea Giora

Calimani Lea Rita

Calò Jak Emanuele

Camerino Leone

Burbea Giorgio

Calimani Moisè

Calò Lello Samuele

Camerino Luciano

Burbea Giuseppe

Calimani Susanna

Calò Marco

Camerino Vanda

Burbea Hammus

Calò Alberta detta

Calò Marco detto

Camhi Simha

Burbea Hammus

Albertina

Chicco

Caminada Arturo

Burbea Hammus

Calò Alberto

Calò Margherita

Camis Ulda

detto Nennes

Calò Alberto

Calò Mario

Cammeo Lorenzo

Burbea Huato

Calò Alberto

Calò Matilde

Cammeo Maria

Burbea Isacco

Calò Alberto detto

Calò Mosè

Cammeo Mario

Burbea Jacob

Cuccio

Calò Mosè Marco

Campagnano Aldo

Burbea Jacob

Calò Angelo

detto Moro

Campagnano Donato

Burbea Jusef

Calò Angelo detto

Calò Nella

Campagnano Saul

Burbea Jusef

Lupetto

Calò Pacifico

Campagnano Teresa

Burbea Mordechai

Calò Anselmo

Calò Prospero

Campagnano Vito

Burbea Musci

Calò Armanda

Calò Quintilio

Campi Anna Lia

Burbea Rachele

Calò Armanda

Calò Raffaele Paul

Campi Massimiliano

Burbea Selma

Calò Aureliano

Calò Raimondo

Camponore Elio

Burbea Silvana

Calò Bellina

Calò Raimondo

Campos Gisella

Burbea Silvina

Calò Bendetto

Calò Renata

Canarutto Anna

Burbea Simeone

Calò Benvenuta

Calò Renzo

Canarutto Bechor

Burbea Simone

Calò Cesare

Calò Ricca

Viktor

Burbea Sion

Calò Cesira

Calò Roberta Rina

Canarutto Emilio

Burbea Smeralda

Calò Dante

Calò Romolo

Canarutto Emma

Burbea Vittorio

Calò David

Calò Romolo

Canarutto Giorgina

Burbea Vittorio

Calò David

Calò Rosa detta

Canarutto Giuseppe

Burbea Zaccaria

Calò David

Rosina

Canarutto Leone

Canarutto Marcella

Capelluto Lea

Capelluto Violetta

Castelfranco Elena

Nina

Capelluto Lea Lucia

Capelluto Violetta

detta Nella

Canarutto Moisè

Capelluto Leone

Capelluto Vittoria

Castelfranco Emma

Mario

Capelluto Maria

Capelluto Vittoria

Castelfranco Olga

Canarutto Ofelia

Capelluto Maria

Vida

Castelletti Aldo

Canarutto Oscar

Capelluto Maria

Capelluto Vittorio

Castelletti Beniamino

Canarutto Regina

Capelluto Maria

Capon Augusto

Castelletti Eugenio

Cantoni Alessandra

Bohora

Capua Paolina

Castelletti Isacco

Cantoni Amelia

Capelluto Matilde

Capuia Dora

Castelletti Stella

Cantoni Carlotta

Capelluto Matilde

Capuia Jeuda Leon

Castelletti Viktor

Cantoni Ida Eugenia

Capelluto Matilde

Capuia Nissim

Castelli Adriana

Cantoni Luciano

Capelluto Matilde

Capuia Roberto

Castelli Elena

Cantoni Mamiani

Capelluto Matilde

Capuia Signorù

Castelli Enrico

della Rovere

Capelluto Matilde

Carcassoni Eugenia

Castelli Giulio Cesare

Vittorio Angelo

Capelluto Mazaltov

Carcassoni Tullio

Castelli Guido

Cantoni Margherita

Capelluto Moise

Cardoso Rosa

Aronne

Cantor Charles

Capelluto Mussani

Cardoso Ugo

Castelli Laura

Cantor Chela

Capelluto Nissim

Carmi Adele

Castelli Olga Renata

Capelluto Adele

Capelluto Nissim

Carmi Cesare

Castiglioni Nella

Capelluto Alberto

Capelluto Nissim

Carmi Ermelinda

Cava Aldo

Capelluto Bulissa

Capelluto Nissim

Colombina

Cava Enzo

Capelluto Bulissa

detto Nisso

Carmi Ermene Ester

Cava Franca

Capelluto Daniele

Capelluto Rabeno

Carmi Ida Gina

Cava Perla

Capelluto Davide

Capelluto Rachele

Carmi Isaia

Cavaglione Emanuele

Capelluto Davide

Capelluto Rachele

Caro Alberto

Cavaglione Emma

Capelluto Davide

Capelluto Rachele

Caro Claudio

Cavalieri Alina detta

Capelluto Diamante

Capelluto Rachele

Caro Giuseppe

Lina

Capelluto Dora

Capelluto Rachele

Caro Violetta

Cavalieri Argia

Capelluto Eleonora

Capelluto Raffaele

Caroglio Carla

Cavalieri Gianna

Capelluto Elia

Capelluto Raimondo

Carpi Alberto

Cavalieri Giuseppina

Capelluto Esther

Capelluto Rebecca

Carpi Germana

Cavalieri Gustavo

Capelluto Esther

Capelluto Rebecca

Carpi Olimpia

Cavaliero Alessandra

Capelluto Estherina

Capelluto Rebecca

Carpi Renzo

Cave Bondì Gina

Capelluto Estrella

Capelluto Rebecca

Carusi Maurizio

Caviglia Adamo

Capelluto Fortunata

Capelluto Rebecca

Cases Ida

Caviglia Adolfo

Capelluto Giacobbe

Capelluto Rebecca

Cases Moisè Giulio

Caviglia Beniamino

Capelluto Giacobbe

Capelluto Regina

Cassin Alberto

Caviglia Elia

Capelluto Giacobbe

Capelluto Renata

Cassin Arturo

Caviglia Enrica

Giacomo

Capelluto Renata

Salomone

Caviglia Ester

Capelluto Giamila

Capelluto Roberto

Cassin Eugenia

Caviglia Giacomo

Capelluto Giannetta

Capelluto Rosa

Cassin Ezechiele

Caviglia Grazia

Capelluto Giulia

Capelluto Rosa

Cassin Sergio

Caviglia Guglielmo

Capelluto Giuseppe

Capelluto Rosa

Cassuto Albertina

detto Bibbidone

Capelluto Giuseppe

Capelluto Rosa

Cassuto Anna

Caviglia Letizia

Capelluto Giuseppe

Capelluto Ruben

Cassuto Nathan

Caviglia Orabona

Capelluto Guidalia

Capelluto Salvatore

Cassuto Ugo

detta Eleonora

Capelluto Guidalia

Capelluto Salvatore

Castelbolognesi

Caviglia Perla Emma

Capelluto Haim

Capelluto Salvo

Bellina

Caviglia Renato

Capelluto Herzel

Capelluto Samuele

Castelbolognesi

Caviglia Rita

Ascer

Capelluto Samuele

Federico

Caviglia Santoro

Capelluto Ida

Capelluto Sara

Castelbolognesi

Caviglia Settimio

Capelluto Isacco

Capelluto Sol

Luciano

Caviglia Sole

Capelluto Isacco

Capelluto Sol

Castelbolognesi

Caviglia Umberto

Capelluto Isacco

Capelluto Susanna

Silvana

Ceres Enrico

Capelluto Lea

Capelluto Tamar

Castelfranchi Renato

Ceres Vittoria

Cervi Maurizio

Civiak Moshek

Coen Diamante

Coen Marcello

Cesana Carlotta

Cividali Aldo

Coen Diana

Coen Margherita

Cesana Davide

Cividali Angelo

Coen Edi

Coen Marta

Cesana Davide

Cividali Sergio

Coen Elena

Coen Matilde

Cesana Emilio

Clerle Alba

Coen Elena

Coen Matilde

Cesana Giacomo

Clerle Cesira Amelia

Coen Eliakim

Coen Matilde

Cesana Isaia

Clerle Emilia

Coen Eliakim

Coen Mosè

Cesana Matilde

Codron Alessandro

Coen Elisa

Coen Mosè

Cesana Menahem

Codron Elsa

Coen Emilia

Coen Mosè

Armando

Codron Esther

Coen Enrica

Coen Mosè

Cesana Pia

Codron Hitzkia

Coen Enzo

Coen Mosè

Cesana Rachele

Codron Laura

Coen Esther

Coen Mosè

Cesana Sara

Codron Leone

Coen Ettore

Coen Natan

Cesana Vittorio

Codron Lina

Coen Flora

Coen Nella Corinna

Cesar Antonia

Codron Maria

Coen Fortunata

Coen Nissim

Chami Simha

Codron Maria

Coen Fortunata

Coen Norina

Charin Markus

Codron Maurizio

Coen Fortunato

Coen Olga

Chimichi Alberto

Codron Nissim

Coen Franca

Coen Oscar

Chimichi Eugenio

Codron Rachele

Coen Giacobbe

Coen Pacina

Elia

Codron Rachele

Coen Giacobbe

Coen Pirani

Chimichi Evelina

Codron Ruben

Coen Giacobbe

Corrado

Chimichi Piero

Codron Sara

Giacomo

Gustavo

Cienhanosiska Sella

Codron Sipura

Coen Giacomo

Coen Pirani Liana

Ciggian Anna

Codron Sipurà

Coen Gilda

Coen Porto Amelia

Cingoli Noemi

Coen Adele

Coen Giorgina

Coen Porto

Cinmanas Abramo

Coen Aharon

Guglielma

Augusto

Ciprut Vittoria

Coen Alberto

Coen Giorgio

Coen Porto Vittorio

Citoni Angelo

Coen Alberto

Coen Giuseppe

Coen Porzia

Citoni Arrigo

Coen Alberto

Coen Giuseppe

Coen Rachele

Citoni Carlo

Coen Alberto

Coen Giuseppe

Coen Rachele

Citoni Colomba

Girolamo

Coen Giuseppe detto

Coen Rachele

Citoni Costanza

Coen Alice

Beppino

Coen Raffaele

Citoni Ettore

Coen Alvaro

Coen Giuseppina

Coen Rahamin

Citoni Giacomo

Coen Amelia

Coen Graziella

Coen Rebecca

Guido

Coen Amelia

Coen Guglielmo

Coen Regina

Citoni Giuseppina

Coen Armando

Coen Guido

Coen Regina

Anita

Coen Aronne

Coen Haim

Coen Regina

Citoni Prospero

Coen Arrigo

Coen Haim

Fortunata

Citroën Renée Marie

Coen Arturo

Coen Hanula

Coen Renato detto

Henriette

Coen Asher

Coen Hanula

Monchino

Cittone Abramo

Coen Avraham

Coen Hizkià

Coen Renée

Bechor

Coen Baruh

Coen Ione

Coen Rica

Cittone Elia

Coen Bella detta

Coen Irene

Coen Rica

Cittone Gioia

Bellina

Coen Isacco

Coen Romilda

Giulietta

Coen Beninfante

Coen Isacco

Coen Sacerdoti

Cittone Leone

Franco

Coen Isacco

Eugenio

Cittone Mordechai

Coen Beninfante

Coen Ivonne

Coen Sadok

Max

Lucio

Coen Lea

Coen Salomone Saul

Cittone Nissim

Coen Beninfante

Coen Lea

Coen Salva

Cittone Nissim

Renzo

Coen Lea

Coen Sara

Cittone Raffaele

Coen Bianca

Coen Leone

Coen Sara

Cittone Sol

Coen Bulissa

Coen Lucia

Coen Sara Rosa

Cittone Vitale

Coen Clara

Coen Luzzato

Coen Saverio

Cittone Vittoria

Coen Daniele

Giacomo

Coen Stella

Civere Donna

Coen Dante

Coen Mahir

Coen Susanna

Coen Umberto

Cohen Regina

Colombo Sara

Cori Esther

Coen Virginia

Cohen Rica

Colombo Tullio

Cori Vitale

Coen Vittoria

Cohen Roberto

Colonna Leo

Corinaldi Ada

Coen Vittoria

Samanto

Colonna Palmira

Corinaldi Bice

Coen Vittorio Angelo

Cohen Ruben

Colorni Bellina Lina

Corinaldi Cesare

detto Uccio

Cohen Salomon

Augusta

Corinaldi Corinna

Coen Zaira

Cohen Sara

Colorni Claudina

Anna

Cogo Guglielmo

Cohen Stella

Conè Alberto

Corinaldi Emilio

Enrico

Cohen Tullio

Conè Giacobbe

Corinaldi Gino

Cohen Adolfo

Cohen Venezian

Giacomo

Corinaldi Gustavo

Cohen Alberto

Carlo

Conè Giuseppe

Corinaldi Olga

Cohen Allegra

Cohen Venezian

Conè Lucia

Corinaldi Rosita

Cohen Amelia

Luisa Itala

Conè Matteo

Corkidis Luisa Lenca

Cohen Anna

Cohen Venezian Olga

Conè Mosè

Cornicer Jean

Cohen Azzar

Cohen Vittoria

Conè Mussani

Cossmann Ida

Cohen Caden

Cohn

Conè Nissim

Costantini Cesare

Cohen Clarissa

Cohn Erich

Conè Rachele

Augusto Benedetto

Cohen da Silva

Cohn Hella

Conè Samuele

Costantini Giovanna

Giacomo

Collin Kaethe

Conè Sara

Ester

Cohen da Silva

Colombo Ada

Conegliano Bruno

Costantini Giulia

Guido

Colombo Alberto

Conegliano Giulio

Costantini Giulio

Cohen da Silva

Colombo Aldo

Conegliano Giuseppe

Costantini Mario

Renato

Colombo Alessandro

Conegliano Italo

Costantini Roberto

Cohen David

Colombo Alessandro

Consarelli Ida

Cottignoli Bruno

Cohen Eliakim Behor

detto Sandro

Consigli Clelia

Covo Mario Abramo

Cohen Ester Stella

Colombo Amerigo

Consolo Giulia

Cramer Natalia

Cohen Estrea

Colombo Angelo

Corcos Felice

Cremisi Elia Arduino

Cohen Flora

Colombo Angelo

Cordoval Abramo

Cremisi Giulio

Cohen Giulia

Colombo Benvenuto

Cordoval Alberto

Cremisi Moisè

Cohen Giuseppe

Gabriele

Abramo

Adolfo

Cohen Isacco

Colombo Claudio

Cordoval Asher

Cremisi Vittorio

Cohen Isacco

Colombo Decima

Cordoval Beniamino

Crespin Abramo

Cohen Isidoro

Colombo Donato

Cordoval David

Crespin Judith detta

Cohen Ivonne

Colombo Elda

Cordoval Eliakim

Juddi

Cohen Leone

Colombo Elena

Cordoval Giacobbe

Crespin Vittoria

Cohen Lidia

Colombo Elena

Cordoval Giuseppe

Cszopp Bernardo

Cohen Manlio

Colombo Elia Enea

Cordoval Giuseppe

Cugno Alberto

Emanuele

Colombo Elsa

Cordoval Grazia

Cugno Ascer

Cohen Marcello

Colombo Enrico

Cordoval Isacco

Cugno Dora

Leone Mosè

Colombo Ester

Cordoval Isacco

Cugno Ester

Cohen Marco Nissim

Giovanna

Cordoval Isacco

Cugno Giacobbe

Cohen Maria

Colombo Eugenio

Cordoval Isacco

Cugno Giacobbe

Cohen Mazaltov

Colombo Federico

Cordoval Matilde

Cugno Giuseppe

Cohen Menahem

Giacomo

Cordoval Nahama

Cugno Isacco

Cohen Mosè

Colombo Gemma

Cordoval Natan

Cugno Lazzaro

Cohen Nissim

Colombo Giulia

Cordoval Natan

Cugno Lucia

Cohen Noemi

Giuditta

Cordoval Nissim

Cugno Lucia

Cohen Perla

Colombo Israele

Cordoval Oro

Cugno Maria

Cohen Rachele

Ferdinando

Cordoval Rachele

Cugno Rachele

Cohen Rachele

Colombo Mario

Cordoval Rica

Cugno Rebecca

Cohen Raffaele

Colombo Mario

Cordoval Rosa

Cugno Samuele

Cohen Rahamin

Colombo Norma

Cordoval Ruben

Cugno Vittorio Haim

Cohen Rebecca

Colombo Pacifico

Cordoval Salvo

Cugnu Rachele

Cohen Rebecca

Colombo Prima

Cordoval Sipurà

Curiel Achille

Cohen Regina

Colombo Rita

Core Rebecca

Samuele

Curiel Alberto

Dalla Volta

De Benedetti Amalia

Debasch Fortunato

Curiel Aldo

Margherita

Perla

Debasch Giuditta

Curiel Amelia

Dalla Volta Paolo

De Benedetti

Debasch Jolanda

Curiel Attilio

Dalla Volta Riccardo

Benvenuta Perla

Debasch Jolanda

Curiel Bruno

Dames Samuel

De Benedetti Bruno

Debasch Leone

Curiel Carlo

Damidt Erna

De Benedetti Claudio

Debasch Rina

Curiel Giacomo

Dan Anna

De Benedetti Elisa

Debasch Ruth

Curiel Giorgio

Dana Ester

De Benedetti Emilia

Deiler Rosa

Curiel Ariel Livia

Dana Isacco

Eva Gentile

Del Mare Ada

Cutiszra Dea

Dana Lea

De Benedetti Enrica

Del Mare Germana

Cuzzeri Amalia

Dana Maria

De Benedetti Ernesta

Del Monte Amedeo

Cuzzeri Elisa

Dana Mosè

De Benedetti

Del Monte Anita

Cuzzeri Ennio

Dana Salomone

Esterina

Del Monte Anna

Cuzzeri Eugenia

Dana Salvatore

De Benedetti

detta Annita

Cuzzeri Giacomo

Dana Samuele

Eugenio

Del Monte Costanza

Cuzzeri Irma

Dana Sara

De Benedetti

Del Monte Franca

Cuzzeri Olga

Dana Stella

Giacomo

Del Monte Giulia

Cuzzeri Pia

Dana Stella

De Benedetti Giorgia

Del Monte Giuseppe

Cuzzi Corinna

Danelon Ottavio

De Benedetti Giorgio

Del Monte Grazia

Curilla

Dann Ester

De Benedetti Ida

Del Monte Italia

Czackes Nathan

Dann Giuseppe

De Benedetti Jolanda

Del Monte Leonello

Czackes Nedda

Dann Regina

De Benedetti

Del Monte Luigi

Vittoria

Dann Sara

Leonardo

detto Gigi

Czerkl Alberto

Dann Schulem

De Benedetti Lucia

Del Monte

Czerkl Elvira

Danon Abramo

De Benedetti Mario

Margherita

Czerkl Emerico

Danon Alessandro

De Benedetti

Del Monte Rina

Czerkl Margherita

Danon Beatrice

Massimo

Del Monte Velia

Czolosinska Sofia

Danon Davide

De Benedetti Matilde

Del Monte Vittorio

D’Angeli Carlo

Danon Davide

De Benedetti Piero

Del Monte Vittorio

D’Angeli Mario

Danon Ester

De Benedetti Ugo

Emanuele

D’Angeli Massimo

Danon Joel

De Benedetti Vittorio

Del Vecchio Emma

D’Italia Adele

Danon Miriam

De Castro Hans

Del Vecchio Maria

Corinna

Danon Moreno

De Cori Gabriella

Ada

D’Italia Gerolamo

Danon Rachele

De Cori Ida

Del Vecchio Paolina

D’Italia Giovanna

Danon Rachele

De Cori Vera

Del Vecchio Raffaele

Da Costa Kurt

Danon Salomone

De Kaiser Bruno

Delfiner Chana

Da Fano Isabella

Danon Salomone

De Kaiser Trude

Deligtisch Ray

Dag Margherita

Danon Sarina

De Leon Davide

Dell’Ariccia Alba

Dag Vittorio

Danziger Mortka

De Leon Michele

Bella

Dalla Torre Aronne

Darmon Massimo

Attilio

Dell’Ariccia

Dalla Torre Bruno

Daskovic Julka

De Leon Rosa

Benedetto

Dalla Torre Giacomo

David Isaak

De Nola Riccardo

Dell’Ariccia

Dalla Torre

David Lotar

De Nola Sergio

Benedetto

Giuseppe

David Matilde

De Nola Settimio

Dell’Ariccia Emma

Dalla Torre Laura

David Sandor

Carlo

Dell’Ariccia Ernesto

Dalla Torre Roma

Davidoff Dora

De Nola Settimio

Dell’Ariccia Giovanni

Dalla Torre Vittorio

De Angeli Aldo

Carlo

Dell’Ariccia Italia

Dalla Volta Alberto

De Angeli Enrichetta

De Nola Sergio

Dell’Ariccia Lello

Dalla Volta Alfredo

De Angeli Riccardo

De Nola Riccardo

Dell’Ariccia Manlio

Ariel

De Angeli Umberto

De Salvo Elena

Dell’Ariccia Samuele

Dalla Volta Anna

De Angelis Bona

De Semo Vittorino

Dell’Ariccia Stefo

Viola

De Angelis Ercole

De Simone Sergio

Della Pergola Cesare

Dalla Volta Enrico

De Benedetti

Debasch Beniamino

Davide

Dalla Volta Guido

Achille

Debasch Ester

Della Pergola Donato

detto Volta

De Benedetti Alice

Debasch Fortunata

detto Tato

Della Pergola Ester

Della Torre Ester

Di Capua Sabatino

Di Cave Fernanda

Della Pergola Giulio

Della Torre Giacomo

detto Settimio

Di Cave Franca

Della Pergola

Della Torre Manlio

Di Capua Serafina

Di Cave Franco

Giuseppe

Della Torre Massimo

Di Capua Zaccaria

Di Cave Guglielmo

Della Pergola Mario

Della Torre Mosè

Di Castro Adolfo

Di Cave Luigia

Della Pergola Steno

Della Torre Odoardo

Di Castro Adolfo

Di Cave Pia

Della Riccia Aldo

Della Torre Ofelia

Di Castro Adolfo

Di Cave Rosina

Della Riccia Berta

Della Torre Oliviero

Di Castro Angelica

Di Cave Sandro

Della Riccia Erasmo

Della Torre Pia

Di Castro Angelo

Di Cave Settimia

Della Riccia

Della Torre Vanda

Di Castro Angelo

Di Consiglio Ada

Fortunato

Demeter Netty

Di Castro Angelo

Di Consiglio Cesare

Della Riccia Franco

Dente Anna

Di Castro Angelo

Di Consiglio Cesare

Della Riccia Luciana

Dente Matilde

Di Castro Anselmo

Di Consiglio Cesare

Della Riccia Mirella

Dente Matilde

Di Castro Attilio

detto Nicolino

Della Rocca Alberto

Dente Moise Morris

Di Castro Attilio

Di Consiglio Cesare

Della Rocca Angelo

Denti Giulia Gioia

Di Castro Cesare

Elvezio

Della Rocca Angelo

Denti Sara

Di Castro Cesare

Di Consiglio Clara

Della Rocca Chiara

Denti Susanna

Di Castro Crescenzio

Di Consiglio David

Della Rocca Costanza

Derczanski Maurice

Di Castro Crescenzio

Di Consiglio Enrica

Della Rocca Costanza

Mosè

Di Castro Crescenzio

Di Consiglio Ester

Della Rocca David

Dereschowitz

detto Pizzanella

Di Consiglio Franco

Della Rocca

Samuel

Di Castro David

Di Consiglio

Elisabetta

Deutsch Adolfo

Di Castro Emma

Graziano

Della Rocca Emma

Deutsch Erminia

Di Castro Emma

Di Consiglio Leone

Della Rocca Enrica

Emma

Di Castro Ermelinda

Di Consiglio

Della Rocca Gina

Deutsch Etel

Di Castro Giorgio

Leonello

Della Rocca Lazzaro

Deutsch Frida

Di Castro Giovanni

Di Consiglio Lina

Della Rocca Lello

Deutsch

Di Castro Giuliana

Di Consiglio Marco

Della Rocca Nella

Massimiliano

Colomba

Di Consiglio Marco

Della Rocca Rubino

Deutsch Nada

Di Castro Giuseppe

Di Consiglio Mario

Della Rocca Settimio

Deutsch Nicola

Di Castro Graziano

Marco

Della Rocca Silvio

Deutsch Vittoria

Di Castro Leonello

Di Consiglio Marisa

Della Rocca Virginia

Deutsch Zeliko

Di Castro Letizia

Di Consiglio Mirella

Della Rocca Viviana

Deutscher Eliana

Di Castro Lidia

Di Consiglio Mosè

Della Seta Adriana

Deutscher Hertz

Di Castro Marietta

Di Consiglio Pacifico

Della Seta Alberto

Devaux Raimonda

Di Castro Mario

Di Consiglio Pacifico

Della Seta Dino

Di Capua Amadio

Di Castro Mario

Di Consiglio Pacifico

Della Seta Eva

Di Capua Angelo

Di Castro Michele

Di Consiglio Regina

Della Seta Franca

Di Capua Annita

Di Castro Pace

Di Consiglio Rina

Della Seta Gina

Di Capua Chighino

Di Castro Pacifico

Ester

Della Seta Giovanni

Di Capua Clotilde

Di Castro Perna

Di Consiglio

Della Seta Giovanni

Di Capua Clotilde

Di Castro Samuele

Salomone

Carlo detto

Di Capua Elisabetta

Di Castro Settimio

Di Consiglio Santoro

Giancarlo

Margherita

Di Castro Teresa

Di Consiglio

Della Seta Leonello

Di Capua Elvira

Di Cave Angelo

Tranquillo

Della Seta Livia

Di Capua Enrica

Di Cave Betta

Di Consiglio Virginia

Della Seta Samuele

Di Capua Ernesta

Di Cave Cesare

Di Cori Amedeo

Leone

Di Capua Gilda

Di Cave Edmondo

Di Cori Amedeo

Della Seta Valentina

Di Capua Mosè

Di Cave Elena

Di Cori Angelo

Della Torre Ada

Di Capua Mosè

Di Cave Elisa

Di Cori Beniamino

Della Torre Attilio

Di Capua Pacifico

Di Cave Emanuele

Di Cori Dario

Salomone

Di Capua Pia

Vittorio

Di Cori Giovanni

Della Torre Cesira

Di Capua Rina

Di Cave Eugenio

Di Cori Giulia

Della Torre Elena

Di Capua Rosa

Simone

Di Cori Sara

Gina

Di Capua Rosina

Di Cave Eva

Di Cori Settimio

Di Cori Settimio

Di Porto Adelaide

Di Porto Graziella

Di Segni David

Di Cori Settimio

Di Porto Alberta

Di Porto Graziella

Di Segni David

Renato

Di Porto Albertina

Di Porto Italia

Di Segni Diodato

Di Fano Achille

Di Porto Alberto

Di Porto Lazzaro

Di Segni Elia

Di Fano Annetta

Di Porto Alberto

Di Porto Letizia

Di Segni Emanuele

Di Fano Elsa

Di Porto Amedeo

Di Porto Lilia

Di Segni Emanuele

Di Fano Giuseppina

Di Porto Angelo

Di Porto Mario

Vittorio

detta Pineta

Di Porto Angelo

Di Porto Mario

Di Segni Emma

Di Fano Maria

Di Porto Angelo

Di Porto Mario

Di Segni Enrica

Di Gioacchino Anna

Di Porto Angelo

Di Porto Mario

Di Segni Enrica

Di Gioacchino Cesira

Di Porto Angelo

Di Porto Marisa

Di Segni Ester

Di Laudadio Angelo

Di Porto Angelo

Di Porto Maurizio

Di Segni Franco

Di Laudadio Gemma

Di Porto Angelo

Di Porto Pacifico

Di Segni Giacomo

Di Nepi Adriana

Di Porto Angelo

Di Porto Pacifico

Di Segni Gianna

Di Nepi Alberto

Di Porto Angiola

Di Porto Perla

Di Segni Giovanni

Di Nepi Amedeo

Di Porto Annita

Di Porto Renata

Di Segni Giulia

Di Nepi Angelo

Di Porto Bellina

Di Porto Romolo

Di Segni Giuseppe

Di Nepi Celeste

Di Porto Celeste

Di Porto Rosa

Di Segni Grazia

Di Nepi Cesare

Di Porto Celeste

Di Porto Rosa

Di Segni Grazia

Di Nepi Cesare

Di Porto Cesare

Di Porto Rosina

Di Segni Grazia

Di Nepi Cesare

Di Porto Cesare

Di Porto Rubino

Di Segni Graziella

Di Nepi Cesare

Di Porto Cesare detto

Di Porto Sabatino

Di Segni Graziella

Di Nepi Elisabetta

Sganzese

Di Porto Sergio

Di Segni Irene

Di Nepi Elvira

Di Porto Cesira

Di Porto Settimio

Di Segni Italia

Di Nepi Elvira

Di Porto Costanza

Di Porto Settimio

Di Segni Lello

Di Nepi Emma

Di Porto Costanza

Di Porto Settimio

Di Segni Lello

Di Nepi Eugenio

Di Porto Costanza

Di Porto Settimio

Di Segni Lello

Di Nepi Giacomo

Di Porto Crescenzio

Di Porto Settimio

Samuele

Giacobbe

Di Porto Crescenzio

Di Porto Settimio

Di Segni Leo

Di Nepi Giorgio

Di Porto Elena

Di Porto Vitale

Di Segni Leone

Di Nepi Giovanni

Di Porto Elvira

Di Porto Vitale detto

Di Segni Liliana

Di Nepi Giuseppe

Di Porto Elvira

Fastidio

Di Segni Luciana

Di Nepi Giuseppe

Di Porto Emanuele

Di Porto Wilma

Di Segni Marco

Di Nepi Laudadio

Di Porto Emma

Di Segni Adelaide

Di Segni Marco

Di Nepi Laudadio

Di Porto Ester

Di Segni Adelaide

Di Segni Margherita

Lello

Di Porto Ester

Di Segni Alba

Di Segni Maria

Di Nepi Leone

Di Porto Ester

Di Segni Alberto

Di Segni Mario

Di Nepi Mosè

Di Porto Esterina

Di Segni Alberto Elia

Di Segni Pace

Di Nepi Rina

Di Porto Fanny

Di Segni Angelo

Di Segni Pacifico

Di Nepi Samuele

Di Porto Finizia

Di Segni Angelo

Di Segni Pacifico

Di Nepi Samuele

Di Porto Fortunata

Di Segni Angelo

Di Segni Pacifico

detto Lello

Di Porto Fortunata

Di Segni Angelo

Di Segni Pacifico

Di Nepi Ugo

Di Porto Fulvio

Di Segni Anita

Di Segni Pacifico

Di Neris Esterina

Di Porto Gabriele

Di Segni Anna detta

Di Segni Prospero

Di Neris Isacco

Di Porto Giacomo

Annetta

Adolfo

Di Neris Raimondo

Di Porto Giacomo

Di Segni Armando

Di Segni Renato

detto Zanella

Di Porto Giacomo

Di Segni Benedetto

Di Segni Renato

Di Neris Samuele

Di Porto Giuditta

Di Segni Benedetto

Di Segni Riccardo

Di Neris Settimio

Di Porto Giuditta

Di Segni Bruno

detto Peppone

Di Nola Alfredo

Di Porto Giuditta

Di Segni Cesare

Brusolinaro

Donato

Di Porto Giuseppe

Di Segni Clara

Di Segni Rina

Di Nola Delia

Di Porto Giuseppe

Di Segni Clotilde

Di Segni Rina

Di Nola Elda

Di Porto Giuseppe

Di Segni Colomba

Di Segni Roberto

Di Nola Ugo

Di Porto Grazia

Di Segni Colomba

Di Segni Roberto

Di Porto Ada

Di Porto Graziella

Di Segni David

Di Segni Rosa

Di Segni Rosa

Di Veroli Ester detta

Di Veroli Umberto

Donetti Amalia

Di Segni Rosa

Rina

Di Veroli Valeria

Donner Celeste

Di Segni Rossana

Di Veroli Esterina

Di Veroli Virginia

Dorfmann Fania

Di Segni Salvatore

Di Veroli Eugenio

Di Veroli Virginia

Drechsler Lina Sali

Di Segni Settimio

Di Veroli Fernando

Diamante Ermanno

Dresner Lisa

Di Segni Silvia

Di Veroli Giacomina

Diamante Guglielmo

Dreyfuss Eugen

Di Segni Tosca

detta Mimì

Dias Bruno

Driller Siegfried

Di Segni Umberto

Di Veroli Giacomo

Dias Davide

Drucker Salomone

Di Segni Virginia

Di Veroli Giacomo

Diaz Dario

Dubinski Gina

Di Tivoli Adelaide

Di Veroli Giacomo

Diaz Emma Edma

Dubinski Saul

Di Tivoli Albertina

Di Veroli Giovanni

Diaz Giuseppe

Dubinsky Giacomo

Di Tivoli Angelo

Di Veroli Giuditta

Dickstein Berta

Dubois Jules

Di Tivoli Fatina

Di Veroli Giuditta

Dickstein Stella detta

Ducci Eva

Di Tivoli Fatina

Di Veroli Giuditta

Scheindel

Ducci Rodolfo

Di Tivoli Gemma

Di Veroli Giuditta

Diena Augusta

Ducci Teodoro

Di Tivoli Giuseppe

Di Veroli Giuseppe

Diena Davide

Duegnas Vittorio

detto Nasosfranto

Di Veroli Gualtiero

Giuseppe

Duri Fiammetta

Di Tivoli Lazzaro

Di Veroli Italia

Diena Ester Wanda

Dym Desiderio

Di Tivoli Leonardo

Di Veroli Lalla

Diena Giacomo

Dymscitz Maria

Di Tivoli Leone

Di Veroli Lazzaro

Diena Giorgio

Echl Barbara

Di Tivoli Marco

Di Veroli Leonardo

Diena Giuseppina

Eckert Sidonia

Di Tivoli Mirella

Di Veroli Leone detto

Diena Ida

Edelheit Gertrud

Di Tivoli Pacifico

Leo

Diena Lea

Jerica

Di Tivoli Rina

Di Veroli Letizia

Diena Remigio

Edelmann Ester Sara

Di Tivoli Rossana

Di Veroli Lidia

Diena Rodolfo

detta Sali

Di Tivoli Salomone

Di Veroli Liliana

Dienstfertig Jenni

Edelmann Salomon

Di Tivoli Settimio

Di Veroli Marco

Dihi Diamantina

Efrati Abramo

Di Tivoli Speranza

Di Veroli Marco

Dihi Simeone

Umberto

Di Tivoli Virginia

Di Veroli Mario

Dina Adele

Efrati Adelaide

Di Tivoli Vittorio

Di Veroli Mario

Dina Amalia

Efrati Alberto

Di Veroli

Di Veroli Michele

Dina Anna

Efrati Angelo

Di Veroli Abramo

Di Veroli Michele

Dina Anna

Efrati Aronne

Di Veroli Adolfo

Di Veroli Michele

Dina Benedetta

Efrati Augusto

Di Veroli Alberto

Di Veroli Michele

Dina Dino Davide

Efrati Cesare

Di Veroli Angelo

Di Veroli Mosè

Dina Emilia Ida

Efrati Costanza

Di Veroli Asdriele

Di Veroli Mosè

Dina Giorgia detta

Efrati Dora

Di Veroli Attilio

Di Veroli Pacifico

Giorgina

Efrati Egle

Di Veroli Bellina

Di Veroli Pacifico

Dina Guido

Efrati Elia

Di Veroli Bruno

detto Mario

Dina Guido

Efrati Enrica

Di Veroli Celeste

Di Veroli Prospero

Dina Leone

Efrati Fortunata

Di Veroli Celestina

Di Veroli Renato

Dina Mario

Efrati Grazia

Di Veroli Colomba

Di Veroli Rina

Dina Salomone

Efrati Graziano

Di Veroli David

Di Veroli Rina

Moisè Davide

Efrati Lazzaro detto

Di Veroli David

Di Veroli Rosa

Dina Smeralda

Burrasca

Di Veroli Donato

Di Veroli Samuele

Dinkelsbuehler

Efrati Leone

Di Veroli Donato

detto Lello

Marianne

Efrati Leone

Di Veroli Donato

Di Veroli Sara

Dlugacz Giuseppe

Efrati Leone detto

Di Veroli Donato

Di Veroli Settimia

Doczi Alfredo

Lello

Di Veroli Elisabetta

Di Veroli Settimio

Aladar

Efrati Marco

Di Veroli Emma

Di Veroli Settimio

Doenias Astrid

Efrati Marco

Di Veroli Emma

Di Veroli Silvia

Doenias Baruch

Efrati Marco

Di Veroli Enrica

Di Veroli Silvia

Alfredo

Efrati Marco

Di Veroli Enrico

Di Veroli Tranquillo

Domaic Maria

Efrati Marco

David

Di Veroli Ugo

Donati Clelia

Giacomo Giuseppe

Di Veroli Ernesta

Giorgio

Donati Vittorio

Efrati Marco Mosè

Efrati Mirella

Erdreich Xenia

Farchi Sarina detta

Ferrera Mosè

Efrati Olga

Ergas Perla

Olga

Ferrera Reina

Efrati Pacifica

Ergas Solo

Farchy Michele

Ferrera Rosa

Efrati Rina

Erlbaum Margarethe

Fargion Elisa

Ferrera Samuele

Efrati Settimio

Errera Gino

Fargion Regina

Ferri Luigi

Efrati Speranza

Emanuele

Farina Teodolinda

Ferro Adalgisa

Efrati Umberto

Errera Paolo

detta Linda

Ferro Anna

Egert Rosa

Eschenazi Mosè

Farkas Desiderio

Ferro Ferruccio

Ehrenwert Antonia

Eschenazi Rachele

Farkas Giorgio

Ferro Giuseppe

Ehrmann Alexander

Eschenazi Vida

Farkas Paolo

Ferro Mario

Eibuschitz Friederike

Esdra Giuseppe

Fassel Adele

Ferro Ugo

Sarah

Esdra Leo

Fatucci Amadio

Feuermann

Eibuschitz Israel

Esdra Rosina

Sabato

Sonnenschein Ester

Heinrich

Eskenasi Bora

Fatucci Amedeo

Elsa

Eifermann Isaak

Eskenasi Marina

Fatucci Angelo

Feuerstein Kurt

Eifermann Maurizio

Eskenazi Giuseppe

Fatucci Angelo

Fiano Amedeo

Eilaender Rosalie

Esquenazi Ester

Fatucci Attilio

Fiano Angelo

Einhorn Adolfo

Esquenazi Leone

Fatucci David

Fiano Anna Lina

Einhorn Bernardo

Esquenazi Rebecca

Fatucci Emma

Fiano Chiara

Einhorn Isacco

Esquenazi Salomone

Fatucci Olga

Fiano Emilia Olga

Einhorn Renata detta

Fahn

Fechter Ferdinand

Fiano Enzo

Renée

Fahn Regina

Fedrigoni Rachele

Fiano Fortunata

Einstein Anna Maria

Fahn Rudolf

Feigenbaum Szmerl

Fiano Giuseppe

Einstein Luce

Fahn Sidney

Feintuch Anna

Fiano Giuseppe

Einstein Roberto

Falck Paula

Feintuch Henia

Benedetto

Eipschitzer

Fano Alba Fausta

Feintuch Jakob

Fiano Nedo

Alessandro

Fano Alessandro

Feintuch Manfredo

Fiano Olderigo

Eiseck Hans

Fano Augusto

Feintuch Mayer

Fiano Salomone

Eisenscher Chana

Fano Bice

Feintuch Rosa

Fiano Sergio

Eisenstaedter Greta

Fano Cesare

Feith Maurizio

Fiedler Joseph

Eisenstaedter

Fano Clementina

Feiwel Leib Wolf

Fieiner David

Guglielmo

detta Clemy

Leone

Finder Breinde

Eisig Sara Rosa detta

Fano Elena

Felberbaum Giovanni

Fink Benzion

Sali

Fano Elio

Feld Romana

Fink Ester

Eisinger Massimo

Fano Emilio Felice

Feldhammer Jacob

Fink Isacco

Elia Emanuele

Fano Enrico

Feldhorn Hanna

Fink Lina

Elia Rosa

Fano Ermanno

Feldmann Berta

Finz Alfredo

Elias Mazaltov

Fano Fausta

Feldmann Etla

Finz Marcello

Eliezer Abramo

Fano Giorgio

Feliks Maurizio

Finzi Adriana

Eliezer Giuseppe

Fano Giulia

Fellah Buba

Finzi Amelia

Eliezer Lucia

Fano Giuseppe

Fels Guglielmo

Finzi Anna Maria

Elkan Salomè

Fano Giuseppina

Felsner Adele

Finzi Beatrice

Eminente Aida

Fano Guglielmo

Fernandez Diaz

Finzi Carlo

Engel Fanny Jette

Fano Liliana

Blanchette

Finzi Cesare

Engel Marco

Fano Lina Ester

Fernandez Diaz Dino

Finzi Clara Jolanda

Engelsman Sophia

Fano Luciano

Fernandez Diaz Jean

Finzi Clotilde

Maria

Fano Marco

Fernandez Diaz

Finzi Contini Dora

Enriquez Isacco

Fano Renato

Pierre

Finzi Davide

Epstein Edvige detta

Fano Roberto

Fernandez Diaz

Finzi Edgardo

Hedy

Fano Ugo

Robert

Finzi Edgardo

Epstein Heinrich

Fano Vittoria

Ferrari Angela

Finzi Edgardo

Epstein Pinchas

Farber Bruno

Ferrera Ester

Finzi Elena

Epstein Simon

Farber Davide

Ferrera Lea

Finzi Elvira

Ercoli Ladislao

Farberow Rosa

Ferrera Mercada

Finzi Emma Laura

Erdreich Michele

Farchi Giacomo

Ferrera Mosè

Finzi Enrico

Finzi Fanny

Fiorentino Salvatore

Foà Estella

Fornari Carlo

Finzi Fausta

Fiorentino Samuel

Foà Fortunata

Fornari Emilia

Finzi Gigliola

Emilio

Foà Giacobbe

Fornari Ermelinda

Finzi Gina

Fis

Foà Giacomo

detta Linda

Finzi Gina

Fis Allegra

Foà Giacomo

Fornari Guglielmo

Finzi Gino

Fis Ascer

Foà Giancarlo

Fornari Mario

Finzi Giuseppe

Fis Giacobbe

Foà Giorgio

Fornari Perla Emma

Finzi Giuseppe

Fis Giosuè

Foà Giorgio

Fornari Raffaele

Finzi Giuseppina

Fis Isacco

Foà Giorgio Amos

Fornari Renato

Finzi Greca Nella

Fis Rachele

Foà Giorgio Nullo

Alberto

Finzi Guglielmo

Fis Rebecca

Foà Giuseppe

Fornari Rossana

detto William

Fischbein Davide

Foà Giuseppe

Fornari Umberto

Finzi Ida

Fischel Kurt

Foà Giuseppina

Fornaro Erina

Finzi Ines

Fischer Alessandro

Foà Guido

Fornaro Giacomo

Finzi Irma

Fischer Isidoro

Foà Guido

Fornaro Leone

Finzi Isidoro

Fischl Caterina

Foà Ida

Forti Alberto

Finzi Jolanda

Fischof Feiga

Foà Italo

Forti Anna

Finzi Lucia

Francesca

Foà Jole

Forti Anna

Finzi Luciana

Fiser Jelka

Foà Marietta

Forti Anselmo

Finzi Marcello

Fiser Mira

Foà Mario

Giuseppe

Finzi Mario

Fiser Regina

Foà Mario

Forti Berta

Finzi Marta

Fiser Vera

Foà Matilde

Forti Bruno

Finzi Moisè Roberto

Fitzer Feige Adele

Foà Noemi

Forti Carmela

Finzi Natale detto

Fiz Giulia

Foà Olga

Forti Elda

Natalino

Fiz Mario

Foà Pacifico

Forti Emilia

Finzi Nora

Fiz Riccardo

Foà Perla

Forti Emma

Finzi Regina

Fiz Roberto

Foà Pio

Forti Gilberto

Finzi Renzo

Flank Jeruchem

Foà Raffaele Filippo

Forti Gilda

Finzi Sabatino

Fleischer Amalia

Foà Samuele Leone

Forti Giuditta

Finzi Silvio

Fleischer Davide

Foà Sansone

Forti Giulia

Finzi Tito

Fleischer Olga

Foà Sergio

Enrichetta

Finzi Vilma

Fleischmann Carlo

Foà Ugo Abramo

Forti Giuliio

Finzi Vittorio detto

Flesch Julius

Sansone

Forti Giulio Cesare

Samuele

Flisser Rosa

Foà Vittoria

Forti Ida

Finzi Wanda

Florenthal Rosalia

Foà Vittorio Enzo

Forti Lina

Fiorentini Ernesta

Foà Alberto

Foà Wanda Debora

Forti Lionello

Fiorentini Piera

Foà Aldo

Fodor Alfredo

Forti Livia

Fiorentini Pierina

Foà Alessandro

Fodor Lilly

Forti Lucia

Fiorentini Renata

Foà Anita

Fodor Magda

Forti Marianna detta

Fiorentini Salvatore

Foà Anna detta Nina

Foerder Elfriede

Elvira

Fiorentino Ada

Foà Annina

Fogel Giulia

Fraenkel Ada

Fiorentino Alberto

Foà Anselmo

Fogel Martin

Fraenkel Arturo

Fiorentino Alda

Foà Armando

Fogel Nathan

Fraenkel Markus

Fiorentino Carlo

Foà Arnoldo detto

Foh Adolfo

David

Fiorentino Cesare

Dino

Foh Alex

Fraenkel Martino

Fiorentino Ester

Foà Arturo

Foh Sidney

Fraenkel Walter

Fiorentino Fortunata

Foà Augusto

Fontanella Dante

Franchetti Argia

Fiorentino Giacomo

Foà Bianca

Fontanella Ermanno

Franchetti Augusta

Fiorentino Giuliana

Foà Davide

Forconi Palmira

Franchetti Elvira

Fiorentino Iginia

Foà Descio detto

Forlì Gaggia

Franchetti Ida

Fiorentino Lello

Dezio

Formiggini Giulia

Franchetti Olga

Fiorentino Leone

Foà Donato

Formiggini Marcella

Franchetti Ugo

Fiorentino Leone

Foà Emilio

Fornari Alberto

Franco Abramo

Fiorentino

Foà Emma

Giuliano

Franco Allegra

Margherita

Foà Enrica

Fornari Angelo

Franco Aronne

Franco Aronne

Franco Raffaele

Fresco Fernando

Funaro Cesare

Franco Aronne

Franco Raffaele

Fresco Marco

Funaro Dario

Franco Baruh

Franco Rebecca

Fresco Nailè

Funaro Davide

Franco Behor Hizkià

Franco Rosa

Fresia Ebe

Funaro Ettore

Franco Beniamino

Franco Rosa

Freud Giuseppina

Funaro Ettore

Franco Bianca

Franco Rosa

Freund Alberto

Funaro Gabriella

Franco Bona

Franco Rosula

Freund Anna Elena

Funaro Giacomo

Franco Bruno

Franco Salomon

Freund Augusta

Funaro Giuditta

Franco Caden

Franco Salomone

Freund Ella

Funaro Giuseppe

Franco Carlo

Franco Samuele

Freund Frieda

Funaro Giuseppe

Franco Celebi Nissim

Franco Sara

Freund Sigfrido

Funaro Leo

Franco Cesare

Franco Selma

Fried Margherita

Funaro Lina

Franco Davide

Franco Stella

Frieder Frieda

Funaro Marco

Franco Elisa

Franco Vittoria

Friedmann Carlo

Funaro Marco

Franco Emilio

Frandze Regina

Friedmann Ernst

Funaro Maria

Franco Enrica Gisella

Frangi Leon

Friedmann Francesco

Funaro Mattia

Franco Enzo

Frank Edmondo

Friedmann Oscar

Ernesto

Franco Ester Signuru

Frank Eduard

Gianpietro

Funaro Milena

Franco Eugenia

Frank Francesco

Friedmann Rosalia

Funaro Mosè Marco

Franco Giacobbe

Frank Rodolfo

Friedrich Andrea

Funaro Nella

Franco Giacomo

Frankel Margherita

Frisch Azriel

Funaro Pacifico

Franco Giacomo

Frankl Miroslav

Frisch Fritz Efraim

Funaro Pacifico

Giacobbe

Frascati Angelo

Frisch Leni

Funaro Rosa

Franco Girolamo

Frascati Clelia

Frisch Max

Funaro Rosetta

Franco Giulia

Frascati Emma

Frischauer Olga

Funaro Samuele

Franco Giuseppe

Frascati Ester

Frischman Giulia

Funaro Samuele

Franco Giuseppe

Frascati Fausta

Froehlich Lotte

Funaro Settimio

Franco Giuseppe

Frascati Fiorella

Frost Robert

Funaro Vittorio

Franco Giuseppe

Frascati Giorgio

Frotzlovsky Rachmil

Funaro Wanda

Franco Graziella

Frascati Ida

Fubini Aldo

Funas

Franco Hanula

Frascati Irma

Fubini Mario

Funkenstein Haim

Franco Isacco

Frascati Lello detto

Fubini Renzo

Futtermann Bernard

Franco Isacco

Il Beccamorto

Fubini Rosetta

Futtermann Hersel

Franco Jannette

Frascati Marisa

Fuchs Irene

Futtermann Marcel

Hanula

Frascati Samuele

Fuchs Oscar Moritz

Gabay Kadem

Franco Lea

Frascati Settimia

Fuchs Rosa

Gabay Rebecca

Franco Lea

Frascati Settimio

Fuerst

Gabbai Carlo

Franco Lea

Frascati Silvana

Fuerst Arturo

Gabbai Giovanni

Franco Lea

Frascati Vittorio

Fuerst Kurt

Yomtov

Franco Lea

Frassineti Rodolfo

Fuerst Margarethe

Gabbai Luisa

Franco Leone

Frassinetti Alfredo

Funaro Abramo

Gabbai Salomone

Franco Lucia

Freiberg Nachman

Lamberto

Gabbai Salomone

Franco Luisa

detto Nachme

Funaro Ada

Gabriel Clara

Franco Luna

Freiberg Sara

Funaro Adolfo

Gabriel Eleonora

Franco Maria

Freiberger Ada

Funaro Alberto

Gabriel Giacobbe

Franco Maria

Freiberger Alice

Funaro Alberto

Giacomo

Franco Masliah

Caterina

Funaro Alberto

Gabrile Mosè

Franco Mordehai

Freiberger Enrichetta

Funaro Alfredo

Gai Ettore

Franco Mosè

Olga

Funaro Angela

Galandauer Bella

Franco Perahia

Freiberger Leviah

Funaro Angelo

Galant Abraham

Franco Rabina

Gilda

Funaro Angelo

Galant Betty

Franco Rachele

Fremont Max

Funaro Angelo

Galant David

Franco Rachele

Frenkel Malka

Funaro Anita

Galant Jehuda

Franco Rachele

Frenkel Naftali

Funaro Aron

Galant Menachem

Franco Rachele

Fresco Dora

Funaro Cesare

Galant Regina Anna

Galant Renata

Ganz Frieda

Gavijon Marco

Gepesz Frida

Galante Abramo

Gaon Aronne

Mordo

Gepesz Giovanni

Galante Abramo

Gaon Clara

Gavijon Sabino

Gerbi Abramo

Galante Aronne

Gaon Davide

Gavijon Salvatore

Gerbi Azra

Galante Baruch

Gaon Diamante

Gavijon Sultana

Gerbi Elia

Galante David

Gaon Gilda

Gavijon Susanna

Gerbi Haim

Galante Davide

Gaon Grazia detta

Gebel Naftali

Gerbi Miriam

Galante Davide

Graziella

Gehan Norina

Gerbi Rachele

Galante Diana

Gaon Rachele

Gehan Samina

Gerbi Sarina

Galante Esther

Gaon Rosa detta

Gehermann Doroteo

Gerschenzon

Galante Felicina

Rosetta

Gehermann Ernesto

François

Galante Giannetta

Gaon Silvia

Geiringer Claudio

Gerschenzon Simon

Galante Giovanna

Gaon Susanna

Geiringer Laura

Gerstenfeld Elena

Galante Isacco

Garda Donato

Geiringer Pietro

Amalia

Galante Johevet

Garda Germana

Gelbart Alberto

Gerstenfeld Giacomo

Galante Lea

Garfinkel Hulda

Gelbart Mendel

Gerstl Matilde

Galante Matilde

Gartner Hermann

Geller Ernestina

Gertner Haim

Galante Mazaltov

Garzoli Crescenzio

Gelles Alice detta

Gertner Maddalena

Galante Mosè

Salvatore

Litzi

Geschlieder Elena

Galante Mosè

Garzoli Debora

Gellisch Matilde

Gesess Elia

Galante Nissim

Garzoli Mario

Gellman Giuditta

Gesess Sara

Galante Nissim

Gaspard Vilma

Geltner Minka Sara

Ghernis Zula

Galante Rachele

Maria

Geltner Renée

Ghiron Dolce

Galante Rachele

Gassenheimer

Geltner Salomone

Eugenia

Galante Rahamin

Hedwige

Gemelli Giulia

Ghiron Enrichetta

Galante Ricca

Gasser Maria

Gemunder Sali

Ghiron Ettore

Galante Rosa

Gattegna Armando

Genazzani Abramo

Ghiron Gemma

Galante Rosa

Gattegna Gabriele

Genazzani Davide

Ghiron Lea

Galante Salomon

Enrico

Genazzani Elena

Ghiron Regina

Galante Sara

Gattegna Gino

Genazzani Gilda

Ghissin Serafina

Galante Stella

Gattegna Israele

Genazzani Lia

Gimpel Evelina

Galante Violetta

Gattegna Perla

Gentili Maria

Gimpel Peter

Galante Vittoria

Gattegno Alberto

Gentili Teresa Elsa

Ginesi Bice

Galante Yomtov

Gattegno Amelia

Gentilli Arrigo

Ginesi Olga

Galapo Rosa

Gattegno Armando

Gentilli Davide

Gittermann Enrico

Galletti Clara

Gattegno Caterina

Gentilli Edvige

detto Giovannin

Galletti Olga

Gattegno Elia

Gentilli Enrichetta

Giuili Elisa

Galletti Piera

Gattegno Elia

Gentilli Giuditta

Giuili Giora

Galletti Valentina

Gattegno Elisa

Gentilli Margherita

Giuli Besso

Gallichi Cesare

Gattegno Haim

Gentilli Regina

Abramo

Davide

Gattegno Lea

Gentilli Umberto

Giuli Enrica

Gallichi Dario

Gattegno Lea

Alberto

Giuli Sergio

Gallichi Teofilo

Gattegno Leone Juda

Gentilli Vittorio

Givrè Gina

Gallico Amelia

Gattegno Luna

Gentilli Vittorio

Givrè Jacob

Gallico Augusto

Gattegno Michele

Moisè

Givrè Raffaele

Gallico Giulietta

Gattegno Regina

Gentilomo Adele

Givrè Raffaele

Gallico Lucia Luna

Gattegno Roberto

Gentilomo Arturo

Gizelt Rosalia

Gallico Lucio

Gattegno Salvatore

Gentilomo Gisella

Glaeser Ferdinando

Gallico Sergio

Gattegno Virginia

Gentilomo Jolanda

Glaeser Gertrud

Gallico Tina

Gavijon Davide

Gentilomo Nina

Glam Giulia

Gani Alberto

Gavijon Elia

Benvenuta

Glanzerberg Laja

Gani Ester

Gavijon Isacco

Gepesz Carlotta

Gleichmann Elena

Gani Giuseppe

Gavijon Leone

Gepesz Daniele

Glueck Ilona

Gani Regina

Gavijon Marcello

Gepesz Dora

Gluecksmann

Ganon Bohora

Conorte

Gepesz Elisabetta

Eugenio

Glueksmann

Gollenstepper Olga

Grosman Maja

Gutenberger Elda

Ferdinand

Golombek Elena

Gross Chaim

Gutmann Magda

Gochbaum Jankiel

Golombek Perla

Gross Ella

Gutmann Malvina

Godelli Martino

Anna

Gross Etel

Guttentag Cara

Goetz Leopoldo

Golombek Rifka

Gross Gisella

Gyarmatj Elemer

Goetz Maurizio

Gomel Sara Giamila

Gross Ignatz

Haar Pavel

Goetzl Alberto

Gomez de Silva

Grossberger

Haar Rosa

Golberti Ada

Ubaldo detto Baldo

Francesca

Haas Moritz

Golberti Irene

Gonda Ladislaus

Grossmann Max

Haas Robert

Gold Angela

Gordon Elisabetta

Grozze Riguetta

Haas Sabine

Gold Elena

Ruth

Gruber Isacco

Habib Allegra

Goldbacher Alberto

Gormezzano Stella

Gruber Michele

Habib Antonietta

Goldberg

Gorniki Mosè

Salomone

Habib Bochor

Goldberg Dora

Goslino Giuseppe

Gruber Simone

Habib Bohora

Goldberg Elisabetta

Gottesmann Georg

Giuseppe

Habib Donna

Goldberg Israel

Gottesmann Marcello

Gruen Alfred

Habib Ester

Goldberg Jetta

Gottesmann Maria

Gruen Carlo

Habib Gemma

Goldberg Josef

Gottesmann Mendel

Gruen Friedrich

Habib Isacco

Goldberger Caterina

Gottlieb Anna Maria

Gruen Leone

Habib Jacob detto

Goldberger Rosa

Gottlieb Enrica

Gruenbaum Dora

Kino

Goldenberg Leon

Gottlieb Nicola

Gruenbaum Israel

Habib Leone

Goldfarb Avraham

Gottlieb Ruth

Gruenbaum Margit

Habib Mosè

Goldfarb Gisella

Gottsegen Enrico

Gruenberg Davide

Habib Mussani

Goldfarb Rosa

Grabar Dominice

Erberto

Habib Nathan

Goldfrucht Lea

Grabowski Enrico

Gruenberger Enrico

Habib Nissim

Goldmann Albert

Ernesto

Gruener Adolfo

Habib Nissim

Goldschmied

Grad Amalia

Gruenfeld Enrico

Habib Nissim

Giuseppe

Grandi Teodora

Gruenfeld Moritz

Habib Nissim

Goldschmied Livio

Anita

Gruenfeld Tobia

Habib Rita

Goldschmied

Grassini Angelo

Gruenspan Rosa

Habib Rosa

Samuele

Grassini Attilio

Maria

Habib Salva

Goldschmied

Grassini Bruna

Gruenwald Anna

Habib Shalom

Stefania

Grassini Mirna

Gruenwald Francesco

Habib Shalom Haim

Goldschmiedt

Grassini Nella

Oliviero

Habib Silvana

Giorgio

Grassini Raffaele

Gruenwald

Habib Simone

Goldschmiedt Ida

Grauer Marco

Margherita

Habib Sol

Goldstaub Bianca

Grauer Samuel

Gruenwald Miroslav

Habib Sultana

Goldstaub Clotilde

Grauer Tito

Gruner Bronia

Habib Virginia

Goldstaub Ernesta

Graziani Adalgisa

Gruzdas Smarja

Habib Vittoria

Vittorina

Graziani Elvira

Guastalla Celestina

Habib Zelda

Goldstaub Vittorio

Graziani Ettore

Guastalla Eugenio

Habib Zimbul

Goldstaub Zevulun

Graziani Haim Vitale

Guastalla Irene

Hacker Margarete

detto Gino

Graziani Maria

Guastalla Luciano

Haddad Mantina

Goldstein Amalia

Graziani Raffaello

Guastalla Vittorio

Haendler Feigel

Goldstein Bluma

Graziani Sara

Guetta Albertina

Haendler Margarete

Goldstein Bronia

Greco Vladimiro

Guetta Alberto

Haendler Michele

Beatrice

Grego Gisella

Guetta Margherita

Haffner Gisella

Goldstein Daneo

Gregori Giovanna

Guetta Pier Luigi

Hafter Elisabetta

detto Dan

Gremboni

Guetta Vivienne

Haggiag Giora

Goldstein Ester

Alessandro

Guggenheim Bona

Hahn Edith

Goldstein Hirsch Zwi

Gremboni Simeone

Guglielmi Achille

Hahn Paolo

Goldstein Jacob

Grinbaum M.J.

Guglielmi Gino

Haim Abramo

Goldstein Oscar

Grini Mauro

Gurewicz Ada

Haim Diamante

Goldstein Rachele

Grob Leib

Gurewicz Anczel

Haim Esther

detta Lala

Gronich Dorotea

Gurfein Leo

Haim Gabriele

Haim Gioia

Hanan Davide

Hasdà Giacomo

Hasson Elsa

Haim Giuseppe

Hanan Enrico

Augusto

Hasson Elsa

Haim Giza

Hanan Ezra

Haselnuess Anna

Hasson Esther

Haim Yomtov

Hanan Gella

Haselnuess Lea

Hasson Esther

Hain Ignaz

Hanan Giacobbe

Hasenlauf Israel

Hasson Fany

Hakim Caden

Hanan Giacobbe

Hassan Buba

Hasson Felicina

Hakim Matilde

Hanan Giuseppe

Hassan Gerda

Hasson Flora

Halber Samuele

Hanan Giuseppe

Yvonne

Hasson Fortunata

Halberstam Chaim

Hanan Giuseppe

Hassan Maria

Hasson Fortunata

Halfon Clara

Hanan Haim

Hassan Nathan Carlo

Hasson Fortunata

Halfon Esther

Hanan Herzel

Hassan Rachele

Hasson Fortunata

Halfon Estrella

Hanan Ida

Hassid Behor

Hasson Fortunata

Halfon Giacobbe

Hanan Isacco

Samuele

Hasson Gabriele

Halfon Giacobbe

Hanan Isacco

Hassid Giuseppe

Hasson Giacobbe

Giacomo

Hanan Lea

Hasson Abner

Hasson Giacobbe

Halfon Isacco

Hanan Lora Laura

Hasson Abramo

Hasson Giacobbe

Halfon Israele

Hanan Maria

Hasson Alberto

Hasson Giacobbe

Halfon Rica

Hanan Matilde

Hasson Alfredo

Hasson Giacobbe

Halfon Signorù

Hanan Matilde

Hasson Allegra

Hasson Giacobbe

Halfon Zula

Hanan Matilde

Hasson Amelia

Hasson Giacobbe

Haller Ottone

Hanan Mercada

Hasson Amelia

Hasson Giacobbe

Halperin Ludovico

Hanan Moris

Hasson Amelia

Hasson Giacobbe

Halpern Armida

Hanan Mosè

Hasson Aronne

Hasson Giacobbe

Aurelia

Hanan Myriam

Hasson Aronne

detto Giaco

Halpern Enrico

Hanan Nissim

Hasson Baruh

Hasson Giacobbe

Halpern Giorgio

Hanan Nissim

Hasson Behora Stella

Giuseppe

Gershon

Hanan Rachele

Hasson Bella

Hasson Giacomo

Halpern Maurizio

Hanan Rebecca

Hasson Bellina

Hasson Giamila

Halpert Lenke

Hanan Rosa

Hasson Bellina

Rosula

Halpert Malvine

Hanan Rosa

Hasson Bochor

Hasson Giannetta

Halua Allegra

Hanan Salomon

Hasson Bohor

Hasson Gilberto

Halua Rachele

Hanan Salomon

Hasson Bohor

Hasson Gioia

Hammer Abramo

Hanan Salva

Hasson Bulissa

Hasson Gioia

Hammer Ester

Hanan Salvatore

Hasson Bulissa

Hasson Gioia

Hammer Lazzaro

Hanan Samuele

Hasson Caden

Hasson Giovanna

Hammerschmidt

Hanan Samuele

Hasson Caden

Hasson Giovanna

Jenny Eugenia

Hanan Sara

Hasson Caden

Hasson Giovanna

Hanan Abner

Hanan Sarina

Hasson Caden

Hasson Giovanna

Hanan Abramo

Hanan Sol

Hasson Caterina

Giannetta

Alberto

Hanan Susanna

Hasson Caterina

Hasson Giuseppe

Hanan Alberto

Hanan Ventura

Hasson Celebi

Hasson Giuseppe

Hanan Allegra

Hanan Violetta

Hasson Clara

Hasson Giuseppe

Hanan Amalia

Hanau Giorgio

Hasson Davide

Hasson Giuseppe

Hanan Ascer

Max

Hasson Davide

Hasson Giuseppe

Hanan Ascer

Hanau Margherita

Hasson Davide

Hasson Giuseppe

Hanan Asher

Hanau Mario

Hasson Diana

Hasson Giuseppe

Hanan Behor

Hanau Vittore

Hasson Dona

Hasson Haim

Hanan Behor

Hannuna Renata

Hasson Donna

Hasson Haim

Hanan Bella

Harmik Isak

Hasson Donna

Hasson Hanula

Hanan Bellina

Harpfen Arturo

Hasson Dorina

Hasson Hasday

Hanan Bension

Hartmeier Sigfried

Hasson Edith Nelly

Hasson Isacco

Hanan Boaz

Hartstein Wilmosch

Hasson Elia

Hasson Isacco

Hanan Bulissa

Hartwig Umberto

Hasson Elieto

Hasson Isacco

Hanan Caden

Haschi Giulia

Hasson Elieto Elia

Hasson Isacco

Hanan Daisy

Haschlaus Feighe

Hasson Elisa

Hasson Jacques

Hasson Jean Pierre

Hasson Regina

Hauser Pessla

Herskovits Maurizio

Hasson Jeuda

Hasson Regina

Hauser Susanna

Zoltan

Hasson Jeuda

Hasson Regina

Hauser Umberto

Herskovits Tiberio

Hasson Jeuda

Hasson Regina

Hausmann Rosa

Herskovitz Rella

Hasson Johevet

Hasson Regina

Hayat Giacomo

Herz Theresia

Hasson Juda

Hasson Rosa

Hazan Alberto detto

Herzberg Maddalena

Hasson Laura

Hasson Rosa

Lekarz

Herzberg Siegbert

Hasson Laura

Hasson Rosa

Hazan Clara

Israel

Hasson Lea

Hasson Rosa

Hazan Colette

Herzer Ida detta Ada

Hasson Lea

Hasson Rosa

Hazan Estrea

Herzer Joseph

Hasson Lea

Hasson Ruben

Hazan Giacobbe

Heschenthal Bruno

Hasson Lea

Hasson Sadis

Giacomo

Hess Richard

Hasson Lea

Hasson Sadok

Hazan Giacomo

Heymann Clara

Hasson Lea

Hasson Salomon

Hazan Ginetta

Heymann Elena

Hasson Lora

Hasson Salomone

Hazan Giuseppe

Hinin Barkov

Hasson Luna

Hasson Salomone

Hazan Isacco

Michael

Hasson Luna

Hasson Salomone

Hazan Matilde

Hirsch Bianca

Hasson Matilde

Hasson Salvatore

Hazan Maurizio

Hirsch David

Hasson Matilde

Hasson Salvo

Hazan Maurizio

Hirsch Gerolamo

Hasson Matilde

Hasson Samuele

Hazan Michele

Hirsch Gino

Hasson Mazaltov

Hasson Samuele

Hazan Nissim

Hirsch Philippe

Hasson Mazaltov

Hasson Samuele

Hazan Rebecca detta

Hirsch Regina

Hasson Mazaltov

Hasson Sara

Becky

Hirsch Susanna

Hasson Mazaltov

Hasson Sara

Hazan Regina

Hirschen Haendel

Hasson Meir

Hasson Sara

Hecht Otto

Hirschhaut Eugenia

Hasson Michele

Hasson Sara

Heier Fanny

Hirschhorn Israel

Hasson Mosè

Hasson Signoru

Heim Anna

Hersz

Hasson Mosè

Hasson Silvia

Heim Enrica

Hirschhorn Lea

Hasson Mosè

Hasson Silvia

Heim Leopoldo

Hirschl Erich

Hasson Mosè

Hasson Simha

Heiman Felice

Hirschl Hinko

Hasson Mosè

Hasson Simone

Heimann Wanda

Hirschl Slava

Hasson Mosè

Hasson Sol

Piera

Hirschl Vera

Hasson Mosè

Hasson Stella

Heinrich Bernardo

Hirschler Bozjena

Hasson Mosè

Hasson Sultana

Heinrich Marcello

Hirschler Zora

Hasson Natan

Hasson Uriel

Heliczer Jacob

Hochberger Bela

Hasson Natan

Hasson Vida

Heller Samuele

Hochberger Evelina

Hasson Natan

Hasson Vida

Hendrix Gertrude

Hochberger Lilly

Hasson Nissim

Hasson Violetta

Hening Beer

Hochberger Wilhelm

Hasson Nissim

Hasson Violetta

Hering Elisa

detto Willy

Hasson Nissim

Hasson Violetta

Hering Isabella Iginia

Hochberger

Hasson Nisso

Hasson Vittoria

Hering Samuele

Wolfgang

Hasson Rachele

Hasson Vittoria

Umberto

Hochwald Carolina

Hasson Rachele

Hasson Vittoria

Hering Sofia

Hodara Clara

Hasson Rachele

Hasson Vittorio

Hering Vittorio

Hodorowitz Giusto

Hasson Rachele

Hasson Vittorio

Herlinger Adele

Hodorowitz Michael

Hasson Rachele

Hasson Vittorio

Herlinger Hermann

Hoenig Israel

Hasson Rachele

Hasson Vittorio

Hermann Julius

Giuseppe

Hasson Rachele

Haim

Hersch

Hoenig Regina

Hasson Rachele

Hasson Zaffira

Herschtal Ester

Hofbauer Giovanna

Hasson Rachele

Haus Leo

Herscovici Abraham

Hoffmann Johanna

Hasson Rebecca

Hauser Arnaldo

Herskovits Agata

Hoffmann Luisa

Hasson Rebecca

Hauser Bela

detta Goti

Hoffmann Olga

Hasson Rebecca

Hauser Eugen

Herskovits Luigi

Hoffmann Stella

Hasson Rebecca

Hauser Lania Laura

Herskovits

Hohn Zora

Hasson Rebecca

Hauser Moritz

Margherita

Hoitsch Hugo

Horitzki Adele

Hugnu Sara

Israel Hanula

Israel Ruben

Horitzki Regina

Hugnu Sara

Israel Ida

Avraham

Hornstein Andrea

Hugnu Sara

Israel Isacco

Israel Sabetai

Hornstein Fanny

Hugnu Sipura

Israel Isacco

Israel Sabino

Hornstein Irene

Hugnu Stella

Israel Isacco

Israel Samuele

Horowitz David

Hugnu Violetta

Israel Isacco

Israel Samuele

Horowitz Fanny

Hugnu Vittoria

Israel Isacco

Israel Samuele

Horowitz Gisella

Hugnu Vittoria

Israel Isacco Gino

Israel Samuele

Horowitz Marcello

Hugnu Vittoria

Israel Jesua

Israel Samuele

Horowitz Markus

Hugnu Vittorio

Israel Leone

Israel Sara

Horschtorn Fanny

Hulli Sarina

Israel Liko Moshe

Israel Sara

Horvatic Ivana

Iacoboni Giacomo

Israel Lucia

Israel Sara

Horzel Oscar

Iacoboni Gisella

Israel Luna

Israel Sara

Hugnu Abramo

Iacoboni Sofia

Israel Mahir

Israel Scemarià

Hugnu Abramo

Ickowics Monica

Israel Mardocheo

Israel Semah

Hugnu Abramo

Iesi Carolina

Israel Maria

Israel Sol

Hugnu Alberto

Igel Regina

Israel Matilde

Israel Stametta detta

Hugnu Alfredo

Iohana Anna

Israel Matilde

Stanni

Hugnu Aronne

Adalgisa detta

Israel Matilde

Israel Susanna

Hugnu Aronne

Mima

Israel Matilde

Israel Vittoria

Hugnu Bianca

Isaac Johanna

Israel Mazaltov

Israel Yomtov

Hugnu Diamante

Isakovic Jacob

Israel Mazaltov

Issel Arturo

Hugnu Elia

Isakovic Josif

Israel Mazaltov

Italia Emma Elena

Hugnu Flora

Israel Alberto

Matilde

Italia Raffaele

Hugnu Fortunata

Israel Allegra

Israel Mosè

Italia Raffaele

Hugnu Giacobbe

Israel Anna

Israel Mosè

Itzkowitz Simon

Hugnu Giuseppe

Israel Aronne

Israel Mosè

Jabes Giuseppe

Hugnu Giuseppe

Israel Aslan

Israel Nissim

Enrico

Hugnu Haim

Israel Bension

Israel Nissim

Jablonka Jankel

Hugnu Haim

Israel Boaz

Israel Nissim

Jacchia Beatrice

Hugnu Isacco

Israel Bulissa

Israel Nissim

Jacchia Diana

Hugnu Jakob

Israel Bulissa

Salvatore

Jacchia Dina

Hugnu Laura

Israel Caterina

Israel Pacina

Jacchia Edoardo

Hugnu Lora

Israel Celebi

Israel Pacina

Jacchia Ermanno

Hugnu Lucia

Israel Daniele

Israel Rachele

Jacchia Ezia detta

Hugnu Luna

Israel Davide

Israel Rachele

Lilly

Hugnu Mardocheo

Israel Davide

Israel Rachele

Jacchia Giorgio

Hugnu Maria

Israel Davide Dario

Israel Rachele

Jacchia Lidia

Hugnu Maria

Israel Diana

Israel Rachele

Jacchia Lina

Hugnu Matilde

Israel Elia

Israel Rachele

Jacchia Mario

Hugnu Matilde

Israel Elia

Israel Rahamin

Jacchia Riccardo

Hugnu Moreno

Israel Eliezer

Israel Rebecca

Jachia Alberto

Hugnu Mosè

Israel Elio

Israel Rebecca

Jachia Anselmo

Hugnu Nathan

Israel Ester

Israel Rebecca

Jachia Armando

Hugnu Nissim

Israel Flora

Israel Regina

Jachia Ercole

Hugnu Rachele

Israel Flora

Israel Regina

Jachia Ida

Hugnu Rachele

Israel Flora

Israel Regina

Jachia Nino

Hugnu Rahamin

Israel Giacobbe

Israel Regina

Jachia Pasqua

Hugnu Regina

Israel Giacobbe

Israel Rica

Jacob Diamante

Hugnu Rica

Israel Giacobbe

Israel Rina

Jacoby Paolo

Hugnu Rica

Israel Giacomo

Allegra

Jacubowski Isidor

Hugnu Rosa

Israel Giovanna

Israel Rosa

Jaffè Isaac Elia

Hugnu Rosa

Israel Giovanna

Israel Ruben

Jaffe Raffaele

Hugnu Salomon

Israel Giuseppe

Israel Ruben

Jaffe Silvio

Hugnu Salomon

Israel Haim

Israel Ruben

Jaffe Ugo

Jakobsohn Paul

Jona Enrichetta

Kabiljo Hanika

Klein Eva

Jakobstamm

Jona Ezechia

Kabiljo Josefu

Klein Margherita

Rosabella

Leopoldo

Kabiljo Levi

Klein Maurizio

Jalowiec Janina

Jona Felice

Kaesz Margarete

Klein Norberto

Jani Emilio Gustavo

Jona Fortunato

Kahlberg Hans

Klein Oscar

Jankowsky Kalman

Aristide

Kahn Michele

Klein Roberto

Janovitz Edoardo

Jona Gabriele

Kajon Erna Herdonia

Klein Teresa

Janovitz Silvio

Jona Gino

Kaldegg Erwin

Klein Cominotti

Janovitz Tullio

Jona Giora

Kalik Teresa

Carlo

Janovitz Vittoria

Jona Giorgio

Kalisch Yvonne

Klein Cominotti

Jansen Francis

Jona Giuseppe

Kalker Alessandro

Edoardo

Jarach Angelina

Jona Giuseppe

Kalker Erminia

Kleinberger Clara

Jarach Anna

Jona Giuseppe

Kalker Sigismondo

Klempmann

Jarach Anna

Jona Leone

Kalmann Ulrich

Abraham

Jarach Augusta

Jona Luigi detto Gigi

Kammer Karl

Knapp Wally

Jarach Giulia

Jona Mariana Bona

Kamras Elisabetta

Knoll Oscar

Jarach Giuseppe

Esmeralda

Kanni Giacomo

Koen Milo

Jarach Marco

Jona Massimo

Kapitz Teresa

Koen Nina

Jarach Mario

Jona Olga

Kaplan

Koen Oscar

Giacobbe

Jona Raimondo Luigi

Kaplan Paolo

Koenig Ana

Jelcich Maria

Eugenio

Kaposi Elena

Koenig Anna

Jenna Lina Arianna

Jona Remo

Kaposi Oscar

Koenig Giuseppe

Jenna Moise detto

Jona Rinaldo

Kapper Eva

Koenig Koelmann

Cesare

Jona Roberto

Kapper Gustavo

Koffler Leopoldo

Jenna Ruggero

Jona Roberto

Kapper Pietro

Koffler Michael

Jerchan Rivka

Jona Rosa Bianca

Karafiol Feiga

Kohl Salomone

Jeret Marie

Jona Ruggero Achille

Karafiol Ida

Kohn Alessandro

Jerusalmi Gioia

Rodolfo

Kardos Zlata

Kohn Bruno

Jesi Carlo

Jona Smil

Karma Elle

Kohn Cesare

Jesi Rosina

Jona Ugo

Karpeles Anna

Kohn Geltrude

Jessoula Clara

Jonas Elsa

Karpeles Arturo

Kohn Gerhard

Jesurum Arrigo

Jonas Geltrude

Kass Jacob

Kohn Giulia

Giuseppe

Jordan Rosa

Kass Jacob

Kohn Jolanda

Jesurum Berta Anna

Josefowicz Bella

Kasterstein Aron

Kohn Margherita

Jesurum Gilda

Josefowicz Stefania

Katz Ermanno detto

Kohn Rosa

Jesurum Giuseppina

Josefowicz Zelig

Hero

Kohn Shalom

Jesurum Jole

Josefowitz Jolan

Katz Ernestina

Kohner Alfredo

Jesurum Marisa

Josefowitz Schmil

Katz Ethel detta Etja

Kolb Clara

Jewell Phoebe

Joseph Georges

Katz Giuseppe

Koppl Hilde

Joachinsthal Ruth

Josephson Enrichetta

Katz Israele

Korbel Hugo

Joffe Isidoro

Josz Aurelia

Katz Juda

Koretz Amalia

Joffe Olga

Juchwid Hirsch

Katz Sofia

Korn Victor

Joffe Paola

Judkowsky Israel

Katz Susanna

Kornblum Giacomo

Joheli Jehuda

Judkowsky Samuele

Katzenstein Ester

Kornitzer Milon

John Matilde

Jung Bertha

Kauber Josef

Kornweitz Karin

Jolles Salomon

Junger Frieda

Kaufer Alfred

Kosicek Leopolda

Jona Amadio

Jungerman Alberto

Kaufmann Sofia Sara

Kovacs Bela

Jona Anna

Jungermann Marcel

Kazar Gabriella

Kovacs Gabriella

Jona Annetta

Jungermann Meilech

Keil

Kovacs Giuseppina

Jona Bellinzona

Jungerwuerth

Kell Irma

Kovacs Rosa

Leonella

Theofila

Kepinscki Davide

Krachmalnikoff

Jona Benvenuta

Jupfer Michele

Kerbes Lemel

Isacco

Regina

Jupiter Marco

Kern Carlo

Kramm Carlo

Jona Elda

Kabilio Josef

Kirschbaum Sara

Kramm Emil

Jona Enrica

Kabiljo Hana

Klein Dora

Kramm Ernesto

Kraus Giorgio

Labi Abramo

Labi Nissim

Landmans Giulio

Kraus Ivan

Labi Alfredo

Labi Quintina

Landsberg Ernesto

Kraus Marcello

Labi Anna

Labi Rachele

Langfelder Cecilia

Krauss Gisella

Labi Aron

Labi Raclin

detta Lilly

Krausz Rosalia

Labi Aronne

Labi Regina

Langstein Johann

Krawietz Abraham

Labi Aronne

Labi Rosa

Laniado Bahia

Krawietz Beniamino

Labi Buba

Labi Rosa

Lapajowker

Krawietz Ryna

Labi Davide

Labi Rubina

Francesca

Krebs Giuseppe

Labi Diamantina

Labi Rubina

Laparini Ermanno

Krebs Martino

Labi Diamantina

Labi Salomone

Lascar Bruno

Kreiner Edith

Labi Diamantina

Labi Sanin

Lascar Flora

Kresic Anna detta

Labi Diana

Labi Sara

Lascar Italia

Anika

Labi Elia

Labi Scialom

Lascar Luciana

Krohn Martin Israele

Labi Elia

Labi Scialom

Lascar Mario

Kroo Alessandro

Labi Elia

Labi Scialom

Lascar Renzo Leone

Kroo Giuseppe

Labi Elisa

Labi Sion

Lascar Umberto

Kroo Luigi

Labi Ersel

Labi Sion

Lascar Wanda

Krumer Ghena detta

Labi Ester

Labi Sion

Latis Leone

Genia

Labi Fortuna

Labi Sion

Latis Liliana

Krupenic Irene

Labi Fortunata

Labi Susanna

Lattes Angela

Krys Betty

Labi Giacomo

Labi Tita

Lattes Anna

Krys Marco

Giacobbe

Labi Vittorio

Lattes Decima

Krzentowsky Sali

Labi Gino

Labi Vittorio

Lattes Edvige

Krzentowsky

Labi Giulia

Labi Wanda

Lattes Franca

Salomone detto

Labi Giulia

Labi Wanda

Lattes Irma

Salo

Labi Giulia

Labi Zatuba

Lattes Itala Rachele

Krzentowsky

Labi Giulia

Lacher Brucha

Lattes Laura Regina

Simeone

Labi Giuseppe

Laemmle Minna

Lattes Leone Davide

Krzesny Gianna

Labi Giuseppe

Lager Luisa Elena

Latzer Margherita

Krzesny Herbert

Labi Grazia

detta Lenke

Laufer Bianca

Kudlik Ariè

Labi Hammus

Lager Marco

Laufer Ladislav

Kuenstler Abramo

Labi Ida

Lagny Elisabetta

Laurent Renata

detto Romolo

Labi Isaak

Lakatos Zoltan

Lausch Guglielmo

Kugler Elena Anna

Labi Isacco

Lallum Ninetta

Lausch Olga

Kugler Gisella

Labi Isacco

Lamm Lea

Lauterstein Hanna

Kugler Maddalena

Labi Isacco

Lamm Salomone

Leblis Giuseppe

Kuh Ermanno

Labi Isacco

Lampronti Carlo

Leckner Giuseppe

Kuh Meta Marie

Labi Jolanda

Lampronti Irma

Leder Eugenia

Kuhn Ada

Labi Josef

Lampronti Marco

Lederer Ernst

Kuhn Beatrice detta

Labi Juda

Lampronti Rina

Leghziel Misa

Bice

Labi Lidia

Lampronti Umberto

Leghziel Raffaele

Kupfer Elena

Labi Lizzi

Landau Bernardo

Lehmann Frieda

Kupfer Jankel

Labi Loris

Landau Erich

Emilia Alisa

Kupferberg Abraham

Labi Lulli Alba

Landau Felicitas

Lehr Aurelia

Kurtz Carlotta

Labi Marcello

Landau Isacco

Leichtmann Hanni

Kurtz Samuele

Labi Maria

Landau Lea

Leim Sofia

Kurz Taube

Labi Messala

Landau Malvina

Leinberg Marco

Kurzrock Anna detta

Labi Messauda

Landesberger Edith

Leipen Lucia

Netty

Labi Messauda

Landesman Boris

Lemberger Marcella

Kurzrock Erminio

Labi Messauda

Landmann Mendel

Lemberger Wolf

Kurzrock Giuseppe

Labi Mosè detto

Landmann Moses

Lenger Aronne

Kuster Paul

Musci

Landmann Rita

Meilach

Kwadratstein Debora

Labi Mosè detto

Landmann Simon

Lenghi Walter

Labi Abner

Musci

Landmann Walter

Lenk Felice

Labi Abramo

Labi Musci

Heinz

Leon Alessandro

Leon Allegra

Levi Alfredo

Levi Dina

Levi Fortunata

Leon Amelia

Levi Alighiero

Levi Dina

Levi Fortunata

Leon Elly Sara

Levi Allegra

Levi Dino Italo Pace

Levi Fortunata

Leon Estrea

Levi Alvise

Levi Donatella

Levi Franco

Leon Giacobbe

Levi Amalia

Levi Donato Giorgio

Levi Gastone

Leon Isacco

Levi Amelia

Levi Donna

Levi Giacobbe

Leon Jeudà

Levi Amelia

Levi Edgardo

Levi Giacobbe

Leon Maria

Levi Amelia

Levi Elda

Levi Giacobbe

Leon Maria

Levi Amelia

Levi Elda

Levi Giacobbe

Leon Maria

Levi Amelia

Levi Elena

Levi Giacobbe

Leon Matilde

Levi Angela Sara

Levi Eleonora

Levi Giacobbe

Leon Matilde

Levi Angelo

Levi Eleonora detta

Levi Giacobbe

Leon Nissim

Levi Angelo Giacomo

Norina

Giacomo

Leon Rachele

Levi Angelo Isaia

Levi Elia

Levi Giacobbe

Leon Sara

Ferruccio

Levi Elia

Giacomo

Leon Sol

Levi Anita

Levi Elia

Levi Giacomo

Leon Sol

Levi Anna

Levi Elia Aurelio

Levi Giacomo

Leoni Arturo

Margherita detta

Levi Elia Eliakim

Levi Giamila

Leoni Attilio

Anita

Levi Elia Lelio

Levi Giannetta

Leoni Augusto

Levi Annetta

Levi Elide

Levi Gino

Leoni Elsa

Levi Argia

Levi Elide

Levi Gioia detta

Leoni Ferruccio

Levi Armando

Levi Elio Nissim

Giuna

Leoni Gabriella

Levi Aronne Nino

Levi Elios Natale

Levi Giorgio

Leoni Giulia

Levi Arrigo

Levi Eloisa

Levi Giorgio

Leoni Gustavo

Levi Arrigo

Levi Elsa

Levi Giorgio

Leoni Lauretta

Levi Arturo

Levi Emilia

Levi Giorgio

Leonzini Lina Perla

Levi Attilio Raffaele

Levi Emilia

Levi Giosuè

Lerer Samuel

Levi Augusto

Levi Emilia

Levi Giovanna

Levi Abramo

Levi Aurelia Allegra

Levi Emilia

Levi Giovanni

Levi Abramo

Levi Bea

Levi Emilio

Levi Giuditta Gioia

Levi Abramo

Levi Beniamina

Levi Emma

Levi Giulia

Levi Abramo

Levi Beniamino Ugo

Levi Emma

Levi Giulio

Levi Abramo

Levi Bianca

Levi Emma

Levi Giulio

Levi Abramo

Levi Bianka Nora

Levi Enrichetta

Levi Giusepina

Levi Abramo

Levi Bochor

Levi Enrico

Levi Giuseppe

Giuseppe

Levi Bochor

Levi Ercolina

Levi Giuseppe

Levi Ada

Levi Bochura

Levi Ernesto

Levi Giuseppe

Levi Ada

Levi Bruno

Levi Ernesto

Levi Giuseppe

Levi Alberto

Levi Bulì

Levi Ester Elvira

Levi Giuseppe

Levi Alberto

Levi Caden

Levi Ester Vittoria

Levi Guglielmo

Levi Alberto

Levi Carlo

Levi Esther

detto Bibi

Levi Alberto

Levi Carlo

Levi Esther

Levi Guido

Levi Alberto

Levi Carlo

Levi Esther

Levi Guido

Levi Alda

Levi Celebi

Levi Estrea

Levi Haim

Levi Alda Silvana

Levi Celestina

Levi Estrea

Levi Haim

Levi Aldo

Levi Cesare

Levi Estrea

Levi Heschielle

Levi Aldo

Levi Cesarina

Levi Estrella

Nissim

Levi Aldo

Levi Clara

Levi Estrella

Levi Ines

Levi Aldo

Levi Clara

Levi Ettore

Levi Isacco

Levi Aldo

Levi Clotilde

Levi Fausto

Levi Isacco

Levi Aldo

Levi Clotilde

Levi Federico Simone

Levi Isacco

Levi Alessandra

Levi Davide

Levi Felice

Levi Isacco

Levi Alessandro

Levi Davide

Levi Felicia

Levi Isacco Bochor

Levi Alessandro

Levi Diamantina

Levi Fortunata

Levi Israele

Levi Alfredo

Levi Diana

Levi Fortunata

Levi Italo

Levi Italo Gustavo

Levi Misha Naftali

Levi Renzo

Levi Vittoria

Davide

Levi Moise

Levi Riccardo

Levi Vittoria

Levi Jehuschvo

Levi Mordechai

Levi Rina

Levi Vittoria

Levi Jeudà

Levi Moritz

Levi Roberto

Levi Vittorina detta

Levi Josef

Levi Mosè

Levi Rodolfo

Rina

Levi Laura

Levi Mosè

Levi Rodolfo

Levi Vittorio

Levi Lazzaro

Levi Mosè

Levi Rosa

Levi Vittorio

Levi Lea

Levi Mosè

Levi Rosa

Levi Vittorio

Levi Lea

Levi Mosè

Levi Rosaldo

Levi Vittorio

Levi Leon

Levi Mosè Renzo

Levi Rosetta

Levi Zelinda

Levi Leone

Levi Moshè

Levi Ruggero

Levi Zoe

Levi Leonella

Levi Myriam

Levi Sadik

Levi delle Trezze

Levi Lia Marta

Levi Nailè

Levi Salomone

Giorgio

Levi Libera

Levi Nerina

Levi Salomone

Levic Davide

Levi Lida

Levi Nissim

Bochor

Levic Stella

Levi Lino

Levi Nissim

Levi Salva

Levie Buba

Levi Lisan

Levi Nissim

Levi Salvatore

Levin Erna

Levi Lucia

Levi Nissim

Levi Salvatore

Levin Hugo

Levi Luciana

Levi Noemi

Levi Salvatore

Levinas Idalco

Levi Luigia

Levi Noemi

Levi Salvatore

Levinsky Felix

Levi Luisa

Levi Nora

Levi Salvatore

Levis Ida

Levi Luisa

Levi Noris

Levi Samuele

Levitan Alessandro

Levi Marcello

Levi Olga

Levi Samuele

Levitus Gustavo

Levi Marco

Levi Oreste Ezechiele

Levi Samuele

Levy Adriana

Levi Marco

Levi Oscar

Levi Samuele Enea

Levy Alene

Levi Marco

Levi Ottavio

Levi Sara

Levy Beniamino

Levi Marco

Levi Pacifico

Levi Sara

Levy Berta

Levi Mardocheo

Levi Paolo Shaul

Levi Sara

Levy Brunilde

Levi Margherita

Levi Perla

Levi Sara

Levy Elia Amedeo

Levi Maria

Levi Pia

Levi Sara

Levy Enzo

Levi Maria

Levi Pia Clelia

Levi Sara

Levy Eva Maria detta

Levi Maria

Levi Primo

Levi Sara Ester

Cicci

Levi Maria

Levi Rachele

Levi Sarota

Levy Federico

Levi Maria Ester

Levi Rachele

Levi Selma

Levy Matilde

Anna

Levi Rachele

Levi Selma

Levy Maurizio

Levi Marietta

Levi Rachele

Levi Sergio

Levy Paul

Levi Mario

Levi Rachele

Levi Sergio

Levy Rudolf

Levi Mario

Levi Raffaele

Levi Sida

Levy Silvia

Levi Mario

Levi Raffaele

Levi Silvana

Levy Vittorio

Levi Mario

Levi Raffaele

Levi Simeone

Levy Vittorio

Levi Mario

Levi Raffaele Carlo

Levi Simha

Lewenstain Armin

Levi Mario

Levi Rahamin

Levi Stella

Lewi Georg

Levi Mario

Levi Rebecca

Levi Stella

Lewin Alfred

Levi Mario

Levi Rebecca

Levi Stella

Lewinski Joachim

Levi Mario Moisè

Levi Rebecca

Levi Sultana

Lewinsohn Carlotta

Levi Masaltov

Levi Regina

Levi Susanna

Lewis James

Levi Matilde

Levi Regina

Levi Tullio

Libeck Eduard

Levi Matilde

Levi Regina

Levi Ugo

Lichtenstadt Rosina

Levi Matilde

Levi Regina

Levi Valentina

Lichtenstein Serena

Levi Matilde

Levi Regina

Levi Vida

Lichtenstern Angela

Levi Maurizio

Levi Regina

Levi Vittoria

Lichtmann Ada

Levi Menachem

Levi Renata

Levi Vittoria

Lichtwitz Joachim

Levi Michele

Levi Renato

Levi Vittoria

Lichtwitz Otto Israel

Levi Minzi Augusto

Levi Renato

Levi Vittoria

Lieber Cypra

Levi Minzi Marcello

Menachem

Levi Vittoria

Liebgold Giovanna

Liebmann Erminia

Livoli Elvira

Lolli Enzo

Luzzato Marcella

detta Etta

Livoli Pacifico

Lombroso Alberto

Luzzatti Davide detto

Liebmann Giacomo

Livoli Pacifico

Lombroso Arturo

Carlo

Paolo

Livoli Rachele

Cesare

Luzzatti Enrico

Liebmann Pietro

Livoli Speranza

Lombroso Carolina

Luzzatti Giuseppe

Liebmann Pietro

Livoli Vittoria

Lombroso Prospero

Luzzatti Ida

Lilienthal Reinhold

Loeb Gertrude

Longo Lidia

Luzzatti Isacco detto

Limentani Alberto

Loeb Hilde

Lonzana Formiggini

Oscar

Limentani Angelo

Loeb Ilse

Cesare

Luzzatti Silvio

Limentani Angelo

Loeb Moritz

Lopes Pegna

Luzzatto Alice

Limentani Anselmo

Loebenstein Ugo

Fernando

Luzzatto Anna detta

Limentani Cesare

Loebl Dorothea

Lopes Pegna Lidia

Paola

Limentani Cesare

Loebl Gertrude detta

Lopes Pegna

Luzzatto Cesare

Limentani Cesira

Trude

Massimo

Luzzatto Cesare

Limentani Chiara

Loebnitz Enrico

Lopez Perera Olga

Salomone

Limentani Costanza

Loebnitz Lidia

Lorant Geltrude detta

Luzzatto Elodia

Limentani Costanza

Loerber Alice

Trude

Luzzatto Emma

Limentani David

Loerber Evelina

Loria Guido

Luzzatto Eugenia

Limentani David

Loew Abramo

Lossi Alfredo

Luzzatto Giacomo

detto Baccalà

Loew Alessandro

Lowj Anna

Luzzatto Gina

Limentani Davide

Loew Draga

Lublinski Lipa

Luzzatto Iginio

Limentani Giovanni

Loew Ella

Lucovich Fabio

Luzzatto Ines

Limentani Giuseppe

Loew Giuseppe

Luft Adolfo

Luzzatto Margherita

Limentani Israele

Loew Jacob

Luft Ignazio

Luzzatto Maria

Limentani Marco

Loew Lavoslaw

Luft Ilse

Grazia detta Beppè

Limentani Mario

Loewenstein Gerda

Luft Massimiliano

Luzzatto Mario

Limentani Mario

Loewenthal Eugenia

Luftschitz Arminio

Luzzatto Mario

Limentani Massimo

Loewenthal Guido

Luftschitz Roberto

Luzzatto Maurizio

Limentani Rosa

Loewenthal Helmuth

Luisada Arnoldo

Luzzatto Natalia

Limentani Rosa

Loewenthal Paola

Luisada Augusto

Luzzatto Olga

Limentani Settimio

Loewenthal Roberto

Luisada Clara

Luzzatto Riccardo

Limentani Settimio

Loewenthal Ugo

Luisada Dante

Guido

Angelo detto

Loewenthal Vittorio

Luisada Franco

Luzzatto Rina Sara

Burione

Loewenwirth Elia

David

Luzzatto Rosalia

Limentani Settimio

Loewinson Ermanno

Luisada Giacomo

detta Rosa

detto Russo

Loewinson

Luisada Lina

Luzzatto Silvia

Lind Kurt

Sigismondo

Luisada Piero

Luzzatto Vittoria

Lind Moses

Loewsztein Joseph

Lumbroso Carlo

Lyon Emil

Linden Giacomo

Loewy Alice

Lumbroso Edwin

Macerata Carlo

Lindenberg Ester

Loewy Anna

Lumbroso Isidoro

Maestro Alfredo

Linder Berthold

Loewy Charlotte

Luria Cesare

Maestro Danilo

Linder Frieda

Loewy Ella

Lusena Alda

Maestro Ezio

Linder Raimond

Loewy Emilio

Lusena Aldo

Maestro Fausto

Linder Regina Maria

Loewy Enrico

Lusena Bianca Maria

Maestro Gemma

Linder Rolando

Loewy Lidia

Lusena Piero

Maestro Giulio

Linder Wilhelm

Loewy Livio

Lusena Said

Maestro Guido

Linsen Tewel

Loewy Marta

Lusena Silvio

Maestro Ida

Lipschitz Eugenio

Loewy Massimo

Lust Bruno

Maestro Jacob

Lipschitz Giuseppina

Loewy Olga

Lust Edmondo

Maestro Nina

Lipschitz Michel

Loewy Olga

Lust Fanny

Maestro Salomone

Lissauer Hans

Loewy Regina

Lust Zoe

Akibà detto Carlo

Litter Samuele

Loewy Riccardo

Lustig Rudolf

Maestro Sigfrido

Littmann Mayer

Loewy Sigfrido

Luzzati Estella

Maestro Vanda

Littmann Romualdo

Loewy Vidor

Luzzati Guido

Magenta Nissim

Livoli Allegra

Lolli Corrado

Zaccaria

Magnel Sara

Magrini Isa

Maon Rachele

Matatia Camelia

Menascè Behor

Magrini Silvio

Marbach Herbert

Matatia Nino

Aaron

Mahler Alexander

Marcaria Bellina

Matatia Nissim

Menascè Bension

Mailand Gerhart

Marcaria Ernesto

Matatia Roberto

Menascè Bernardo

Maio Giacobbe

Marcaria Giacomo

Matatia Samuel

Menascè Bianca

Maio Leone

Marcaria Ida

Mattersdorfer

Menascè Boaz

Maio Maria detta

Marcaria Raffaele

Alfredo

Menascè Boaz

Meri

Marcaria Stella

Mattersdorfer Carlo

Menascè Boaz

Maio Miriam

Marcos Luna

Felice

Menascè Caterina

Maio Mosè

Marcos Rebecca

Mattersdorfer Liliana

Menascè Catina

Maio Regina

Marcos Sara

Mauer Frimeta

Menascè Daniele

Maio Sara

Margules Maurice

Mauri Luigi

Menascè Davide

Maio Violetta

Mariani Ada

Mayer Arnaldo

Menascè Eleonora

Maissa Rachele

Mariani Anita

Mayer Ernest

Menascè Eliezer

Maizels Bernardo

Mariani Bettina

Mayer Grego Elda

Menascè Esther

Makowski Abraham

Mariani Elena

Mayer Grego

Menascè Estrea

Malek Brucha

Mariani Enrico

Enrico

Menascè Estrella

Mallel Allegra

Mariani Ernesto

Mayer Grego

Menascè Farida

Mallel Diana

Mariani Francesco

Giacomo

Menascè Fassana

Mallel Giuseppe

Isacco

Mayer Guido

Menascè Fassana

Mallel Nissim

Mariani Ida

Mayer Karoline

Menascè Fassana

Mallel Nissim

Mariani Leo

Mayer Risa

Menascè Fortunata

Mallel Sara

Mariani Luciano

Mazzetti Agar

Menascè Giacobbe

Mallel Violetta

Mariani Ugo

Mazziotti Proietti

Menascè Giacobbe

Maller Szmul

Mariani Vittorina

Clorinda

Menascè Gioia

Mallowan Carlo

Marienberg Isacco

Mazzus Emilia

Menascè Giuseppe

Malvert Georges

Marienberg Michele

Mazzus Rebecca

Menascè Giuseppe

Malvert Jacques

Marienberg Simona

Mazzus Sofia

Menascè Giuseppe

Malvert Lucie

Marino Angelo

Meisel Albert

Menascè Haim

Manasse Delia

Marino Pacifico

Melauri Paolo

Menascè Lea

Manasse Erminia

Marino Settimio

Melli Abramo

Menascè Leon

Rosa

Markoviski Johanna

Melli Ada

Menascè Lucia

Manasse Herbert

Markovits Emilia

Melli Amalia

Menascè Mardocheo

Manasse Vittorio

Markovits Melita

Melli Amelia

Menascè Mardocheo

Manasse Wolfgang

Markowiez Theodora

Melli Bellina

Marco

Mandel Elvira

Markus Elena

Melli Benedetto

Menascè Maria

Mandel Gisella

Markus Moses

Melli Carlo

Menascè Maria

Mandel Israele

Marmaros Carlotta

Melli Ebe

Menascè Maria

Pinkus

Maroni Dora

Melli Elena

Menascè Matilde

Mandel Maria

Maroni Pace Augusto

Melli Elio

Menascè Mazaltov

Mimmi

Maroni Rita

Melli Enrichetta

Menascè Mazaltov

Mandel Pinchas

Maroni Venturina

detta Rina

Menascè Michele

Philip

Marianna

Melli Giuliana

Menascè Michele

Mangel Samuel

Marsiglio Gino

Melli Giulio

Menascè Mordehai

Mangel Wilma

Marsiglio Riccardo

Melli Guido

Menascè Morris

Mankevitz Anna

Marton Rodolfo

Melli Mario

Mosè

Mankevitz Ernst

Marzolini Bianca

Melli Medea

Menascè Mosè

Manli Bruno

Masfary Levi Carlo

Melli Novella

Menascè Mosè

Manli Luciano

Masklis Dora

Melli Sergio

Bochor

Mann Walter

Masliah Rosa

Melli Vittoria

Menascè Nissim

Mannsovich Ida

Masriel Cadina

Melli Zaira

Menascè Nissim

Mano Gioia Perla

Massa Marietta

Meltzeil Gustavo

detto Nisso

Mansbach Henriette

Massarani Olga

Menascè Abramo

Menascè Norma

Mansberger

Massarani Tullo

Menascè Alberto

Menascè Rachele

Giuseppina

Matalon Elia

Menascè Amelia

Menascè Rachele

Menascè Rachele

Metzger Samuel

Milano Ugo

Misrachi Gioia Perla

Menascè Raffaele

Meyer Daisy

Milch Desiderio

Misrachi Haim

Menascè Raffaele

Meyer Paul

Milch Emilio

Misrachi Lea

Menascè Rahamin

Meyohas Giacomo

Milgrom Carmi

Misrachi Linda

Menascè Rebecca

Mezei Moritz

Milgrom Isak

Misrachi Mazaltov

Menascè Regina

Michalup Karoline

Milgrom Rea

Misrachi Rachele

Menascè Regina

Micheletti Elio

Jeannette Giovanna

Misrachi Regina

Menascè Regina

Michelstaedter Ada

Milhofer Maria

Misrachi Samuele

Menascè Reina

Michelstaedter Elda

Milla Aldo

Misrachi Sara

Menascè Rivka

Michelstaedter

Milla Amelia

Misrachi Stella

Menascè Salomon

Malvina

Milla Amelia

Misrachi Virginia

Menascè Stella

Michelstaedter

Milla Ferruccio

Misul Alfredo

Menascè Violetta

Rachele

Milla Laura

Misul Frida

Menascè Vittoria

Mieli Adolfo

Milla Lina

Mittag Anita

Menascè Yahir

Mieli Alba

Milla Ninetta

Mizrachi Elia

Menasci Alberto

Mieli Alberto

Milla Ugo

Modena Leone

Menasci Camillo

Mieli Angelo

Millul Achille

Modena Luigia detta

Menasci Cesare

Mieli Armando

Millul Egisto Mario

Gina

Menasci Enrico

Mieli Cesare

Millul Lia Sara

Modiana Giacomo

Menasci Enrico

Mieli Claudio

Millul Liana

Elia

Menasci Ernesta

Mieli Corinna

Milstein Josef

Modiano Carlo Elia

Menasci Raffaello

Mieli Crescenzo

Milul Isacco Gino

Modiano Daniele

Menasci Roberto

Mieli Enrica

Milul Lina Fortunè

Modiano Elisa

Raffaello

Mieli Ernesta

Minerbi Aldo

Modiano Flora

Menasci Umberto

Mieli Ester

Minerbi Gino

Modiano Giacobbe

Menasci Vittore

Mieli Giacomo

Minerbi Marcello

Modiano Giacomo

Menassè Davide

Mieli Gina Giulia

Minerbi Moisè detto

Modiano Giacomo

Vittorio

Mieli Giovanni

Menotti

Modiano Giuseppe

Menassè Rosa

Mieli Guglielmo

Minikes Mosè

Modiano Grazia

Menassè Vittorio

Mieli Ida

Miranda Alfredo

Modiano Grazia

Mendel Raffaele

Mieli Israele Cesare

Misan Adele

Modiano Isacco

Mendelsohn

Mieli Lazzaro

Misan Clara

Modiano Laura

Abraham

Mieli Letizia

Misan Diamantina

Modiano Lucia

Mendelsohn Benzion

Mieli Marco Aurelio

Misan Elio

Modiano Lucia

Mendelsohn Israel

Mieli Marina

Misan Enrica

Modiano Mosè

Mendelsohn Jechiel

Mieli Mario

Misan Ester

Modiano Samuele

Mendelsohn Miriam

Mieli Michele

Misan Giuseppe

Modiano Samuele

Mendelsohn Moritz

Mieli Pacifico

Misan Isacco

Modigliani Clara

Mendes Angelina

Mieli Pacifico

Misan Isaia

Rosa

Mendes Davide

Mieli Renato

Misan Sarina

Modigliani Elisa

Mendes Ida

Mieli Rossana

Misano Benedetto

Modigliani Giacomo

Mendes Marcello

Mieli Sergio

Misano Claudio

Modigliani Milena

Mendes Maurizio

Mieli Settimio Bruno

Misano Costanza

Modigliani Umberto

Mendes Stella

Mieli Tranquillo

Misano Fulvio

Modigliani Vittorio

Mendes Umberto

Mieli Ugo

Misano Lina

Molco Oreste Sergio

Mendler Leopold

Mieli Umberto

Misano Marco

Moldauer Leopoldo

Menier Elena

Migliau Giuseppe

Misano Servadio

Molho Abramo

Menkes Leia

Milani Carolina

Achille

Molho Aldo

Merdjan Elia

Milano Angelo

Misco Giorgio

Molho Dario

Merdjan Marco

Salvatore

Misrachi Bulissa

Molho Giovanni

Mernau Arrigo

Milano Elda Camilla

Misrachi Bulissa

Molho Leone

Messiah Arbib

Milano Giorgina

Misrachi Davide

Molho Olga

Messiah Isacco

Milano Raffaello

Misrachi Eliezer

Molho Renata

Messica Emilia

Milano Silvana

Misrachi Giacobbe

Molho Vittorina

Metzenberger Leonia

Milano Tullio

Misrachi Giacobbe

Molnar Elena

Momigliano Aldo

Moresco Giuditta

Moscati Asriele

Moskovic Julius

Momigliano Dante

Moresco Grazia

Cesare

Moskovic Viera

Momigliano Ester

Moresco Grazia

Moscati Bruno

Mosseri Alberto

Tranquilla

Moresco Ida

Moscati Cesare

Mosseri Enrico

Momigliano Ida

Moresco Pacifico

Moscati Cesare

Mosseri Giacomo

Momigliano Iolanda

Moresco Romolo

Moscati David

Renato

Momigliano Italo

Moresco Zaccaria

Moscati Elda

Mosseri Lauretta

Momigliano Pilade

Morgenstern Edith

Moscati Elio

Mosseri Marco

Momigliano Zechia

Morgenstern Fanny

Moscati Emanuele

Moster Mauro Anton

Bonaiuto

Morgenstern Irma

Moscati Eva

Mozes Esther

Monat Ignazio

Morpurgo Abram

Moscati Giacobbe

Muehlstein

Mondolfi Maria

Alberto

Moscati Giacomo

Guglielmo

Mondovì Linda

Morpurgo Alice

Moscati Giorgio

Mueller Maria

Montagnana Aida

Annetta

Moscati Giovanni

Mueller Stefania

Sara

Morpurgo Bianca

Moscati Ida

Muenz Julius

Montagnana Rosina

Maria

Moscati Letizia

Muenz Karl

Montalcini Virginia

Morpurgo Carlo

Moscati Marco

Muggia Aldo

Montanari Alberto

Morpurgo Elda

Moscati Maria

Muggia Amelia

Montecorboli Arturo

Morpurgo Elena

Moscati Pace

Muggia Attalo

Montecorboli

Morpurgo Elio

Anselmo

Sansone

Giorgio

Morpurgo Emma

Moscati Reale detta

Muggia Celeste

Montefiori Nella

Morpurgo Emma

Tina

Muggia Doralice

Montias Leon

Morpurgo Enrico

Moscati Rosa

Muggia Franca

Montiglia Giacomo

detto Morpurghetto

Moscati Rosa

Muggia Giuseppe

Montiglia Regina

Morpurgo Fortunata

Moscati Rosa

Muggia Lia

Elena

Morpurgo Gaddo

Moscati Sarina

Muggia Lino

Morais Alberto

Morpurgo Gina

Moscati Vanda

Munk Hans

Morais Alberto

Morpurgo Ida

Moscati Vito

Munk Liselotte

Morais Amalia

Morpurgo Marco

Moscato Bruno

Murgi Gino

Morais Carlo

Morpurgo Maria

Moscato Bruno

Musafia Marcela

Morais Emma

Morpurgo Maura

Anselmo

Musafja Jakob

Morais Giorgina

Morpurgo Olga

Moscato Celestina

Musatti Elia Gino

Morais Graziella

Morpurgo Oscar

Moscato Elia

Mussafia Carla

Morais Leonello

Morpurgo Pia Elvira

Moscato Elia

Mussafia Margherita

Morais Umberto

Morpurgo Umberto

Moscato Emma

Mussafia Valeria

Mosè

Morpurgo Vittoria

Moscato Ester

Mussafir Rachele

Moravetz Carlo

Mortara Corrado

Moscato Franco

Mussafir Regina

Mordo Abramo

Mortara Giuseppe

Moscato Giacomo

Mussafir Rica

Mordo Diamantina

Mortara Vittorio

detto Bufolone

Mussafir Vittorio

Mordo Elio

Mario

Moscato Giuseppe

Mustacchi Anna

Mordo Massimo

Mortera Abramo

Moscato Giuseppe

Mustacchi Daniele

Mordo Salomone

Giulio

Moscato Lazzaro

Mustacchi Felice

Morelli Leone Vita

Mortera Jole

Moscato Lazzaro

Mustacchi Giuseppe

Morello Arturo

Morterra Elda

Moscato Orabona

Mustacchi Leone

Aronne

Mosbach Egon

Moscato Pace

Mustacchi Marco

Morello Erminia

Sigmund

Moscato Pacifico

Mustacchi Marco

Moresco Alberto

Mosberg Margit Sofia

Moscato Renato

Moisè

Moresco Angelo

Moscatel Rosa

Moscato Servadio

Mustacchi Marianna

Moresco Anselmo

Moscati Alba

Moscato Virginia

Mustacchi Matilde

Moresco Cesare

Moscati Alberto

Moscato Vito

Mustacchi Michele

Moresco Cesare

Moscati Aldo

Moses Clara

Mustacchi Michele

Moresco David

Moscati Angelo

Moses Frieda

Mustacchi Moisè

Moresco Elisabetta

Moscati Angelo

Moses Hedwig

Mustacchi Rachele

Moresco Esterina

Moscati Angelo

Moshopola Jacopo

Mustacchi Rosa

Moresco Giorgio

Moscati Anselmo

Moskovic Felix

Mustacchi Salomone

Mustacchi Samuele

Nathan Fritz

Neumann

Notrica Perahia

Mustacchi Sofia

Nathan Jeannette

Giuseppina

Notrica Rachele

Nacamulli Elena

Nathan Raoul Elia

Neumann Kurt

Notrica Rachele

Nacamulli Gina

Nathan Simon

Neumann Livia

Notrica Rachele

Nacamulli Guido

Nathan Rogers

Neumann Marcello

Notrica Raffaele

Nacamulli Iside

Romeo

Neumann Maria

Notrica Rebecca

Nacamulli Lina

Nathansen Samuel

Neumann Viktor

Notrica Regina

Nacamulli Mara

Nauri Misa

Neumann Zoltan

Notrica Renata

Nacamulli Mario

Navarro Achille

Neuwohner Charlotte

Notrica Rosa

Nacamulli Ruggero

Navarro Alessandro

Nichtberger Bobi

Notrica Sadis

Nacamulli Umberto

Navarro Amalia

Nichtberger Dina

Notrica Salomon

Nacamulli Vittorio

Navarro Lina

Nichtberger Markus

Notrica Salvo

Nacamulli Vittorio

Navarro Regina

Nicolone

Notrica Samuele

detto Pupo

Allegrina

Pierfrancesco

Notrica Samuele

Nacamully Wally

Navarro Rosina

Ninos Luisa

Notrica Sara

Nachmann Caroline

Nazimov Ludwig

Nissim Alberto

Notrica Sara

Nachmansohn

Nazimov Simon

Nissim Augusta

Notrica Sultana

Moise

Negri Guglielmo

Nissim Graziella

Novelli Ugo

Nacson Anna

Nehama Sam

Nissim Luciana

Nuernberg Salomone

Nacson Elia

Neisser Arthur

Nissim Magenta

Nunes Adua

Nacson Giulia

Aaron

Nissim Marcella

Nunes Olga

Nacson Leone

Nelken Richard

Nizza Michele

Nunes-Vais Adolfo

Nacson Leone

Nemes Ferdinando

Eugenio

detto Fofi

Nacson Pacina

Nemes Maria

Nizza Umberto

Nussbaum Ernst

Nacson Rebecca

Nemni Abramino

Noah José

Oberdorfer Ada

Nacson Rebecca

Nemni Davide

Nordlinger Elsa

Oberdorfer Irene

Nacson Sara

Nemni Giulia

Norsa Diana

Oberdorfer Olga

Nacson Stella

Nemni Hlafo

Norsa Gaby

Obernbreit Adele

Nacson Stella

Nemni Isacco

Norsa Germana

Oberzanek Emanuele

Nador Margherita

Nemni Isacco detto

Norsa Giorgio

Oberzanek Samuele

Nagler Giacomo

Kaki

Norsa Giulio

Oberzanek Thea

Nagler Salo

Nemni Josef

Norsa Laura

Oblath Alessandro

Nahmias Rica

Nemni Jusef

Norsa Mario

Oblath Bianca

Nahmias Rosa

Nemni Miriam

Norsa Sergio

Maria

Nahmias Stella

Nemni Misa

Norza Ida

Oblath Dragica

Nahon Margherita

Nemni Mosè

Norzi Anna Luciana

Oblath Ivan Gelza

Nahoum Camelia

Nemni Renato

Norzi Edvige

Offner Sigismondo

Nahoum Rosa

Nemni Scelbia

Norzi Guido

Ojalvo Marco

Nahoum Valerie

Nemni Simone

Norzi Marco

Ojalvo Sara

Nahum Emilio

Neppi Gino

Norzi Todros

Oransz Maurizio

Nahum Rebecca

Emanuele

Notrica

Orefice Clotilde

detta Becky

Neppi Olga

Notrica Allegra

Orefice Edoardo

Nahum Zula

Neubauer Hugo

Notrica Giuseppe

Orefice Emma

Naim Vittorio

Israel

Notrica Graziella

Orefice Fanny

Namias Bruna

Neuberger Ugo

Notrica Haim

Orefice Giuseppe

Namias Enzo

Neufeld Irma

Notrica Hanula

Orefice Guido

Namias Ferruccio

Neufeld Nina

Notrica Isacco

Ornstein Tina

Namias Guglielmo

Neufeld Paolina

Notrica Jochevet

Oroster Masia

Nasch Albert

Neumann Alessandro

Notrica Judà

Ortona Bella

Nasch Ingeborg

Neumann Aranka

Notrica Lucia

Marianna

Nasch Karl

Neumann Eugenio

Notrica Matilde

Ortona Bellina detta

Nathan Arthur

Neumann Federica

Notrica Matilde

Adele

Abramo

Neumann Francesco

Notrica Matilde

Ortona Delfina

Nathan Assalonne

Neumann Frieda

Notrica Mazliah

Ortona Renato

Nathan Fritz

Neumann Giovanna

Notrica Miryam

Orvieto Ada

Orvieto Adolfo

Ottolenghi Lina detta

Paecht Karl Joseph

Pavoncello Anselmo

Arturo

Ninì

Paggi Dante

Pavoncello Anselmo

Orvieto Aldo

Ottolenghi Linda

Paggi Goffredo

Pavoncello Anselmo

Orvieto Alessandro

Ottolenghi Livia

Pahrah Elisabetta

Pavoncello Anselmo

Orvieto Amelia

Ottolenghi Marco

Palagi Franca

detto Chaim

Orvieto Angiolo

Ottolenghi Mary

Palagi Gino Umberto

Pavoncello Camilla

Orvieto Elisa

Ottolenghi Olga

Palombo Giacobbe

Pavoncello Cesare

Orvieto Guido

Maria Teresa

Palombo Leone

Pavoncello Cesare

Fortunato

Ottolenghi Salvatore

Palombo Matilde

Pavoncello Chiara

Orvieto Leone

Ottolenghi Silvio

Palombo Nahman

Pavoncello Clelia

Alberto

Salomon

Palombo Regina

Pavoncello Dora

Orvieto Lodovico

Ottolenghi Tesaura

Palombo Sara

Pavoncello Elio

Orvieto Nello

Ottolenghi Vittorio

Paneth Emil

Pavoncello Emanuele

Orvieto Rodolfo

Ovadia Corinna

Panzer Aron

detto Picchio

Orvieto Rosina Clelia

Ovazza Ada

Panzer Bianca

Pavoncello Emanuele

Orvieto Ugo

Ovazza Alessandro

Panzer Maurizio

Vittorio

Oser Cecilia

Ovazza Elena

Panzer Susanna

Pavoncello Emilia

Osillag Elena

Ovazza Ettore

Papini Alfredo

Pavoncello Emilia

Osimo Ada

Ovazza Riccardo

Papini Franco

Pavoncello Enrico

Osimo Giulio

Pace Armando

Papo Salomone

Pavoncello Giacomo

Osmo Dario Davide

Pace Celeste

Papo Sara

Pavoncello Giacomo

Osmo Ester

Pace Corrado

Papo Vittoria

Gaetano

Osmo Lucia

Pace Giacomo

Pardo Bea

Pavoncello Giuditta

Osmo Ninetta

Giacobbe

Pardo Elvira

Pavoncello Graziella

Osmo Rachele

Pace Gino

Pardo Roques

Pavoncello Leone

Osmo Roberto

Pace Renato

Giuseppe Abramo

Pavoncello Leone

Osmo Rosa

Pace Salomone

Parenzo Giuseppe

detto Cirillo

Osmo Sabino

Pace Sergio

Parenzo Italo

Pavoncello Lina

Osmo Sabino

Pace Umberto

Parigi Giorgio

Pavoncello Rebecca

Osmo Vittoria

Pacht Anny

Parigi Renzo

Pavoncello Renata

Ossia Israel

Pacifici Ada

Parigi Ugo

Pavoncello Samuele

Ostrowka Alfredo

Pacifici Alberto

Parin Gino Federico

Pavoncello Sergio

Ottenfeld Max

Pacifici Aldo

Paschir Liana

Pavoncello Umberto

Ottolenghi Ada

Pacifici Clelia

Passigli Eligio

Pawlowsky Hofman

Ottolenghi Adolfo

Pacifici Elena

Alfredo

Pea Karl

Ottolenghi Aldo

Pacifici Emma

Passigli Enzo

Pecar Davide

Ottolenghi

Pacifici Giulia

Passigli Ernesto

Pecar Leone Remo

Alessandro

Pacifici Giulia

Passigli Giuseppe

detto Leo

Ottolenghi Beatrice

Pacifici Goffredo

Passigli Goffredo

Pecar Zina Mirella

Ottolenghi Dorina

Pacifici Ines

Passigli Guido

Pelech Bernardo

Ottolenghi Emma

Pacifici Loris

Passigli Guido

Pelech Dora

Ottolenghi Enrica

Pacifici Luciana

Passigli Jenny

Pelletier Alice

detta Tina

Pacifici Riccardo

Passigli Leone

Pelosof Edgardo

Ottolenghi Felice

Pacifici Samuele

Passigli Lidia

Pepes Rachele

detto Felicino

Pacifici Sonia

Passigli Liliana

Percowiez Adolfo

Ottolenghi Giacomo

Pacifici Spartaco

Passigli Rodolfo

Perera Gabriella

Ottolenghi Giacomo

Padoa Carlo

Passigli Stella

Perera Luciano

Giorgio

Padoa Celina detta

Pavia Amelia

Perera Mirella

Ottolenghi Giano

Marcella

Pavia Egidio

Peretz Eliana

Olao detto Gianni

Padoa Leone

Pavia Roberto

Rachele

Ottolenghi Giorgio

Maurizio

Pavoncello Abramo

Perez Grazia

Ottolenghi Giulio

Padoa Olga

Pavoncello Alfredo

Perez Graziella

Ottolenghi Giuseppe

Padova Giorgina

Pavoncello Allegra

Perez Haim

Ottolenghi Gustavo

Padovani Grazia

Pavoncello Allegra

Perez Rachele

Ottolenghi Lidia

Lidia

Pavoncello Angelo

Perez Vittoria

Pergola Aldo

Pesaro Maurogonato

Piazza Sed Emma

Pincherle Giuseppe

Pergola Bixio

Adolfo

Piazza Sed Ester

Pincherle Giuseppina

Pergola Eleonora

Pesaro Oddone

Piazza Sed Eugenio

Pincherle Lina Dina

Perl Alice

Pescarolo Claudio

Piazza Sed Leda

Pincherle Vicini

Perl Meier

Pescarolo Eleonora

Piazza Sed Marco

Luigi

Perlmutter Achille

Pescarolo Enrico

Piazza Sed Rosa

Pincherle Vittorio

Perlmutter Bruno

Pescarolo Tullio

Piazza Sed Sara

Samuele

Perlmutter Gilmo

Pfeffer Rosa

Picciaccio Emanuele

Pincsohn Ernst

Perlow Aron Ernesto

Philipson Beniamino

Piccoli Amalia

Pincus Eric

Perlow Gisella

Piacentino Rubino

Pick Edvino

Pinhas Naftali

Perlow Giuseppe

Piattelli Bruno

Pick Gabriella

Pinkus Giulia

Perlow Mario

Settimio

Pick Giuseppe detto

Pinsk Regina

Perlow Mira

Piattelli Cesare

Riccardo

Pinto Vera

Perlow Paula

Piattelli Dora

Pick Nathan Oscar

Pinto Wanda

Perlow Silvio

Piattelli Elda

Pick Valeria

Pintora Giamila

Perlow Sonia

Piattelli Ezechiele

Pick Vittoria

Piperno Abramo

Pernetz Massimiliano

Luigi

Pickholz Augusta

Aronne

Perugia Angelo

Piattelli Franco

Pieri Rosa

Piperno Ada

Perugia Angelo

Piattelli Giacomo

Piha Bellina

Piperno Adriana

Perugia Angelo Vito

Piattelli Giacomo

Piha Caden

Piperno Aldo detto

Perugia Cesare

Marco

Piha Davide

Chianuglione

Perugia Clelia

Piattelli Lello

Piha Diana

Piperno Aldrato

Perugia Debora

Piattelli Letizia

Piha Isacco

Piperno Amelia

Perugia Debora

Piattelli Marco

Piha Maurizio

Piperno Angelina

Perugia Enrica

Piattelli Servadio

Piha Myriam

Piperno Angelo

Perugia Fortunata

Piattelli Settimio

Piha Rachele

Piperno Angelo

Perugia Gabriella

detto Negus

Piha Rebecca

Piperno Angelo

Perugia Giacomo

Piattelli Zaccaria

Piha Rebecca

Piperno Anna

Perugia Gilberto

Cesare

Piha Regina

Piperno Augusto

Giuseppe Alberto

Piazza Alceo

Piha Salomon

Piperno Aurelio

Perugia Giovanni

Piazza Angelo

Piha Sara

Piperno Benedetto

Perugia Italia

Piazza Angelo

Piha Sol

Ugo

Perugia Laura Elena

Piazza Anita

Piha Vida

Piperno Cesare

Perugia Lello

Piazza Bruno

Pilas Estrella

Piperno Cesare

Perugia Letizia

Piazza Donato

Pilosoff Aronne

Piperno Claudio

Perugia Marcella

Piazza Edvige

Pilosoff Bulissa

Piperno Corinna

Perugia Margherita

Piazza Elio

Pilosoff Eliezer

Piperno Elena

Perugia Mario

Piazza Elisa

Pilosoff Fassana

Piperno Enrica

Perugia Rosa

Piazza Elvira

Pilosoff Giuseppe

Piperno Ernesto

Perugia Sara detta

Piazza Emanuele

Pilosoff Haim

Piperno Fernanda

Serafina

Piazza Fernanda

Pilosoff Isacco

Piperno Fernando

Perugia Settimio

Piazza Giacomo

Pilosoff Maria

Piperno Giacomo

Perugia Vito

Piazza Gina

Pilosoff Matatia

Piperno Giacomo

Perugia Vittoria

Piazza Gino

Pilosoff Matilde

Piperno Gino

Perugia Vittoria

Piazza Giuseppe

Pilosoff Matilde

Piperno Giuditta

Perugia Vittorio

Piazza Maria Luisa

Pilosoff Mazaltov

Piperno Giuseppe

Pesaro Ada

Piazza Rachele

Pilosoff Nissim

Piperno Letizia

Pesaro Arnaldo

Piazza Regina

Pilosoff Rachele

Piperno Mario

Pesaro Canzio

Piazza Umberto

Pilosoff Rachele

Piperno Mosè

Pesaro Cesare

Piazza Virginia

Pilosoff Susanna

Piperno Nino

Pesaro Costanza

Piazza Sed Angelo

Pincherle Emilia

Giorgio

Pesaro Gualtiero

Piazza Sed Camilla

Pincherle Emma

Piperno Odorico

Pesaro Ida Benedetta

Piazza Sed Cesira

Pincherle Ernesto

Piperno Rambaldo

detta Tina

Piazza Sed Consola

Pincherle Giulia

Piperno Renato

Pesaro Lieta

Piazza Sed Costanza

Pincherle Giulia

Piperno Renzo

Piperno Roberto

Polacco Maria

Popelik Carla

Rabbeno Carla detta

Mosè

Polacco Mario

Popelik Erminia

Jolanda

Piperno Sarina

Polacco Massimiliano

Popper Alice

Rabbeno Rodolfo

Piperno Settimio

Polacco Moisè

Popper Elisa

Rabello Adele

detto Peppone

Polacco Mosè

Popper Gertrude

Rabello Armida

Piperno Sigfrido Ezio

Polacco Olga

Popper Olga

Rabinoff Anna

Piperno Tranquillo

Polacco Regina

Poras Catterina

Raccah Aldo

Mario

Polacco Regina

Poras Francesca

Raccah Giuseppe

Piperno Vera

Polacco Roberto

Poras Isidoro

Raffael Emilia

Piperno Virginia

Polacco Ruggero

Poras Rosa

Ragendorfer Benno

Piperno Virginia

Polacco Venturina

Porlitz Roberto

Ragendorfer Lucia

Pirani Clara

detta Annina

Ignazio

detta Luzzi

Pirani Lina

Polak Ginetta

Portaleone Armando

Rahamin Alice

Pisa Ida

Polak Jacob

Prato Laura

Rahamin Daniele

Pisante Elvira

Polak Wolf

Prausnitzer Caterina

Rahamin Elia

Pisante Giuseppe

Polatschek Elvira

Preiss Edgardo

Rahamin Giacobbe

Pisanti Giamila

Polgar Emerico

Preninger Sarah

Rahamin Matilde

Pisarz Josef

Polgar Mario Claudio

Pressburger Alfredo

Rahmiel Rosa

Pisetzky Arturo

Poliakoff Xenia

Pressburger Ernst

Rahn Jeanne

Pisetzky Dorotea

Politi Dora

Pressburger Gertrude

Rahn Nicola

Pitigliani

Pollack Carlo

Pressburger Heinrich

Rajner Darko

Bonaventura

Pollak Alberto

Pressburger Joseph

Rajner Hela

Evelina

Pollak Anna

Priester Meta

Rajnik Elisabetta

Plau Erich

Margherita

Printz Lillo

Cornelia

Plesneri Rachele

Pollak Cort

Prister Clementina

Rakosi Tibrio

Plitzka Sarah

Pollak Edoardo

Prister Leone Ettore

Alexander

Podolski Beatrice

Pollak Giacomo

Prister Margherita

Ramras Enrico

Podolski Siegbert

Pollak Giulio

Prister Sara Luigia

Randegger Irene

Poggetto Alberto

Pollak Ida

Pristiges Regina

Rapaport Caterina

Poggetto Clelia

Pollak Jaques

Pritsch Jacob

Raphael Clara

Poggetto Moise

Pollak Leo

Privitera Giuseppe

Rappaport Regina

Pokorin Paolo

Pollak Ludovico

Procaccia Ada

Rataud Henri

Polacco Abramo

Pollak Paul

Procaccia Aldo

Rath Elisabetta

Polacco Alba

Pollak Susanna

Procaccia Amedeo

Rath Emanuele

Polacco Albino

Pollak Valeria

Procaccia Amelia

Rath Nelly

Polacco Aldo

Pollak Volfango

Procaccia Elda

Rath Salomon detto

Polacco Athos

Pollitzer Giulio

Procaccia Ernesto

Salo

Polacco Carlo

Pollitzer Ilona

Procaccia Giuseppe

Ravà Alice

Polacco Cesare

Pollitzer

Procaccia Paolo

Ravà Beatrice

Polacco Clementina

Massimiliano

Procaccia Rina

Ravà Eloisa

Giuseppina

Pompas Vittorio

Procaccia Sabatino

Ravà Lazzaro

Polacco Elda

Haim

Procaccia Umberto

Ravà Renato

Polacco Emma

Pontecorvo Carlo

Prosckauer Fanny

Ravah Elia

Polacco Enrica

Pontecorvo Clelia

Provenzal Federico

Ravah Lucia

Polacco Ercole

Pontecorvo Ester

Provenzali Ada Rita

Ravenna Alba Sofia

Polacco Estella

Pontecorvo

Pugliese Anna

Ravenna Bianca

Polacco Giacomo

Gianfranco

Pugliese Emilia

Ravenna Ciro

Polacco Giulia

Pontecorvo Letizia

Pugliese Gemma

Ravenna Enrico

Polacco Giuseppe

Pontecorvo Luigia

Pugliese Sandra

Ravenna Eugenio

Polacco Ines

Pontecorvo Nella

Puhaz Chaja

Ravenna Eugenio

Polacco Iride Frida

Pontecorvo Olga

Rabà Edo

detto Gegio

Polacco Leda

Pontecorvo Sara

Rabà Ivo

Ravenna Franca

Polacco Linda

Pontremoli Amelia

Rabà Lanciotto

Eugenia

Polacco Linda

Pontremoli Daniele

Rabà Lina

Ravenna Germana

Polacco Marcello

Pontremoli Violetta

Rabà Vasco

Ravenna Gino

Ravenna Giorgio

Reginiano Ida

Reutlinger Albertina

Roditi Rosa

Ravenna Giulio

Reginiano Irma

Reven Adolfo

Rodriguez Berta

Ravenna Guido

Daisy

Revere Adriana

Roger Martin

Anselmo

Reginiano Isacco

Revere Alessandro

Roger Oscar

Ravenna Ida

Reginiano Julia

Revere Enrico

Rogonzinski Johanna

Ravenna Marcello

Reginiano Lidia

Revere Ines

Romanelli Angelo

Ravenna Margherita

Reginiano Liliana

Revere Olga

Romanelli Carla

Ravenna Mario

Reginiano Lina

Rexinger Ernesta

Romanelli Elsa

Ravenna Rino

Reginiano Louis

Reznik Michel

Romanelli Elsa

Lazzaro

Reginiano Mario

Ricchetti Edoardo

Romanelli Ernesta

Ravenna Roberto

Reginiano Nissim

Richetti Elisa

Romanelli Giorgio

Ravenna Rodolfo

Reginiano Quintilio

Richetti Enrico

Romanelli Lamberto

Ravenna Ugo

Reginiano Raffaele

Richetti Nora

Romanelli Laura

Ravenna Vittorio

Reginiano Raffaele

Richetti Vittorina

Romanelli Michele

Ravicz Alessandro

Reginiano Rahmin

Richter Sara Jalka

Marco

Ravicz Jean Jacques

Reginiano René

Richter Sigfried

Romanelli Raffaella

Rawicz Evelina

Reginiano Rina

Riesenfeld Berthold

Romanin Bianca

Razdovitz Wilma

Reginiano Rina

Riesenfeld Hans

Romano Abramo

Razon Nissim

Reginiano Saul

Riesenfeld Hermann

detto Beniamino

Raffaele

Reginiano Scialom

Rietti Alfredo

Romano Ester

Razon Sultana

Reginiano Scialom

Rietti Carlo

Romano Ferdinando

Susanna

Reginiano Vana

Rietti Emma

Vittorio

Razon Vittoria

Reginiano Vera

Rietti Gastone

Romano Giacobbe

Recanati Elena

Reginiano Vilma

Rietti Giulia

Romano Hanula

Recanati Flora

Reginiano Vittorio

Rietti Ilma

Romano Violetta

Recanati Rebecca

Reginiano Vittorio

Rietti Jole

Romano Vittorio

detta Rita

Reginiano Vittorio

Rietti Leonella

Rosati Paola

Rechnitzer Eugenio

Reginiano Vittorio

Rietti Marco

Rosenbaum Elena

Rechnitzer Matilde

Reginiano Vittorio

Rietti Nello

Rosenbaum Elena

Rector Arturo

William

Rignani Armando

Rosenbaum Ernst

Redlich Giuseppina

Reich Adele

Rignani Enrico

Rosenbaum Lea Isa

Reggio Gisella

Reich Alessandro

Rignani Marco

Rosenbaum Moses

Reggio Iole

Reich Elisabetta

Rignani Mario

Rosenbaum Rachele

Reggio Rina

Reich Lazzaro

Rimini Daniele

Rosenberg Elena

Reginiano Abramo

Reich Mariska

Ettore

Rosenberg Eliahu

Reginiano Abramo

Reich Rosa

Rimini Eleonora

Rosenberg Esther

William

Reich Sandro

Rimini Elvira

Laja

Reginiano Alfonso

Reich Teresa

Rimini Emilia

Rosenberg Friedrich

Reginiano Amalia

Reich Willy

Rimini Enrichetta

Rosenberg Lucia

Reginiano Beniamino

Reicher Marian

Rimini Lucia

Rosenberg Otto

Reginiano Buba

Reichmann Leopoldo

Rimini Margherita

Rosenberg Sofia

Reginiano Camilla

Reinach Ernesto

Rimini Pia

Rosenberg Thea

Reginiano Dora

Reinach Etta Maria

Rimini Rosina

Rosenblatt Raphael

Reginiano Efraim

Reiner Max

Ritter Ester

Rosenblum Fayga

Reginiano Esmeralda

Reininger Gustavo

Riviere Elena

Rosener Sara

Reginiano Ester

Reiter Eduard

Roberti Guido

Rosenfeld Bertha

Reginiano Ester detta

Reitzmann Alexander

Robitschek Caterina

Rosenfeld Davide

Rina

Reknitzer Adolfo

Rocca Cesare

Rosenfeld Haim

Reginiano Fortunata

Reknitzer Carlo

Rocca Gilberto

Enrico

Reginiano Ghibri

Reknitzer Mehemed

Rocca Giulio

Rosenfeld Ottone

Reginiano Grazia

Remondini Marcella

Rocca Valeria

Rosenfelder Heinrich

Reginiano Hamani

Rendel Augusta

Roccas Laura

Rosenholz Emilia

Reginiano Hamus

Resignani Itala

Roccas Mario

Rosenholz Ester Elsa

Reginiano Hlafo

Resignani Silvia

Roccas Renzo

Rosenholz Ignazio

Reginiano Hlafo

Resinger Etele

Roditi Luciano Israel

Isacco

Rosenholz Leone

Rotschild Paula

Sabatello Eleonora

Sacerdoti Camilla

Lajb

Rozanes Rosa

Sabatello Emma

Sacerdoti Clara

Rosenkranz Feige

Rozanes Sultana

Sabatello Emma

Sacerdoti Emilio

Rosenschein Sara

Rozay Teodoro Elia

Sabatello Enrica

Sacerdoti Evelina

Rosenschein Teresa

Rozio Ester

Sabatello Franco

Sacerdoti Franco

Rosenstein Amalia

Rozio Esther

Sabatello Giovanni

Sacerdoti Olimpia

Rosenthal Baruch

Rozio Jacob

Sabatello Graziella

detta Pia

Rosenthal Debora

Rozio Jacob

Sabatello Italia

Sacerdoti Renzo

Rosenthal Hanna

Rozio Rachele

Sabatello Leone

Sacerdoti Valeria

Rosenthal Ilka

Rozio Rahamin

Sabatello Letizia

Sachs Elsa

Rosenthal Leib

Rozio Sara

Sabatello Liana

Sachs Selma

Rosenthal Maria Sara

Rozio Silvia

Ornella

Sadis Esther

Rosenthal Nahum

Rubin Giulia

Sabatello Michele

Sadis Matilde

Rosenthal Otto

Rubin Misa

Sabatello Settimio

Sadis Nissim

Rosenthal Paola

Rubinfeld Chaim

Sabatello Tranquillo

Sadis Regina

Rosenthal Rodolfo

Rubinfeld Edward

Sabatello Umberto

Sadis Salomone

Rosenthal Werner

Rubinfeld Enrica

Sabbadini Elio

Sadun Amiel

Rosenwald Anna

Rubitscheck Fanny

Sabbadini Salvatore

Sadun Diodato

Clementina

Rubitscheck Laura

Sabbadini Sylva

Gastone

Rosenzweig Maria

Rudnitzky Elena

Sabbadini Vittoria

Sadun Gina

Rosenzweig Nathan

Rudnitzky Maurizio

Sabban Sultana

Sadun Gino

Rosner Emma

Rudnitzky Regina

Sabetai Davide

Sadun Lelio

Rosner Libe

Rudnitzky Roberto

Sabetai Nissim

Sadun Lya

Rosner Rosa

Rudoi Caterina Gitzel

Sabetai Salomone

Sadun Paolo

Rosselli Lucia

Ruerst Armando

Sacerdote Bice

Sadun Vittorio

Rosselli Marcella

Rukig Jetti

Sacerdote Camillo

Emanuele

Rossetti Maria

Rumeld Leib

Sacerdote Cesare

Sagi Luigi

Rossi Bice

Rumpler Adele

Sacerdote Claudio

Sagi Nicolò

Rossi Corrado

Russi Ada

Sacerdote Claudio

Saglia Luisa

Rossi Gino

Russi Ada

Sacerdote

Salambrassi Vassiliki

Rossi Giulio

Russi Giacomo

Clementina

Basilia

Rossi Letizia

Russi Irma

Sacerdote Davide

Salem Emanuele

Rossi Margherita

Russi Pia

Sacerdote Debora

Salem Salem

Rossi Milena

Russi Sergio

Dorina

Salem Samaim

Rossi Moisè Alberto

Russi Zoe

Sacerdote Emanuele

Salmona Josef

Rossi Sergio

Russo Abramo

Sacerdote Emilio

Salmoni Angelo

Pellegrino

Russo Alfredo

Sacerdote Emma

Salmoni Bianca

Rossman Elisa

Russo Benvenuta

Sacerdote Ernesta

Salmoni Celeste

Roth Alcher

Russo Esther

Sacerdote Estella

Salmoni David

Roth Aron Henri

Russo Esther

Sacerdote Giacomo

Salmoni Dora

Roth Emilie

Russo Maria

Sacerdote Giorgio

Salmoni Gilberto

Roth Noel

Russo Oro

Sacerdote Giuseppe

Raffaele

Roth Sabina

Russo Rebecca

Sacerdote Laura

Salmoni Gino

Roth Silvano

Rutkowski Maria

Sacerdote Lea Elena

Salmoni Renato

Roth Tereza

Ruzicka Elena

Sacerdote Luciana

Salmonì Riccardo

Rothbarth Guido

Ruzicka Vera

Sacerdote Marianna

Salmoni Romeo

Rothschild Elsie

Sabatelli Perla

Sacerdote Matilde

Rubino

Rothschild Menny

Sabatello Abramo

Sacerdote Nella

Salmoni Rosa

Rothschild Myriam

Sabatello Angelo

Sacerdote Rosy

Salom Aldo

Rothstein Adele

Sabatello Carlo

Sacerdote Sabato

Salom Moise

Rothstein Giorgio

Sabatello Carlo

Sacerdote Sergio

Salomon Emmy

Rothstein Giuseppe

Salvatore

Sacerdote Teodoro

Salomon Herbert

Rothstein Sara

Sabatello Celeste

Sacerdoti Adele

Salomone Paolina

Rothstein Wanda

Alba

Elvira

Salonicchio

Rotschild

Sabatello Dattilo

Sacerdoti Alessandro

Abramo

Salonicchio

Savic Giorgio

Schiffer Alessandro

Schwarz Benno

Alessandra detta

Savic Stefano

Schiller Giulia

Schwarz Giuseppe

Sarina

Saya Giacomo

Schingazz Anna

Schwarz Gustavo

Salonicchio Ester

Sayowici Baruch

Schingazz Giuseppe

Schwarz Maria

Salonicchio Lucia

Sayowici Dorotea

Schlaf Israele Isidoro

Schwarz Serena

Salonicchio

Sayowici Maurizio

Schlesinger

Schwarz Siegried

Salomone

Sbrana Gina

Schlesinger Luisa

Schwarzschild Berta

Saltiel Giacomo

Scandiani Bianca

Schlesinger Ruth

Schwarzschild Ernst

Saltiel Giovanni

Scandiani Luisa

Schlesinger Stella

Schwertfinger Ester

Maurizio

Scapa Mazaltov

Schlochoff Erich

Schwitz Eliana

Saltiel Joseph

Scaramella Messulam

Schloss Hans Werner

Schwitz Fanny

Saltiel Moise

Adelaide

Schloss Hermann

Schwolka Hermine

Saltiel Rachele

Scaramella Messulam

Schloss Iolanda

Sciaki Menachem

Saltiel Sanson

Anna

Schloss Paolo

Sciaki Nathan

Salzberger Edoardo

Scaramella Messulam

Schluesselberg

Scialom Humbert

Salzer Edmondo

Rosetta

Salomon

Scialom Liliana

Samaia Angelo

Scarar Francesco

Schmidt Antonia

Sciami Giacobbe

Samaia Ida

Scazzocchio Clotilde

Schmier Gisella

Sciami Giovanna

Samuel Esther

Scazzocchio Riccardo

Schmierer Felice

Sciami Luna

Samuel Sigismondo

Scazzocchio Virginia

Schmierer Pinkas

Sciami Nissim

Samuel Simeone

Scemarià Abramo

Schmolka Filippa

Sciami Salvatore

Samuelides Sam

Scemarià Bulissa

Schnapp Gerda

Sciarcon Bulissa

Sander Lilli detta

Scemarià Dora

Schnapp Littman

Sciarcon Esther

Babette

Scemarià Elia

Eisig

Sciarcon Estrella

Sander Ugo

Scemarià Esther

Schneider Michele

Sciarcon Felicia detta

Sandmann Sigfried

Scemarià Giacobbe

Schneider Theodor

Felicina

Sanguinetti Bruno

Scemarià Giacobbe

Schoenberger

Sciarcon Fortunata

Sanguinetti Emilia

Giacomo

Giuseppe

Sciarcon Giulia

Sanguinetti Renato

Scemarià Giuseppe

Schoenbrunn Joseph

Sciarcon Giuseppe

Sanguinetti Umberto

Scemarià Haim

Schoenfeld Bela

Sciarcon Isacco

Sansonovitch Anna

Vittorio

Schoenfeld Elvira

Sciarcon Lucia

Saphier Henni

Scemarià Hanula

Schoenhaut Leopoldo

Sciarcon Lucia

Saphir Emma

Scemarià Lea

Schoenheit Carlo

Sciarcon Matilde

Saralvo Cesarina

Scemarià Leone

Schoenheit Franco

Sciarcon Morris

Saralvo Corrado

Scemarià Lucia

Schoenstein Rosette

Sciarcon Mosè

Saralvo Giorgio

Scemarià Marco

Schott Alberto

Sciarcon Mosè

Saralvo Giovanna

Scemarià Mosè

Schott Enrico

Sciarcon Selma

Saralvo Lilio

Scemarià Mosè

Schotten Irma

Scikamovic Rachele

Saralvo Lindo

Scemarià Saruta

Schrecker Erwin

Scioa Camilla

Saralvo Mario

Schacherl Emil

Schreier Sofia

Scitrug Vittorio

Saralvo Rino

Schanzer Rodolfo

Schrotter Anna

Benedetto

Saraval Bruno

Schapira Leopold

Schubert Hans

Sciunnach Alberto

Saraval Eugenio

Schapira Paul

Schuler Augusta

Sciunnach Dattilo

Saraval Ida

Schapiro Elena

Schulmann Gabriel

Giovanni

Saravalle Emma

Schattner Grete

Schumann Davide

Sciunnach Fortunata

Sarfatti Lisa

Schatz Jakob

Schuskind Sabine

Sciunnach Giuditta

Sas Giulio

Schenkel Enrichetta

Schuster Eva

Sciunnach Leone

Sass Ernst

Schenkel Giuseppe

Schustermann Enrico

Sciunnach Letizia

Sass Peter

Scherzenberg Elena

Schustermann Jacob

Sciunnach Marco

Sass Rosa

Schfargel

Schustermann

Sciunnach Marco

Sattler Caterina

Schickler Elena

Marcella

Sciunnach Settimio

Saul Estrella

Schieber Rosa

Schustermann Moritz

Sdraffa Berta

Saul Rebecca

Schiff Sigismondo

Schwartz Hans Israel

Sed Alberto

Saveri Oscar

Schiffeldrin Kurt

Schwarz Adolf

Sed Alberto

Savic Antonio

Schiffeldrin Mosè

Schwarz Arthur

Sed Angelica

Sed Angelo

Segrè Fortunata

Selinsky Leo

Sermoneta Rosa

Sed Angelo

Gemma

Semele Ester

Sermoneta Rosa

Sed Cesira

Segrè Girolamo

Semmel Tynya

Sermoneta Rosa

Sed Emma

Ettore

Semo Anita

Sermoneta Salvatore

Sed Ester

Segrè Giulia Rosa

Semo Ester

Sermoneta Salvatore

Sed Fatina

Segrè Giulio

Semo Giuliana detta

Sermoneta Salvatore

Sed Gioia

Segre Giuseppe

Lilly

Sermoneta Silvia

Sed Giulia

Segrè Ida

Semo Leone

Sermoneta Virginia

Sed Giulia

Segre Ines

Senigaglia Arrigo

Sermoneta Vittorio

Sed Giuseppe

Segrè Isidoro

Seppilli Alessandrina

Seror Mina

Sed Graziano

Segrè Italia

Seppilli Emma

Servadio Letizia

Sed Lello

Segrè Lea

Mazaltov

Servadio Nives

Sed Leonardo

Segre Lelio Leone

Seppilli Lidia

Servi Affortunata

Sed Marco

Davide

Sereni Aldo

Servi Aldo

Sed Pacifico

Segrè Lidia

Sereni Angelo

Servi Arturo

Sed Pacifico detto Il

Segre Liliana

Sereni Eena

Servi Carlo

Toscanino

Segre Marco

Sereni Enzo

Servi Corrado

Sed Piazza Giuseppe

Segre Marco

Sereni Giacobbe

Servi Elda

Sed Piazza Graziadio

Segre Margherita

Giacomo

Servi Ester

Sed Piazza Pacifico

Segre Maria Bice

Sereni Isacco

Servi Fernanda

Sed Silvana

Segrè Marianna

Sereni Paolo

Servi Giovacchino

Seemann Hermann

Fanny Nella

Sereni Ugo

Servi Ida

Segall Maximilian

Segre Mario

Sereno Clara

Servi Irma

Segre Abramo

Segre Massimo

Serman Emil

Servi Lucia

Segre Adele Regina

Daniele

Sermoneta Alvaro

Servi Margherita

Segre Adriana

Segre Mirella

Sermoneta Amedeo

Sessa Virginia

Segre Alberto

Segrè Moise

Sermoneta Amelia

Sessi Ester

Segre Alberto

Segre Moise

Sermoneta Angelo

Sestieri Aldo

Segre Alberto

Segre Moise Mario

Sermoneta Anita

Sestieri Celeste

Segre Alberto

Segrè Nedda

Sermoneta Benedetto

Sezzi Augusto

Segre Alberto Carlo

Segrè Ottavio

Sermoneta Benedetto

Sezzi Riccardo

Maurizio

Segre Pia

Sermoneta Benedetto

Sforni Dosolina

Segre Alice

Segre Regina

Sermoneta Benedetto

Sforni Elda

Segre Anna

Segre Riccardo

Sermoneta Celeste

Sforni Gianfranco

Segre Annetta

Segre Roberto

Sermoneta Costanza

detto Franz

Segre Attilio

Segre Rosa

Sermoneta Costanza

Sforni Guido

Segre Beniamino

Segrè Rosa Emilia

Sermoneta Emma

Shalom Esther

Segre Carmen

Segrè Salvatore

Sermoneta Eugenio

Shalom Rebecca

Segre Cesare

Segre Salvatore

Sermoneta Eugenio

Shalom Samuele

Segre Cesare Davide

Segre Salvatore

Sermoneta Franca

Shalom Stella

Segre Clotilde

Samuele

Sermoneta Giuseppe

Shoumann Jolanda

Segrè Clotilde

Segre Sanson

Sermoneta Giuseppe

Sidi Lisa

Segre Delia

Segre Silvio

Benedetto

Sidi Renee

Segre Egle

Segre Spartaco

Sermoneta Isacco

Sidis Behor

Segre Elena

Segre Tullio

Sermoneta Isacco

Sidis Clara

Segrè Elena

Segre Ugo

Sermoneta Isaia

Sidis Isacco

Segrè Elena

Segrè Valentina

Sergio

Sidis Luna

Segre Emanuele Sion

Segrè Vittoria

Sermoneta Marco

Sidis Maria detta

Segre Emma

Segre Vittorina

Sermoneta Mario

Marietta

Segre Ermelinda

Segre Vittorio

Sermoneta Mario

Sidis Matilde

Bella detta Bettina

Seidenpelz Stella

Sermoneta Pacifico

Sidis Mordochai

Segre Ester

Seidl Edith

Sermoneta Pacifico

Sidis Rachele

Segre Eugenia

Seif Giacomo

Sermoneta Pellegrino

Sidis Stella

Segre Eva Raffaella

Seifter Adele

Sermoneta Prospero

Siebzehner Joseph

Segre Ezechiele

Seifter Bernhard

Sermoneta Renata

Sierzantowicz Lili

Sierzantowicz

Sobalska Rachele

Sonnino Guglielmo

Soriano Esther

Maurizio

Sojke Bernard

Sonnino Ida

Soriano Fortunata

Sigura Stella

Solal Olga

Sonnino Ilda

Soriano Giacobbe

Silber Ferdinando

Soliani Arturo

Sonnino Isacco

Soriano Giacobbe

Silberberg Berta

Soliani Umberto

Sonnino Isacco

Soriano Jenni

Silberger Nadia

Som Sauro

Sonnino Lalla

Rachele

Silbermann Berta

Som Silvia

Sonnino Leone

Soriano Mosè

Silbermann Carlotta

Sommer Taube

Sonnino Lina Maria

Soriano Nissim detto

Silbermann Valeria

Sommerfeld Leo

Sonnino Marco

Maurice

Silberstein Elena

Sommermann Carlo

Sonnino Margherita

Soriano Perlina

Silberstein Richard

Somogy Tiburzio

Sonnino Maria Luisa

Soriano Rachele

Silberstein Stella

Sona Giuseppe

Sonnino Mario

Soriano Rachele

Silberstein Walter

Sonino Guido

Sonnino Mario

Soriano Rachele

Silva Umberto

Sonino Paola

Sonnino Mario

Soriano Rachele detta

Giorgio

Sonne Feldora

Sonnino Massimo

Lily

Silvera Lelio

Regina

Sonnino Michele

Soriano Sara

Silvera Violetta

Sonnenfeld Ella

Sonnino Michele

Soriano Stella

Simberger Heda

Sonnino Adele

Sonnino Moise

Soriano Sultana

Simkovics Ermanno

Sonnino Alberto

Sonnino Mosè Marco

Sorias Giuseppe

Simkovics Eva

Sonnino Aldo

Sonnino Mosè Marco

Sorias Moisè

Simkovics Giorgio

Sonnino Amadio

Sonnino Nella

Sornaga Anna

Simkovics Giuditta

Sonnino Amedeo

Sonnino Pacifico

Sornaga Elena

Simkovics Giuseppe

Sonnino Amedeo

Sonnino Pacifico

Sornaga Enrichetta

Simkovics Guido

Sonnino Angelo

Armando

Spagnoletto Aurelio

Simkovics Mayer

Sonnino Angelo

Sonnino Paolo

Spagnoletto

Simkovics Nora

Sonnino Angelo

Sonnino Piera

Leonardo

Simkovits Adolfo

Sonnino Angelo

Sonnino Piero

Spagnoletto

Simon Max Guenther

Sonnino Angelo

Sonnino Pilade

Leonardo

Simon Paula

Sonnino Angelo

Sonnino Rachele

Spagnoletto Mario

Simoro Vittoria

Sonnino Bice

Sonnino Renato

Spagnoletto Noè

Simsolo Clara

Sonnino Celeste

Sonnino Roberto

detto Peppino

Simsolo Zafira

Sonnino Cesira

Sonnino Rosa

Spagnoletto Perla

Singer Franziska

Sonnino Costanza

Sonnino Rubino

Emma

Singer Mira

Sonnino David

detto Traballa

Spagnoletto Rosa

Sinigaglia Alda

Sonnino David

Sonnino Salomone

Spagnoletto Samuele

Sinigaglia Angelica

Sonnino Davide

Vito

Spagnoletto Settimio

Sinigaglia Angelo

Sonnino Edda

Sonnino Samuele

detto Vespillone

Sinigaglia Attilio

Giuditta

Sonnino Samuele

Spagnoletto Sofia

Sinigaglia Italo

Sonnino Elisa

Sonnino Samuele

Spagnoletto Virtuosa

Sinigaglia Leone

Sonnino Enrico

detto Lello

Spagnoletto Virtuosa

Sinigaglia Livia

Sonnino Ester

Sonnino Samuele

Spiegel Felice

Sinigaglia Nino

Sonnino Ettore

Sandro

Spiegel Jonas

Sinigaglia Oreste

Sonnino Eugenio

Sonnino Sara

Spiegel Pia

Sinigaglia Paride

Sonnino Fabrizio

Sonnino Speranza

Spielberg Arturo

Sinigaglia Teresina

Sonnino Fortunata

Sonnino Tina

Spierer Helene

Sinigaglia Vittoria

detta Nella

Sonnino Umberto

Spira Gisela

Sinigallia Luigi

Sonnino Gabriele

Sonnino Virginia

Spira Sigmund

Siptzinger Alberto

Sonnino Gabriele

Sonntag

Spiro David

Skrzynsky Mottel

Sonnino Giacobbe

Sonsino Nissim

Spitz Alberto

Slam Esther

Sonnino Gina

Sorani Aldo

Riccardo

Slatopoloski

Sonnino Giorgio

Soria Davide

Spitz Alfredo detto

Alexander

Sonnino Giuliana

Soria Sofia

Fredy

Sleidinger Arturo

Sonnino Giuseppe

Soriano Bellina

Spitz Anna

Slovak Margherita

Sonnino Grazia

Soriano Bulissa

Spitz Ella

Slukin Anna

Sonnino Grazia

Soriano Davide

Spitzer Emma

Spitzer Eugen

Spizzichino Norina

Stern Josephine

Surmani Esther

Spizzichino Ada

Spizzichino Pacifico

Stern Katalina

Surmani Giacobbe

Spizzichino Adelaide

Spizzichino Pacifico

Stern Rachele Lea

Surmani Haim

Spizzichino Alberto

Spizzichino Pacifico

Stern Samuele

Surmani Mirù

Spizzichino Alberto

Spizzichino Pacifico

Stern Simel Chaim

Surmani Mosè

Spizzichino Alberto

Spizzichino Regina

Sternbach Chaim

Surmani Orietta

Umberto

Spizzichino Ricca

Sternfeld Paolo

Stella

Spizzichino Alfredo

Spizzichino Rina

Sternthal Wolf

Surmani Rachele

Spizzichino Allegra

Spizzichino Rosa

Stettauer Paola

Surmani Rachele

Spizzichino Angelo

Spizzichino Rosa

Stiassny Ludwig

Surmani Samuele

detto Cazzodoro

Spizzichino Rosa

Stilermann Giulia

Surmani Sara

Spizzichino Bruno

Spizzichino Rubino

Stockfisch Armand

Surmani Stella

Pellegrino

Spizzichino Sara

Stockfisch Chaia

Suzeman Rachel

Spizzichino Costanza

detta Sarina

Isacco

Syrkus Paul

Spizzichino Elvira

Spizzichino Settimia

Stockfisch Henri

Szabo Emerico

Spizzichino Enrica

Spizzichino Stella

Stockfisch Kalman

Szabo Emerico

Spizzichino Enrica

Spizzichino Umberto

Stockfisch Maria

Szakacs Peter

Spizzichino Enrica

Spizzichino Umberto

Matza

Szapiro Ester

Spizzichino

Spizzichino Vittorio

Stolowiek Robert

Szatkownik Daniele

Enrichetta

Emanuele

Josef

Szatkownik Henri

Spizzichino

Spizzichino Vittorio

Stolzberg Czama

Szatkownik Sara

Enrichetta

Emanuele

Stolzberg Israel

Szcrycky Chaim

Spizzichino Ester

Spizzichino Virginia

Stolzberg Pinkas

Szecso Giuseppe

Spizzichino Eugenio

Springer Elisa detta

Strauber Gisela

Szego Paolo

Spizzichino Eugenio

Lizzi

Strauss Julius

Szekely Adele

Spizzichino Fiorina

Spritzmann Samuele

Strawczynski

Szekely Alice

Spizzichino

Stabholz Menasse

Zigmund

Szklozer Eva

Fortunata

Stahl Olga

Strehler Sara

Szmidt Szlama

Spizzichino

Staineri Carlo

Stricks

Szoelloessy Irene

Fortunata

Staineri Emanuele

Stricks Isidor

Szorenyi Adolfo

Spizzichino Franca

Starc Teodora

Strilzov Ljuba

Szorenyi Alessandro

Spizzichino Giacomo

Stark Paola

Strykowski Abraham

Szorenyi Arianna

Spizzichino Giacomo

Steigman Moses

Stuhl Herman

Szorenyi Carlo

Spizzichino Giacomo

Stein Hildegarde

Sturm Isacco

Szorenyi Daisy

Spizzichino Giuditta

detta Hilde

Sturm Jacob

Dorotea

Spizzichino Giuseppe

Stein Samuel

Sturm Maria

Szorenyi Lea

Spizzichino Grazia

Steinbach Arturo

Sturm Nissim

Szorenyi Rosalia

Spizzichino Graziano

Steiner Abramo

Stutz Hava

Szorenyi Stella

Spizzichino Graziella

Adolfo

Stutz Jenny

Szuecks Margherita

Spizzichino Ines

Steiner Aurelia

Stutz Saya

detta Manzi

Spizzichino Iride

Steiner Ernst

Stutz Sonia

Szwarc Simon

Spizzichino Jader

Steiner Eugenio

Stutzel Antonio

Tagger Eliezer

Spizzichino Lazzaro

Steiner Margherita

Stutzel Arnaldo

Tagliacozzo Ada

Spizzichino Letizia

Steinitz Regina

Subert Edvige

Tagliacozzo Amedeo

Spizzichino Letizia

Steinlauf Davide

Suesskind Arthur

Tagliacozzo Angelo

Spizzichino Luciana

Steinmann Filippo

Suessmann Giulia

Tagliacozzo Arnaldo

Spizzichino Marco

Steinmann Iris

Sulam Amelia

Tagliacozzo Celeste

detto L’Americano

Steinmann Regina

Sulam Rachele

Tagliacozzo Colomba

Spizzichino Mario

Stempa Adolf

Sulam Ruben

Tagliacozzo David

Spizzichino Mario

Stendler Giuseppe

Sullam Gisella

Tagliacozzo Enrica

Spizzichino Michele

detto Pino

Supino Teresa

Tagliacozzo Enrica

Ezio

Stendler Lina

Surmani Abramo

Tagliacozzo Ester

Spizzichino Mosè

Stern Francesca

Surmani Caden

Tagliacozzo Ester

Otello detto

Stern Gitl

Surmani Calomira

Tagliacozzo Gino

Bracarolo

Stern Haskel

Surmani Eliezer

Tagliacozzo Italia

Tagliacozzo Michele

Taussig Walter

Tedeschi Wanda

Terracini Nella Sara

Tagliacozzo Pacifico

Tayar Ester

Tedesco Ada

Tiano Salomone

Taich Federica

Tazartes Fatima

Tedesco Adele

Tiefenthal Wilhelm

Taieb Ester

Tedeschi Ada

Tedesco Cesare

Tiemann Joseph

Taigman Kalman

Tedeschi Ada

Tedesco Giulia

Tiersfeld Walter

Talmazschii Ghers

Tedeschi Adelaide

Tedesco Rocca Laura

Timberg Sabina

Talmazschii Regina

Tedeschi Adele

Teglio Carlo

Tint Herbert

Talmazschii Valerio

Tedeschi Adolfo

Teglio Ivonne

Tint Julius

detto Willy

Tedeschi Alberto

Teglio Margherita

Tint Ugo

Tammam Giulia

Sebastiano

Teglio Rita Sara

Tisminiezky Aronne

Smlei

Tedeschi Arrigo

Teglio Teresita

Walter

Tapiero Leone

Tedeschi Benvenuta

Teglio Ugo

Tisminiezky Boris

Tarica Alice

detta Ines

Teitel Adele

Tisminiezky Ester

Tarica Amelia

Tedeschi Bianca

Teitel Jacob

Tisminiezky

Tarica Bulissa

Tedeschi Bice

Tempel Adele Anna

Loredana

Tarica Elvira

Tedeschi Emanuele

Tempel Hanna

Todesco Alberto

Tarica Ester

Amedeo

Templer Jacob

Leone

Tarica Esther

Tedeschi Emma

Templer Salomon

Todesco Angela

Tarica Esther

Tedeschi Emma

Tepper Berta

Todesco Bruno

Tarica Esther

Bianca

Termini Vittorio

Todesco Emilio

Tarica Esther

Tedeschi

Terni Vittorio

Todesco Emma

Tarica Fassana

Ermenegilda

Terracina Adriana

Todesco Eugenio

Tarica Flora

Tedeschi Ernesta

Terracina Alberto

Todesco Fanny

Tarica Flora

Irma

Terracina Amedeo

Todesco Giuseppe

Tarica Fortunata

Tedeschi Eugenia

Terracina Anna

Todesco Marco

Tarica Giacobbe

Tedeschi Ezio

Terracina Anna

Todesco Mario

Tarica Ketty

Tedeschi Francesca

Maria

Todesco Sergio

Tarica Loretta

Tedeschi Franco

Terracina Cesare

Tolentini Oscar

Tarica Marco

Tedeschi Giacomo

Terracina Cesira

Tolentino Elena

Tarica Maria

Tedeschi Giacomo

Terracina Eleonora

Tolentino Elio

Tarica Maurizio

Tedeschi Giacomo

Terracina Emanuele

Tolentino Enrichetta

Tarica Mazaltov

Tedeschi Giacomo

Terracina Emma

Tolentino Ersilia

Tarica Mosè

detto Mino

Terracina Enrichetta

Tolentino Giulia

Tarica Mussani detto

Tedeschi Gino

Terracina Franca

Tolentino Irma

Il Vegliardo

Tedeschi Gino

Terracina Giacomo

Tolentino Paolo

Tarica Olga

Tedeschi Giorgio

detto Ciccio

Topsch Wilhelmine

Tarica Rachele

Eugenio

Terracina Giovanni

Emma

Tarica Rachele

Tedeschi Giuliana

Terracina Giuditta

Toribolo Teresita

Tarica Rebecca

Tedeschi Gualtiero

Terracina Leo

Torre Marco

Tarica Rebecca

Tedeschi Irene

Terracina Leone

Torre Salvatore

Tarica Rosa

Tedeschi Lidia

Terracina Leone

Torre Sansone

Tarica Sarina

Tedeschi Lionello

David

Torres Raoul

Tarica Sarota

Tedeschi Luciano

Terracina Leonello

Toscano Elena Ida

Tarica Simha

Tedeschi Mafalda Ida

Terracina Letizia

Toscano Eleonora

Tarica Sipura

Tedeschi Marco

Terracina Marco

Toscano Elisa

Tarica Sol

Tedeschi Marisa

Terracina Marco

Toscano Mario Mosè

Tarica Violetta

Tedeschi Natalia

Mosè

Toscano Rachele

Tarica Yeudà

Tedeschi Sabato

Terracina Mirella

Lina

Tarica Yohevet

Giuseppe

Terracina Pellegrino

Toscano Rebecca

Bohora

Tedeschi Salomone

Terracina Piero

Toscano Rosa

Tarnover Julius

Tedeschi Salvatore

Terracina Raffaele

Totter Matilde

Tarnowsky David

Tedeschi Silvio

Terracina Rina

Erminia

Tarnowsky Giuseppe

Tedeschi Umberto

Terracina Rosa

Tramer Alfredo

Tarnowsky Renato

Tedeschi Vittoria

Terracina Sergio

Tramer Enrichetta

Tauber Edvige

Tedeschi Vittorio

Terracina Virginia

Trautmann Regina

Treistmann Ariel

Turiel Michele

Valabrega Samuele

Venezia Elia

Leib

Turiel Rachele

Emanuele

Venezia Renata

Treppner Lina

Turiel Raffaele

Valabrega Stella

Venezia Salomone

Treves Adelaide

Turiel Rebecca Rifka

Valabrega Umberto

Ugo

Treves Alda

Turiel Salvatore

Valabrega Vincenza

Venezia Silvia

Treves Alfredo Moisè

Turiel Sara

Valech Alba detta

Veneziani Aida

Treves Amelia

Turiel Violetta

Albina

Veneziani Aldo

Treves Dario

Turmann Giuseppe

Valech Ferruccio

Veneziani Dario

Treves Elia Emanuele

Turowski Eugen

Valech Michele

Veneziani Dario

Treves Elisa

Turteltaub Edmondo

Valech Morosina

Veneziani Donato

Treves Elsa

Turteltaub Hans

detta Mosi

Veneziani Edgardo

Treves Eugenia

Turteltaub Walter

Valech Mosè Davide

Veneziani Giacomo

Allegra

Tylberg Marcello

Valentini Herbert

Veneziani Guido

Treves Giulia

Uggeri Bruna Teresa

Valentinuzzi Iris

Veneziani Lea

Treves Giuseppe

Ukmar Enrico

Valenzin Mario

Veneziani Margherita

Treves Luciano

Ullman Fanni

Valenzin Raffaello

Veneziani Maria

Treves Mario

Ullman Ruth

Valenzin Vittorio

Veneziani Pellegrino

Ezechiele

Ullmann Amelia

Valobra Alessandro

Veneziani Piero

Treves Renato

Ungar Nada

Valobra Alfredo

Veneziani Ubaldo

Treves Roberto

Unger Charles

Valobra Bruno

Veneziani Wanda

Treves Rodolfo

Unterberger Isol

Valobra Elsa

Veneziano Evelina

Trevez Giuseppe

Urbach Kurt

Valobra Enrico

Veneziano Mosè

Trevez Regina

Urbach Leo

Valobra Guglielmo

Marco

Trevi Aldebrando

Urbach Liliana

Valobra Guido

Ventense Erna

Trevi Anna

Urbino Ciro

Valobra Lazzaro

Ventense Lieselotte

Trevi Aurelio Angelo

Urbino Elda

Cesare

Ventoura Lina

Trevi Enrichetta

Usigli Edoardo detto

Valobra Sergio

Ventura Esther

Trevi Giacomo

Sacagnao

Valobra Vincenzo

Ventura Isacco

Trevi Ida

Usigli Guido

Valobra Violetta

Ventura Lucia

Trevi Valerio

Usigli Silvia

Vamos Alberto

Ventura Maria

Trevi Zoe

Usiglio Bondì

Vamos Mira

Ventura Zalma

Triebfeder Nathan

Giacomo

Vamos Nelly

Venziani Marcella

Trieste Celina

Uziel Odette

Vamos Sigismondo

Verderber Hanna

Troestler Wilhelm

Vacchi Uberto

Van Clef Giuseppe

Verderber Leo

Trotzer Zoltan

Vadana Leone

Varadi Alessandro

Verlengo Cesare

Tsciuba Rachele

Vajda Eugenio

Varadi Elisabeth

Verona Adriana

Tsciuba Toma

Valabrega Ada

Varon Allegrina

Verona Elda Saretta

Tuchmann Heinz

Valentina

Varon Ascer

Verona Giuseppe

Erich

Valabrega Alberto

Varon Bohor

Verona Giuseppina

Tuchmann Hilde

Valabrega Aldo

Nahman

Verona Lina

Rosy

Valabrega Alma

Varon Dora

Verona Umberto

Tuerkheimer Max

Valabrega Anselmo

Varon Giuseppe

Verschleisser Adolfo

Turad Renata

Valabrega Arturo

Varon Hasdai

Vic Margherita

Turiel Boaz

Valabrega Bruno

Varon Hasdai

Vidal Matilde

Turiel Boaz

Valabrega Ernesto

Varon Ida

Vidner

Turiel Celebi

Valabrega Evelina

Varon Laura

Vigevani Aida

Turiel Dolly

Valabrega Franco

Varon Leone

Vigevani Eda Anna

Turiel Esther

Valabrega Guglielmo

Varon Moisè

Vigevani Lionello

Turiel Ghedalia

Valabrega Leone

Varon Mosè

Vilma

Turiel Giuseppe

Italo

Varon Salomon

Vita Margherita

Turiel Isidoro Ezrà

Valabrega Luciano

Varon Signurù

Vita Finzi Alberto

Turiel Lea

Valabrega Michele

Varon Stella

Vita Finzi Laura

Turiel Lucia

Valabrega Roberto

Velc Ida

Vita Finzi Rosa

Turiel Maurizio

Valabrega Samuele

Venezia Alberto

Vital Abramo

Turiel Mazaltov

Davide

Venezia Dora

Vital Davide

Vital Giuseppe

Vivante Davide

Vogelbaum Selig

Weig Otto

Vital Rosina

Vivante Diamantina

Vogelmann Schulim

Weil Bertoldo

Vital Vittorio

Vivante Enrichetta

Vogelmann Sifra

Weil Eva Doris

Vitale Achille

Vivante Enrichetta

Vogelmann Sissel

Weil Hans

Vitale Aldo

Vivante Ester

Emilia

Weil Marianne

Vitale Arturo

Vivante Felice

Voghera Augusta

Weil Sofia

Vitale Benedetta

Vivante Felice

Voghera Enrico

Weiller Alessandro

Vitale Cesare

Vivante Fortunata

Voghera Ferruccio

Weiller Elena

Sanson

Vivante Francesca

Voghera Gino

Weinberg Giuseppe

Vitale Cesira

detta Fanny

Volterra Adrio

Weinberg Maria

Vitale Claudio

Vivante Giorgio

Volterra Aldo

Weinberg Wilhelm

Vitale Clelia

Vivante Giulia

Volterra Elena

Weinberger

Vitale Elvira

Vivante Ida

Volterra Ezio

Giuseppina

Vitale Emilia

Vivante Leone

Volterra Federico

Weinberger Haim

Vitale Eugenio

Vivante Moisè

Volterra Gastone

Joseph

Vitale Gemma

Vivante Rachele

Volterra Mario

Weinberger Malvine

Vitale Giuseppe Vita

Vivante Sabino

Volterra Mario

Weinberger Maria

Vitale Ilka

Benzion

Volterra Nissim

Weinberger Sara

Vitale Italo

Vivante Salvatore

Volterra Oscar

Weiner Walter

Vitale Lelio

Vivanti Alberto

Volterra Ugo

Weingarten Rudolf

Vitale Lia

Vivanti Amerigo

Volterra Umberto

Weinreb Sara

Vitale Marco

Vivanti Angelo

Angelo

Weinreich Hilda

Vitale Michele

Vivanti Angelo

Volterra Valentina

Weinstein Giuseppe

Vitale Prospera

Vivanti Angelo detto

Vorgeitz Augusta

Weinstein Marta

Vitale Rosa

Il Bassetto

detta Gusti

Weinwurm Ernst

Vitale Sergio

Vivanti Anna

Wachsberger

Weinzweig Kurt

Vitale Sergio

Vivanti Benedetto

Arminio

Weisenfeld Edgardo

Vitali Ada

Vivanti Benedetto

Wachsberger Clara

Weiser Golda

Vitali Alessandro

Vivanti Beniamino

Wachsmann Mordko

Weiss Alfredo

Vitali Ariodante

Vivanti Celeste

Wachsmann Vasani

Weiss Amalia

Viterbo Elena

Vivanti Celeste

Carlo

Weiss Arnold

Viterbo Margherita

Vivanti Diamantina

Wadatz Josef

Weiss Blanga

Viterbo Piero

Vivanti Elisabetta

Wagner

Weiss Carmen

Vitta Benvenuto

detta Betta

Waiss Paola

Weiss Desiderio

Mario

Vivanti Emanuele

Waktor Elsa Maria

Weiss Desiderio

Vitta Carlo

Vivanti Emma

Wald Paul

Weiss Elena

Vitta Cesare

Vivanti Eugenio

Wald Schachun

Weiss Eluda

Vitta Emma

Vivanti Fortunata

Waldbaum Meta

Weiss Felicita

Vitta Ernesto

Vivanti Fortunata

Waldman Alberto

Weiss Franco

Vitta Irma

Vivanti Giacomo

Waldman Franziska

Weiss Gisella

Vitta Marco Ettore

Vivanti Giacomo

Waldman Saul Behar

Weiss Hermann

Vitta Simone

Vivanti Isacco

Wallach Lote

Weiss Hilda

Vitta Zelman

Vivanti Italia

Wallach Max

Weiss Johann

Ferruccio

Vivanti Laura

Wallach Rosa

Weiss Malvina

Vitta Zelman Trieste

Vivanti Leone

Walter Margherita

Weiss Maria Teresa

Vivante Alba

Vivanti Letizia

Wandel Leone

detta Thea

Vivante Angelo

Vivanti Mosè

Warcholski Aronne

Weiss Mira

Fortunato

Vivanti Pellegrino

Warschauer Fritz

Weiss Nada

Vivante Angiolina

Vivanti Rachele

Wasser Ruth

Weiss Otto

Vivante Anna

Vivanti Raoul

Wax Moise Maurizio

Weiss Rudolf

Vivante Anna

Vivanti Vitale

Waychman Maurice

Weiss Sonja

Vivante Carmen

Vivanti Vito

Wazsony Eugenio

Weiss Stefania

Allegra

Vivanti Vito

Wechsler Ferdinando

Weiss Teresa

Vivante Costante

Vodicka Angela

Wechsler Leopold

Weissbach Anna

Vivante Davide

Vogel Ernestina

Weidenreich Ruth

Weissberger Marco

Weissbrod Fanny

Wohlmuth Siegfrid

Zamorani Annamaria

Zarfati Rosa

Weissenstein

Wohrisek Hilda

Zamorani Arrigo

Zarfati Salomone

Margherita detta

Wolf Emil

Zamorani Daniele

Zarfati Sergio

Grete

Wolf Felicita

Zamorani Elsa

Zarfati Settimio

Weisser Paolo

Wolf Henry

Zamorani Emilio

Zarfati Silvana

Weisskopf Alois

Wolf Leia

Zamorani Ilda

Zarfati Vitale

Jacob

Wolf Mayer

Zamorani Maria

Zarfati Zaira

Weisskopf Ida

Wolf Nelly

Zamorani Massimo

Zargani Lina Letizia

Weissmann Frieda

Wolf Rachele

Zarfati Alberto

Zausner Irene

Weisz Alberto

Wolf Sara

Zarfati Alessandro

Zeiger Olga

Weisz Alexander

Wolff Martino

Zarfati Angelo

Zeisler Aleksandar

Weisz Elisabetta

Wolff Meilech

Zarfati Angelo

Zeisler Oscar

Weisz Eugenio

Wolfinger Nathan

Zarfati Aurelia

Zeisler Regina

Weisz Oscar

Norbert

Zarfati Bianca

Zelebonovitz Grete

Welicka Ester

Wolfstein Margarethe

Zarfati Camilla

Zelebonovitz Moritz

Wenkert Isaac

detta Gretchen

Zarfati Celeste

Zelikovics Samuele

Werczler Davide

Wollisch Roberto

Zarfati Cesare

Zelikovits Karl

Werczler Ernesta

Wollner Gustavo

Zarfati Cesare detto

Zelikowski Leo

Werczler Guglielmo

Wollner Miranda

Soricetto

Zeljezniak Edviga

Werczler Lazzaro

Wormann Susanna

Zarfati Debora

Zelkowicz Heinrich

Werczler Simeone

Wortitzky Alois

Zarfati Elvira

Zeller Arturo

Alessandro

Wortmann

Zarfati Emma

Zeller Ermanno

Werndorfer Eugenio

Wortmann Herta

Zarfati Enrica

Zeltowski Abraham

Werndorfer

Wortmann Nella

Zarfati Enrica

Zenger Harry

Guglielmo

Xapcisk Ceslav

Zarfati Enrichetta

Zerkowsky Eric

Werner Giulia

Yaffe Gioia

Zarfati Ester

Zevi Anna

Wertheimer Silvio

Yaffe Mosè

Zarfati Fausta

Zevi Emma

Wessely Max

Yanni Sara

Zarfati Giacomino

Zieg Samuel Wolf

Wessler Elvira

Yeni Isak

detto Lupone

Ziegler Jack

Westreich Benjamin

Yeni Pia

Zarfati Giuseppe

Ziegler Joseph

Wetterschneider

Yerusalmi Aronne

Zarfati Grazia

Ziegler Liana

Karl

Yeshurun Matilde

Zarfati Italia

Ziegler Susanna

Wiener Max Israel

Yesua Alessandro

Zarfati Italia

Ziffer Emilio

Windreich Berta

Yesua Carlotta

Zarfati Lamberto

Ziffer Oscar

Windspach Amalia

Yesua Davide

Zarfati Lazzaro

Zigdon Rachele

Windspach Guido

Yohai Rebecca

Zarfati Leo

Zimmermann Guilia

Windspach Noemi

Zaban Amalia

Zarfati Leone

Zimmermann Sidoza

Winter Alfredo

Zaban Giulio

Zarfati Leone

Roha

Winterfeld Karhe

Zaban Marcella

Zarfati Leone detto

Zimmerspitz Josef

Winternitz Wolf

Annina

Vespilloni

Moses

Wiskanik Melitta

Zaban Massimo

Zarfati Marco

Zimmerspitz Rosalia

Wital Ilse

Zaban Wally

Zarfati Marco

Zinger Margherita

Witscharbe Giacobbe

Zaccar Allegra

Zarfati Marco

Zippel Herta

Witscharbe Valeria

Zaccar Speranza

Zarfati Marco

Zipper Carlotta

Wodak Mary

Zaduk Ivan Alfredo

Zarfati Michele

Zipszer Giannetta

Wofsi Joseph

Zaitschek Hans

Zarfati Michele

Zucker Jacob

Wohlgemuth

Zaitschek Josefine

Zarfati Milena

Zundler Henriette

Alexander

Zaitschek Leopold

Zarfati Pacifico

Cecilia

Wohlgemuth Ella

Zalai Federico

Zarfati Paola

Zwirblawsky Enoc

Wohlgemuth Herta

Zamatto Guido

Zarfati Primo

Hersch

Wohlgemuth

Zamojra Joseph

Zarfati Rina

Zylber Szaya

Margherita

Zamojra Markus

Zarfati Roberto

Zynger Jerachmil

Wohlgemuth Max

Zamorani Amalia

Abramo

8

A trial begins in Trieste in 1976 to prosecute those suspected of committing crimes at San Sabba. The media are abuzz; the public is agitated. The news does not pass by Haya. It enters her room, sits in her classes, sneaks into her dreams. The dreams circle around her mind, sometimes heavy and slow like a millstone, other times quick like flashes of fireflies; dreams crazed by a web-like ease which in wakefulness knit their sticky net around her, and she doesn’t know how to fend them off

in a nightgown she walks easily out of her childhood room, because the door has been smashed. haya goes to the trattoria leon doro and says, ein kaiserfleisch bitte, nein, nein, una costata di maiale affumicato cosparsa de cren fresco e accompagnata con gnocchi di pane, she says. e, per contorno? asks the waiter, buttoned up to his throat in a black soldier’s uniform. per contorno, haya repeats, per contorno, ein kipfel. ein kipfel? asks the waiter. non capisco, he says. then haya runs off. in her lace nightgown like a mad ophelia she runs into a toilet of which the door has also been smashed, she washes her hands, and at the window over the washbasin stands her white alarm clock, her old-fashioned big white alarm clock with two round white bells on it, and that great white alarm clock of hers ticks, tick-tock, tick-tock, so terribly, so loudly, so terribly loud… before haya’s eyes the white nightgown gets darker, and she sees herself standing on the walls of the gorica fortress in a smocked black dress that flutters in the wind and turns into a flock of ravens, and the ravens carry her on their wings to the sky

Haya is fifty-three and she reads the newspapers differently than she did during the war, when she was twenty. Stories circulate around school about the trial prosecuting suspects for crimes committed at San Sabba. In and out of class, grandchildren comb through the fates of their grandfathers, schoolteachers scour the past of their fathers, some aloud, some at a whisper. People divide into warring camps, plant themselves in cafés, evade each others’ eyes, turn away, the air around them thick with heavy breathing. Bundles of the past sprout on all sides. They swing like rotten cherries from which worms inch.

The President of the Republic declares the San Sabba rice mill a national monument in 1965, but at that point, in 1965, few people go to see it, because at the time it is still neglected, abandoned, rats breed there, cats roam through it, mildew wafts from the crumbling façades and a muffled echo circles through its walls. Ten years later the San Sabba rice mill is remodelled. It becomes a museum with mementos in glass cases in which whispers of the dead circle once again.

By car along State Highway 202 (exit Valmaura, Stadium, Cemetery) or, as Haya goes in 1976, taking bus Number 8, 10, 19, 20, 21 or 23 from Trieste, one arrives at the Ratto della Pileria 43. Every day (except 1 January and 25 December) between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. (admission free) one can step into the well-washed, indescribably quiet past; the barking of dogs does not reverberate; the oven has been demolished; there are no soldiers’ boots marching; the cells are empty: there are no groans, no ash; in the late evening hours no music swells; there is no licentious women’s laughter; no-one is dancing; it’s only shadows that flicker. History is served on a platter in a tidy fashion, sifted, polished, compressed into the grains that roll around noiselessly on the stone floors of San Sabba.

So, in 1976, when the trial begins to prosecute those suspected of committing crimes at San Sabba. Haya says, It is time, yes, and with a camera around her neck, in October 1976, she goes for a

Visit to the rice mill of San Sabba

In 1943 the Nazis move into a plant for husking rice, which at that point was empty, built in 1913 on the outskirts of Trieste, in the town of San Sabba. Inside the walls of the former factory compound stands a complex of buildings, a little city, architecturally almost entirely preserved. So with minor adaptations the Germans change the buildings into a prison, a camp, a “transit camp” from which people travel a long way by train to Auschwitz and Dachau, then briefly, with speed and efficiency, from their cells to the crematorium ovens, right there, not ten metres away. In San Sabba about a hundred and fifty people, Italians, Slovenes, Croats, Jews, Roma, partisans, children, homosexuals, age makes no difference (the Nazis don’t split hairs, everything and everyone gets a pass when the S.S. police and S.S. troops lay their hands on them), about a hundred and fifty people disappear daily in the spanking-new oven, the work of the skilled and proud mason Erwin Lambert, the designer of crematoria. The oven at San Sabba is still there on Saturday, 28 April, 1945, but on Sunday, 29 April, 1945, the Nazis blow up the chimney, demolish the crematorium building and remove all traces that can be hastily removed. On Monday, 30 April the detachments vanish — heading for Carinthia. Between three and five thousand souls are killed, following rules and regulations, in a tidy fashion; the job is done. Perhaps it could have been done better. Perhaps there could have been more incinerations, but, heavens, war is unpredictable. The liberators find three paper sacks for cement under the rubble of San Sabba, and in them human bones and ash which the fugitives have not had time to transport to the San Sabba docks, they are in such a hurry to flee. The little collective grave of the nameless shoved into these paper sacks is therefore saved, because the pelting rain of April 1945, perhaps intending to rinse clean the earth before the advancing summer, to set it to rights for a new age, decides suddenly to stop, as if it has had a change of heart. So, thanks to the heavens, the ashes of the last to be incinerated at the San Sabba rice mill are not turned into grey, squeaky mud from which children would make patty cakes had they passed through there, but instead become a burden few know what to do with, even many years later, some fifty years down the road.

I used to work at the rice mill. During the war I’d stop by the landing stage, partly out of nostalgia, partly to pick up an odd job. The Germans brought sacks of human ashes there. I saw. The sacks were bursting, the ash was leaking out. Charred, halfburned human bones floated on the sea. I saw them. I am Luigi Jerman from Kopar. I live in Trieste.

The Allies manage to catch the occasional fugitive; most elude their grasp. The Allies do, however, find trunks and jute sacks full of stolen goods, which the fugitives have not had a chance to cart off with them, and which they had spent two years eagerly collecting, because the Nazis are racing off to Carinthia. The Allies then send the stolen goods to Rome, where the sacks and trunks languish for fifty years in the cellars of the Ministry of the Treasury and Finance, waiting for someone to discover them again. Oh, there are all sorts of things in these sacks and trunks: watches, spectacles, combs, jewellery — rings, brooches, chains; there are powder compacts, pipes, beautiful pipes; there is money and bonds, furniture, bank books, insurance policies, silver; there are paintings, carpets, clothing, a lot of clothing, bedding, bicycles, typewriters, cameras; there are large wheels of Parmesan cheese, toothbrushes, tableware, fine porcelain — all of it nothing more than patches, debris, shreds of lives no longer living, of lives of those deported to Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, Ravensbrück and San Sabba. There are documents, photographs, camp uniforms, passes; there are drawings, maps and charts with locations where the inmates were buried before the oven started working at San Sabba. Something of this is preserved today at the Ljubljana historical archive. Some of it is at the San Sabba museum along with graphics donated by Zoran Mušić, originally from Gorizia, a Dachau prisoner, a student of Babić’s in Zagreb, who died a natural death, thank God, in Venice in 2005.

Rainer is a big honcho in the Adriatisches Küstenland — THE honcho. He controls all the regional heads and mayors, and determines the rules of behaviour for the collaboration armies, Italian, Slovenian and Croatian, and they obey him, these armies, humbly. Entire fascist military units enter into service in the S.S. forces, various police squads, the Special Inspectorate of Public Security under the command of Giuseppe Gueli, who lives well in lively Trieste, in a large villa on Via Bellosguardo and helps Rainer nab Jews and partisans. Rainer visits San Sabba often. Rainer loves going to San Sabba. A visit to San Sabba is like a little holiday for Rainer, a way to relax. Rainer’s buddies live at San Sabba, his companions from the camps, closed by then, in which they used to party after their hard labours. The central, six-storey building at San Sabba is a barrack; on the upper floors are the quarters of the German, Austrian, Ukrainian and Italian S.S. men, all of them small fry, and Rainer does not linger there. The kitchens and mess halls, clean and aired, are on the lower floors; the staff smile and Rainer is pleased. Outside, a small building is visible from the road, housing the sentries who guard everything and everybody, especially Commander Josef Oberhauser, whose flat is on the ground floor. Friedrich Wirth most often escorts Rainer on the rounds. After Wirth is killed by the partisans in May 1944, Rainer is accompanied by August Dietrich Allers.

The camp has a large yard. To the right of the entrance stood a building, no longer there. It housed the offices and flats of the officers and the Ukrainian women. Today there is a green lawn with trees and flowers. From the building that is gone there runs an underground corridor to the death cell. From the death cell captives exit quickly; to torture, then shooting, then the oven.

A bus arrived one Sunday crammed with people from, I think, Trieste. They were pushed quickly into that cellar there with the bricked-up window, the death cell; that same night all of them were shot. I believe they were hostages the Germans had rounded up in Trieste raids; there was an underground in Trieste. From my cell I witnessed an old man being savagely beaten, who, whilst sweeping up the courtyard had failed to put the rubbish in the exact place he had been ordered to by the S.S. officer. During a bombardment two prisoners managed to escape from their cells, while the Germans took refuge in the bunkers. By way of revenge they shot all the companions of the two prisoners. It was June 1944 when I realized what was happening. They were killing victims in the garage that one entered through a secret door in the kitchen, which led to the crematorium. One evening we saw a lorry arrive loaded with soldiers. We saw only their boots; their bodies were covered with blankets. When the lorry entered the garage they made us carry in all the wood we had previously sawn up. From the courtyard at night we could hear people coming and going, people screaming, crying and begging for mercy, uttering heart-wrenching pleas. The Germans turned up the volume on the music from their entertainment hall. Then the lorries turned on their motors and this incited the dogs to bark and growl, and we knew that the Nazis were killing people, we just couldn’t tell how. Only when we found the clothing of the people they’d killed and it wasn’t at all bloody, hardly a single drop of blood, did we realize. It was mostly the Ukrainians who did the killing, because by early in the afternoon they were already drinking, so by evening they’d be in good shape for killing. And the Germans took part in these orgies. One night they pulled five men out of our cell who never came back. I am Giovanni Haimi Wachsberger from Rijeka.

To the left of the entrance was a building which still exists. On the ground floor were workshops for tailoring and cobbling in which the prisoners must have done sewing; they were up to something there, repairing the officers’ shoes, just to keep busy, passing the time. The prisoners did not sew much nor did they fix shoes for long, because they hadn’t the time; they were soon replaced. In the building where the sewing was done and the shoes repaired were the halls for the S.S. officers and soldiers. In those halls the S.S. officers and soldiers drank a little, played a few rounds of cards; listened to the radio. There were seventeen small prison cells in that building, with six prisoners in each. In those little cells partisans, Jews and political prisoners had no time to relax. They stayed in the little cells for a few days, several weeks at most, and then they left, they were gone.

I was in cell Number 8, alone in the dark with the rats. There was only a tiny vent in the ceiling where air and light could filter in. Our food was passed through a little window in the cell door, which was otherwise always shut. During the afternoon and evening you could almost always hear people crying out in Slovenian, Italian and Croatian, then a truck would come into the yard and the driver would leave the motor to rumble to cover the wrenching screams. It was then we knew our companions had been dragged off to their deaths in the crematorium. When the sirocco blew, smoke with an unbearable stench seeped into our cells, the smell of burned human flesh. It made all of us vomit. I am Ante Peloza from Velih Muna.

The outlines of the demolished crematorium

The prison building from which camp inmates were taken who were targeted for transfer to Dachau, Auschwitz and Mauthausen

We were afraid of spies. We didn’t ask questions, we didn’t talk. A certain Kabiglio, a Jewish shopkeeper who was from Mostar, said, Look, that is an oven. They are burning people. Then I looked and I saw people disappearing beyond the door. Everything was happening at around ten or eleven at night. I heard the footsteps of the prisoners dragging on the stone paving, I heard women’s sandals, they made the loudest noise. The S.S. would turn on the engines of their lorries or the music way up, as if they were partying. Sometimes I heard cries for help. Sometimes I didn’t. I began to scribble down notes on the goings. There were no comings. One night I counted the footsteps of fifty-six people who went from the courtyard to the entrance of the crematorium; another night, seventy-three. Then I stopped counting, I stopped keeping track. My fourteen-year-old daughter was with me in the cell. They were killing children. I heard children calling out Mamma! Mamma! I am from Trieste. My name is Majda Rupena.

I am Albina Škabar from near Trieste. I was stripped bare, strung up to a beam by my plaits and beaten until I passed out. Then I was shoved into cell Number 7. At night I remember hearing terrible screams, horrible screams, coming mainly from the first few cells. Those people were taken away first. I can remember a woman who screamed, I am from Grabovizza! I am from Grabovizza! and she screamed, The S.S. killed my baby in its cradle! There was also one Olga Fabian from Slovenia there. I remember a 67-year-old woman from Trieste, from Via Milano. She kept saying, I am innocent! I am innocent! The smell of burned hair was the worst. After the war, I went back once to the rice mill and immediately fainted.

The S.S. officers dragged in all sorts of stolen goods along with the prisoners. Through a hole in the wall I saw soldiers pulling people across the yard, clutching them by the shoulders, and the people weren’t moving. One day a group of Jews interned on the island of Rab arrived. Most of them were from Zagreb. I remember a beautiful girl, they told me she was Greek. The whole group was transported to a German concentration camp, to Auschwitz, that is what they told me. Before they loaded them onto the train, they took everything from them, all their money and jewellery; we watched through a crack in the door. They knew where they were being taken. They told us, Lucky you who are staying here. They knew they would never come back.

Branka Maričić from Rijeka

I saw a tall, heavy S.S. officer, he told me, holding a little boy by the hand, barely more than an infant, he said, and leading him to the prison. The boy had black, curly hair and waddled. He was so small, he said, that he could barely walk. Then, suddenly, the infant, barely more than a infant, he said, the infant suddenly tripped and fell and the S.S. officer began kicking him furiously and he kicked the little boy, he kicked him and kicked him, and all the while he shouted and cursed and kicked him, he told me, until the little boy’s skull cracked open, then he stopped, he said. My name is Carlo Schiffer. I am testifying on behalf of my friend.

I am from Rijeka. My name is Dara Virag. I spent a year at the rice mill. They tortured me terribly. Till this very day I shiver at every sound. The sound of boots on the paving still makes me start and think, They’re coming!

In 1976, before and during the trial of those suspected of committing the crimes at San Sabba, lists of the accused are printed, their biographies are published, or rather summaries of their lives, because many of the people who were milling around the Adriatisches Küstenland between 1943 and 1945 have fat criminal dossiers, interesting and dynamic. Some of them have already been tried in Germany and are doing time for the monstrosities they committed in mental hospitals which were turned into euthanasia centres throughout the Reich, or at the camps of Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and beyond, the list is long, there were many concentration camps; some are dead (of old age, illness, execution, suicide), some have been released (most of the accused are released), some escape, some change their identity and vanish without a trace, most of them live here, there, everywhere, until today, until tomorrow. Christian Wirth, Gottfried Schwarz, Franz Reichleitner, Karl Gringers, Alfred Löffler, Karl Pötzinger, Kurt Richter, a crowd of companions, pals, old buddies, rests there in the German war cemetery on the slopes of Monte Baldo in picturesque Costermano, between the eastern shore of Lake Garda and the tourist town of Verona. Surrounded by vineyards and olive groves, the German war cemetery in Costermano lies in the shade of old cypress trees and is described as an attractive site by tourist brochures. There are more than eight hundred German war cemeteries the world over, in which tens of thousands are buried. Costermano is host to 21,972 German graves. So when the trial begins in April 1976 in Trieste against those suspected of being responsible for the crimes committed at the San Sabba rice mill during the German occupation of Italy, the bench for the accused is empty—the bench for the accused is empty—and the trial ends before it starts.

Haya deciphers her past. She builds a file of her past. From a newspaper she cuts out an incomplete list of S.S. men, incomplete because there are more than a hundred of them with some sort of rank and terrible power from 1943 to 1945, when they are dispatched to the Adriatisches Küstenland; more than a hundred of them saunter around the unrealized dreamland of the fictitious Adriatisches Küstenland, yet the list published in the papers gives barely fifty names. Where are the ordinary soldiers? Where are the German police officers? Where are the Ukrainians? Where are the Cossacks? Where are the women and the members of their families who spend their summers and winters on the shore and in the mountains, from 1943 to 1945? Where are the Italians in the service of the Reich? Where are the civilians, the silent observers, the invisible participants in the war? And Here, too, am I, Haya says. This list should be endless. This list is endless, she says.

In the newspaper cutting Haya finds names of people she met, at whose table she ate, with whom she shook hands (not often, thank God, she adds), and she searches, and researches, and arranges, and stops sleeping, staring instead into the yawning jaws of the Hydra, waiting for the poisonous fumes to spew forth, and Hercules is nowhere to be found. Oh, this eternal repetition, she says, can it be cut short?

Shortcuts, Saba tells Haya’s mother Ada at the Gorizia psychiatric clinic, shortcuts are the shortest way to get from one place to the next. But shortcuts are often impassable, impassable… Saba says.

And Ada, until her death repeats—Behind every name there is a story.

An incomplete list of the former members of Aktion T4 1943 transferred to Trieste and the surrounding areas (O.Z.A.K.)

Gottfried Schwarz, also known as Friedl, S.S.-Hauptscharführer (head squad leader), promoted after Aktion Reinhard to S.S.- Untersturmführer (second lieutenant). Date of birth unknown. Works in mental hospitals — euthanasia centres, at the Grafeneck Castle, in Bernburg and Hadamar as “cremator”, as deputy camp commander at Belzec, as commander of Sobibor. Dispatched to Einsatz R in Trieste in 1943. Killed in Istria. Buried at the German war cemetery in Costermano (grave No. 666).

Gottlieb Hering, born on 2 June, 1887, in Warmbronn, Württemberg, dies in hospital on 9 October, 1945, in unexplained circumstances. Serves for twenty years with Christian Wirth in Stuttgart criminal police, then on Aktion Tiergarten 4. Succeeds Wirth in 1942 as commander of Belzec camp. Like Wirth before him, at Belzec Hering gives himself free rein, indulging a variety of eccentricities, such as shooting at internees while galloping on horseback. About 601,500 people die and are killed at Belzec, most of them Jews. As far as anyone knows, only Rudolf Reder and Chaim Herszman survive. Like Wirth, Hering takes part after 1940 in the Nazi euthanasia programme. While Wirth supervises all six euthanasia centres in the Reich, Hering is in command “only” at Sonnenstein and Hadamer. Promoted to S.S.-Hauptsturm-führer in 1943 and made commander of the San Sabba camp, where he lives in small separate quarters with his secretary at that time, Helena Reigraf from Fellbach, whom he later marries. After Hering is admitted to hospital, Josef Oberhauser takes charge of San Sabba.

Franz Stangl, son of a night watchman, born in Altmünster, Austria, on 26 March, 1908. First works as weaver, then as policeman after 1931, S.S.-Hauptsturmführer (staff sergeant). Member of team that runs T4 euthanasia programme at Hartheim and Bernburg, Germany. Commander of Sobibor and later Treblinka, where he oversees the killing of some 900,000 Jews from 1942 to 1943. Transferred in 1943 to Italy, where he runs the R2 Zone (Udine) and organizes anti-partisan and anti-Jewish operations. The Allies capture him in 1945, but he escapes. With documents he is given by the Red Cross and with money that anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi Bishop Aloïs Hudal provides, Stangl goes to Syria, then to Brazil. Discovered in 1967 working at a Volkswagen factory in Sâo Paulo, arrested and extradited to Germany where he is imprisoned for life. Dies of a heart attack in Düsseldorf prison on 28 June, 1971. Stangl designs and oversees the building of the fake train station at Treblinka in order to deceive future victims. For future “guests”, camp painters paint words of welcome in black lettering on big backdrops: BAHNHOF OERMAJDAN — UMSTEIGEN NACH BIALYSTOK UND WOLKOWYSK (OBERMAJDAN STATION — CHANGE HERE FOR BIAŁYSTOK AND VOLKOVYSK). Signs are erected to indicate a ticket window, first-, second- and third-class waiting rooms, and on the façade of the entire mirage they hang a railway clock. S.S.-guards stride around in uniform, pretending to work for the railway. The fake station is actually the reception for Treblinka camp. Stangl loves horses, so he rides through his camps dressed in white, as he also loves this colour.

Ask away, my conscience is clear. I was commander of Treblinka, yes, but I never had anything to do with killing Jews. My conscience is clear.

How many people were killed in a day?

A transport of thirty freight cars. Three thousand people could be liquidated in three hours. When we worked for fourteen hours, 12,000 to 15,000 people were annihilated.

I heard that Wirth visited the camp while they were building the gas chambers and he said, Marvellous! We’ll try them out straight away. Bring in those twenty-five Jewish workers and pack them all into one of the chambers, so we can see how it works. That is the way they talked. All the time he’d be brandishing his whip, they said, and he beat his own men. I got there later.

Would it be true to say you got used to the liquidations in time?

Well, apparently I did.

In days? Weeks? Months?

It was months before I could look each of the future victims in the eye. I repressed the nausea: I tried to create a special place. I ordered flowers to be planted at the camp, new barracks, new kitchens, I brought in barbers, tailors, shoemakers, carpenters. There are many ways in which a person can chase away troubling thoughts, and I used them all. But in the end only drinking helped. I had a large glass of brandy before I went to bed each night.

And then it all became easier?

Not really. But I concentrated on my work. I worked hard.

And finally you forgot you were working with people?

When I was on a trip once, years later in Brazil, my train stopped next to a slaughterhouse. The cattle grazing in the pens trotted up to the fence and stared at our train. They were very close to my window, one jostling the other, looking at me through that fence. I thought then, This reminds me of Poland. That’s how the people looked at me there: trustingly, just before they went into the… I couldn’t eat tinned meat for a long time after that. Those big cows’ eyes staring at me, those animals who had no idea that in no time they’d all be slaughtered…

So you didn’t feel the camp inmates were people?

Cargo. They were cargo.

When did you begin to think of people as cargo? When you first came to Treblinka you say you were horrified by the heaps of dead bodies lying all around the camp.

I think it started the day I realized that Treblinka was a death camp, a Totenlager. Wirth was standing there, next to the pits full of blue-black corpses. These corpses had nothing to do with humanity. They were masses of rotting flesh. Wirth asked, What shall we do with this rubbish? Maybe that’s when I thought, of course, they are just plain cargo.

There were many children in that “cargo”. Do you know that not a single child survived Treblinka? Did you ever think, what if those were my children? Did you ever think of how you would feel in the position of their parents?

No. You see, I did not look upon them as individuals. They were always a mass for me. I sometimes stood on the wall and watched them being herded through the tube. They were naked, crowded, packed together, driven by whips, running towards the ovens…

Why didn’t you take any steps? Why didn’t you put a halt to the horror? You were high in rank.

Impossible, impossible. This was the system, and Wirth invented it. The system worked. And because it worked, it was irreversible.

Werner Dubois, S.S.-Oberscharführer, senior squad leader. Born in Wuppertal on 26 February, 1913. Raised by grandmother. Eighth-grade education. Construction and graphics worker, brush maker, farmer. Driver in the S.S.-Gruppenkommando Oranienburg, driver and guard at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, in Brandenburg, Grafeneck and Hadamar. As cremator, transports corpses and urns. Transferred as a driver in 1941 to the O.T. (Organization Todt) in Russia. In Lublin (Aktion Reinhard) in 1942, after that in Belzec until April 1943. At trial, twenty-eight years later, describes killing six people with a 9-mm Belgian F.N. Browning, and, at Wirth’s command, another six exhausted Jews, who were later flung into a pit. Supervises the arrival of all transports. Transferred to Sobibor after the closing of Belzec in June 1943. In Sobibor loves shooting at inmates. Badly wounded during the uprising. After hospital treatment is transferred to Trieste as member of Aktion R, tasked with killing partisans. In May 1945 arrested by American soldiers. Released in late 1947. Works as locksmith until final arrest. At Munich trial (1963–4) acquitted of charges; in Hagen (1966) sentenced to three years in prison for participating in killing at least 15,000 people in Sobibor. Dies in 1973, before the 1976 Trieste trial. At trial for Sobibor crimes, only Dubois admits guilt: A crime was clearly committed at the camp. I aided in that crime. I will consider it a just sentence if you declare me guilty. Murder is murder. All of us are guilty. The camp was run by a chain of command and if one link had failed, the whole system would have collapsed… We did not have the courage to disobey.

Friedrich Tauscher, born in 1905, S.S.-Oberscharführer, otherwise a detective, works in Belzec as instructor for cremating corpses. From 1943 to 1945 serves in Trieste and surroundings. Commits suicide in prison in 1965.

Lorenz Hackenholt, born on 25 June, 1914. At wife’s initiative, declared dead as of 31 December, 1945. Member of S.S. from 1934. Begins career as driver at Sonnenstein, then works in Grafeneck, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. One of the key organizers of the euthanasia programme. Wirth’s favourite. Participates in Belzec and Treblinka installing gas chambers, which he later runs. In Belzec and Treblinka they call the gas chambers Stiftung Hackenholt (Hackenholt Foundation), and on the façade of each gas chamber, at Lorenz’s order, a large Star of David is mounted for all to see. In 1943 promoted to S.S.-Hauptschar-führer. Serves in Italy from 1943 to 1945. Drinks heavily; loves taking photographs. A big man, more than two metres tall. In 1945 simply vanishes under circumstances that have never been explained; police and secret services search for him in vain until mid-1970s, when the Hackenholt case is placed ad acta. S.S.-Oberscharführer Erich Bauer, also stationed at San Sabba and imprisoned for life in 1950 for crimes committed at Sobibor, where more than 250,000 Jews were killed, declares under oath in 1961 that Hackenholt gets through the war alive and is in hiding using the name Jansen, Jensen, or Johannsen, working as a truck driver. Bauer also claims that Hackenholt spends the last days of the war somewhere near Trieste with a woman named Monika. The police in Trieste question all members of the R1 unit — Frau Lindner, Frau Fettke, Frau Schmiedel and Frau Allers, as well as Dietrich Allers, the final San Sabba commander — but no-one knows anything about Hackenholt being involved with any woman in Italy. They all agree, however, that Hackenholt is a common drunkard and few of them fraternized with him. S.S.-Scharführer Karl Schluch, Hackenholt’s colleague from Treblinka and San Sabba, who is never convicted (after his trial in the 1960s, he is cleared of all charges), claims that Hackenholt is ruthless and brutal. S.S.-Unterscharführer Robert Jührs (cleared of all charges) is also in Belzec and Trieste with Hackenholt, and says: “He wanted to piss with the big boys, but he couldn’t lift his leg.”

Hackenholt is charged with participating in the murder of more than 70,000 German mentally ill patients, as well as the liquidation of more than 1,500,000 Jews during Aktion Reinhard.

Globočnik honours Hackenholt with the Iron Cross, Trieste, 1944

San Sabba, 1944

Erich Bauer, S.S.-Oberscharführer, born in 1900. Short but strong, exceptionally cruel. Manages gas chambers in Sobibor. Stationed in Italy at San Sabba, 1943 to 1945. Arrested in 1950, recognized by chance at a Berlin around amusement park by Samuel Lerer, survivor of the camps. In 1951 sentenced to death; after death penalty is abolished in Germany, sentence is commuted to life. Dies in prison in Berlin in 1980.

Arthur Daschel, guard and cremator of corpses at Sonnenstein. At Belzec and Sobibor oversees building of camps. Lives in and around Trieste from 1943 to 1945, after which all trace of him is lost.

Hubert Gomerski, S.S.-Oberscharführer. Supervisor at Sobibor, member of T4 group, spends years 1943 to 1945 in and Trieste. In 1948 sentenced to life imprisonment, released in 1972 for ill health, but in 1974 sentenced to another fifteen years.

Karl Frenzel, S.S.-Oberscharführer. Born on 28 August, 1911. Carpenter. Member of Nazi Party from 1930. Involved in T4 programme. Arrives in Sobibor in 1942 with Stangl’s crew. After Sobibor revolt, sent to Italy and subordinated to Christian Wirth. Stationed in Trieste and Rijeka. Works in theatre after the war as a lighting technician. Arrested in Charged with personally murdering forty-two and taking part in the murder of at least 250,000 Jews. Sentenced to life imprisonment, but released after sixteen years on grounds of poor health. At time of Trieste trial in 1976 under house arrest in German village of Gorben-aufder-Horst.

Franz Wolf, S.S.-Unterscharführer, sergeant, amateur photographer, otherwise mason. Born in 1907 in Heidelberg. Works in Sobibor. Stationed in Rijeka during Einsatz R. At Sobibor trial in Hagen in 1966 sentenced to eight years in prison. After serving sentence, lives in Bavaria until death.

Erwin Lambert, S.S.-Unterscharführer, mason, member of Nazi Party since 1933. Known as “the flying architect” because he rushes from one camp to another, building, erecting, arranging, refining gas chambers. Born in 1909 in Schildow, near Berlin. Installs gas chambers at Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Bernburg and Hadamar 1962. euthanasia centres. At Treblinka and Sobibor supervises construction of barracks with gas chambers. Ends career in Trieste with introduction of crematorium at San Sabba camp. Arrested in 1962, charged with participating in the murder of an unknown number of Jews, sentenced in 1965 to four years in prison.

Ernst Lerch, S.S.-Sturmbannführer, born in Klagenfurt in 1914. Works from 1931 to 1934 as waiter in hotels in Switzerland, France and Hungary, then until Anschluss in 1938 in his father’s café, Café Lerch, a watering hole for the underground Nazi movement in Carinthia. Thus Globočnik, Classen and Kaltenbrunner often stop by at Café Lerch. Lerch is a member of the Nazi Party from 1932, and is in the S.S. by 1934. Transferred to Berlin in 1938 to Central Office of Reich Security. Soon marries an employee of the Gestapo. Pohl and Globočnik are best men at his wedding. Becomes member of the Wehrmacht in December 1938; works in the Central Office of Reich security police from 1940 to 1941, then transferred first to Cracow, later to Lublin, as head of Globočnik’s office and Stabsführer der Allgemeinen S.S. Lerch is one of the key people in Aktion Reinhard responsible for the “Jewish Question”, that is for the mass murder and annihilation of Jews within the borders of the General Government.

After Aktion Reinhard winds down, Lerch is transferred to Trieste in September 1943, again as Globočnik’s right-hand man in O.Z.A.K. (Operationszone Adriatisches Küstenland). Extensive authority in leading the antipartisan operations in which hundreds of anti-fascists are killed. Serves several weeks as temporary chief of Rijeka police.

After Germany surrenders, Lerch flees to Carinthia, where the British Army arrests him on 31 May, 1945 with companions Globočnik, Höfle and Michalsen. During investigation conducted in prison in Wolfsburg, Lerch claims he spent only a brief time in Lublin and had nothing to do with Globočnik or the mass annihilation of Jews. Lerch is then allowed a discreet escape from prison, and hides in Austrian villages until 1950. Wiesbaden court, which spearheads the de-Nazification process of the country, sentences Lerch to two years in prison in 1960, and then in 1971, at a trial in Klagenfurt, Lerch is charged with participation in the Holocaust. Due to lack of witnesses and Lerch’s insistent denials of activity in Poland, case is closed in 1976.

Until his death in 1997 Lerch runs his own café in Klagenfurt, and anyone who so desires (and knows of Lerch) can see him there, in Klagenfurt, otherwise known as Celovec, eating Apfelstrudel and reading the newspaper.

Hermann Höfle, S.S.-Sturmbann-führer, major. Born in Salzburg, 19 June, 1911. Member of Austrian Nazi Party from 1930. Mechanic by trade. Runs a taxi service in Salzburg. During the war a key figure in Aktion Reinhard and involved in Mielec, Lublin, Rzeszow, Warsaw and Bialystok deportations. In Eichmann’s escort when Eichmann tours Belzec and Treblinka. Personally selects from transports who will work in camps. Joins Globočnik in Trieste in early 1944. Arrested in Carinthia on 31 May, 1945, with Lerch, Michalsen and Globočnik, but escapes. Lives in Italy, Germany and Austria. Arrested again in 1961 in Salzburg and transferred to Vienna. Hangs himself in prison on 20 August, 1962.

In 2000, when certain documents from World War Two are made public, a telegram is found dated 11 January, 1943, from Höfle to Adolf Eichmann in Berlin. In the telegram Höfle lists the number of registered deaths in camps related to Aktion Reinhard. Up to 31 December, 1942: Majdanek: 24,733; Belzec: 434,508; Sobibor: 101,370; Treblinka: 713,555; total for year of 1942: 1,274,166 murdered Jews.

Robert Jührs, S.S.-Untershar-führer. Born 17 October, 1911, in Frankfurt. Eighth-grade education. Works as porter, janitor, house painter and usher at Frankfurt Opera. During war: Hadamer, Belzec, Dorhusza, Sobibor, Trieste. Task in Belzec: killing Jews who are in poor physical condition as soon as they arrive at camp. At trial, states: I did this out of mercy. I always aimed my machine gun at the head. They died instantly. With absolute certainty I can state that none of them suffered. Charged with killing thirty Jews. At trial in Munich in 1963–64 acquitted of all charges.

Otto Stadie, S.S.-Stabsscharführer, born in 1897 in Berlin. Before the war works as nurse. Part of T4, 1940. At Treblinka from July 1942 to July 1943 as Stangl’s assistant. In Trieste, San Sabba, from 1944. At trial in Düsseldorf (Treblinka) in 1964–65 sentenced to seven years in prison. Date of death unknown.

Paul Bredow, Unterscharführer. Born in 1902. Nurse. Service: Grafeneck, Hartheim, Sobibor, Treblinka, Trieste. Hobby: shooting at live targets. In Sobibor, quota: fifty Jews per day. Has a weakness for perfumes. After the war, with colleague, Karl Frenzel, leaves San Sabba and works in Giessen as carpenter. Killed in road accident in Göttingen in December 1945.

Heinrich Unverhau, S.S.-Unterscharführer, born in 1911, eighth-grade education, works as plumber, musician and nurse at euthanasia centres of Hadamar and Grafeneck, where he takes victims to gas chambers, administers shots of sedatives; after the murders airs rooms and removes corpses. Russia: 1941–42; Belzec and Sobibor: 1942–43; San Sabba: 1943–44. Vindicated at trials for Grafeneck (1948), Belzec (1963–64) and Sobibor (1965), and released. Works as nurse from 1952 onwards, and as musician on the side. Date of death unknown.

Ernest Zierke, S.S.-Unterscharführer, born in 1905. Eighth-grade education. Worker in sawmill. Carpenter and locksmith. Member of National Socialist Workers Party, 1930. Nurse at Grafeneck, Hadamar and Sonnenstein. 1941–42 in Russia, 1942–43 at Belzec and Sobibor. Supervises escorting of Jews to gas chambers. Takes part in execution of last camp inmates as Belzec and Sobibor are closed. At San Sabba, December 1943. Acquitted at all trials due to poor health.

Karl Schluch, S.S.-Unterscharführer, born in 1905 in Lauenburg. Part of T4 programme from 1940 on. Guard. As with Unverhau, escorts victims to gas chambers and supervises cremation. Grafeneck, Hadamar, Russia, Belzec, Sobibor, Trieste — San Sabba — Aktion R. Acquitted at all trials from 1948 to 1965. Works after war as agricultural worker, construction worker, nurse.

In Belzec and Sobibor I supervised the disembarkation of the Jews from the freight carriages via the ramp. During disembarkation, Wirth told the Jews they had come there for transfer, that they would soon be travelling on further, but that they should first go to the baths and be disinfected. It was my job to calm the Jews. After they had stripped naked, I would show them the way to the gas chambers. Yes, I saw all the gas chambers. The ones in Belzec were 4 x 8 metres. They looked cheery, not a bit alarming. The doors were yellow or grey, I can’t remember. The walls were painted with oil paint. In any case, the floors and walls were easy to wash. I think there were showers on the ceiling.

I believe the Jews were convinced that they really were going to the baths. After they entered the gas chambers, Hackenholt would personally close the doors and then switch on the gas supply. Five or seven minutes later, someone would look through the small window into the gas chamber to verify whether all inside were dead. Only then were the outside doors opened and the gas chambers ventilated, after which a Jewish working group under the command of their kapo entered and removed the bodies. I supervised all this. The Jews inside the gas chambers were so densely packed that they did not die on the floor but one on top of another, heaped in disorder, some of them kneeling, some of them standing, they were covered in spittle, urine and shit, their lips and the tips of their noses were bluish, some of them had open eyes. The bodies were dragged out of the gas chambers and inspected by a dentist, who removed the rings and gold teeth. Then the corpses were thrown into a big pit. Both Wirth and Oberhauser took part in these operations.

Willi Mentz, S.S.-Unterscharführer, born in 1904. Dairy farmer. Works in 1940 on farm of Grafeneck euthanasia centre, tending to herds of cows and pigs, but in his free time participates in gassings. Later, at Hadamar, he gardens, waters the flowers and cuts the grass, and also, when free, assists in killing the mentally ill. From 1942–43 likes to drink beer in the shade at Treblinka, in the open makeshift café at the entrance to the little zoo that he maintains. After Sobibor, transferred in 1944 to San Sabba concentration camp, tasked with killing partisan fighters and Italian Jews. Passionate amateur photographer, goes on outings with Kurt Franz in and around Gorizia. (And for Kaiserfleisch at the Trattoria Leon d’Oro on Via Codelli during the spring of 1944, when he wipes his mouth on his sleeve instead of using a serviette, surprising Haya.)

At Treblinka, under Wirth’s command, Mentz lines up inmates along the edge of a pit, then shoots them in the back of the head. At Treblinka nicknamed “Frankenstein”. At the S.S. garrison at Treblinka only Mentz and Kurt Franz know how to ride, so they ride through the nearby woods and enjoy the fresh air. While they ride around the camp compound, Mentz enjoys shooting at Jews who serve as live targets, so he shoots and shoots and shoots. This earns him another nickname: “Gunman”. Sentenced to life imprisonment.

When I arrived at Treblinka, everything was in chaos. There weren’t enough gas chambers. Afterwards we built new ones, five or six more spacious and attractive chambers. If the little chambers had accommodated between eighty and one hundred people, the larger ones could hold at least twice as many.

Otto Horn, S.S.-Untersharführer (sergeant), born in 1903 near Leipzig. Nurse. Member of Nazi Party from 1937. Sent in 1941 to Sonnenstein as member of T4 Programme, and in October 1942 to Treblinka where he supervises the Grubenkommando, whose task it is to cover piles of bodies with sand and chloride of lime. At Treblinka had reputation of a decent man who does no-one harm. Leaves Treblinka after rebellion, simulating illness. In January dispatched to Trieste, but refuses to comply and goes home. Acquitted at Düsseldorf trial in 1965.

Name?

Otto Richard Horn.

Living in?

Berlin.

Date of birth?

14 December, 1903.

How old are you?

I’m dead.

What was Treblinka?

A camp. A death camp. They gassed people there.

Who did you report to upon arrival at Treblinka?

The deputy commander, Kurt Franz. He sent me to the Upper Camp, the Totenlager.

What tasks were handled at the Upper Camp?

Unloading trains and undressing.

Whom?

Mainly Jews.

Is that all that went on at the Upper Camp?

No. People were gassed and their corpses were burned.

Did they gas men only?

No. Men and women.

And children?

And children.

Who was the commander of the Upper Camp?

Matthes.

And for all of Treblinka?

Stangl.

Aside from the Germans and Ukrainians, were there prisoners at the Upper Camp?

There were. About two hundred prisoners worked at the Upper Camp. Jews.

What did they do?

They moved the corpses to the pits and burned them.

Where did they move the corpses from?

From the gas chambers.

Were there female prisoners at the Upper Camp?

Yes. They worked in the laundry. Six of them.

Do you remember the names of these women?

No. But one of them testified against me at the Düsseldorf trial in 1965.

Mr Horn, how long did it take to gas a person?

About an hour. After that the chambers were opened.

And then?

Then the corpses were taken to the pit and burned there.

What kind of gas was used at Treblinka?

I don’t know. I think that some motors produced the gas.

Mr Horn, you knew that the euthanasia programme meant killing children as well, did you not?

No, I didn’t know that.

But you were present at Treblinka when they gassed children.

Yes. They killed them all — children, women, men.

And you saw murdered children?

Yes.

Where were you standing when you saw the dead children?

At the pits.

You are accused of the murder of thousands of Jews, is that right?

Yes, yes.

And some Jews came to the trial and testified against you, is that right?

Yes, but they couldn’t prove anything.

What was the final verdict?

I was acquitted of all charges and declared innocent.

Completely innocent?

Absolutely. Completely.

Heinrich Matthes, S.S.-Oberscharführer. Born in 1902 in Wermsdorf, near Leipzig. Trained as tailor, later pre-qualifies as nurse. Works in psychiatric institutions throughout Germany, which makes him suitable for inclusion in T4 programme. Amateur photographer. As of 1934 an S.A., member of Nazi Party from 1937. Supervises work of gas chambers at Treblinka from 1942–43. Exceptionally pedantic and jumpy, quick on the draw. Transferred to Sobibor, then Trieste in early 1944, where he works as a policeman and guard at San Sabba. Sentenced to life imprisonment in 1965 for crimes committed at Treblinka.

What is your name?

Eliahu Rosenberg.

How old are you?

Eighty.

You lived in Warsaw until 1942?

Yes.

Then on 11 July of that year you were deported to Treblinka?

It was summer. Very hot. As soon as they unloaded us, I heard a camp inmate say to his friend in Yiddish, Moshe, grab a broom and sweep! Sweep like crazy! Save yourself! Then Moshe got hold of a broom, climbed into the freight carriage which had just been emptied and started sweeping.

What did you do?

An S.S. officer came over. He was holding a long Peitsche, a whip, and with it he was performing acrobatics in the air. He selected some thirty men and told them, Throw down your parcels in the pile here and start sorting. We sorted shoes into one pile, children’s clothes into another, gold into a third. They were huge piles, as tall as buildings. There were all sorts of things on them: toys, instruments, tools, medicine, clothing, so much clothing… I found a way into that group. We worked until dark.

Your mother and three sisters came on the same transport?

Yes. They were ordered to go left. There was a lot of shouting on the platform. Some people were killed right there, for the hell of it.

Did you see your mother and sisters after that?

No. I found out where they were buried.

At Treblinka?

At Treblinka.

What happened the next day?

The next day we sorted again. New clothing, new shoes. Then S.S.-Scharführer Matthes came and shouted, I need twenty volunteers for a light ten-minute job. I was standing right next to Matthes and I was afraid he might strike me, so I stepped forward. I was seventeen. They took us to Treblinka 1, towards a gate camouflaged with pine branches. They took us in and then we saw a pile of corpses. Then Matthes howled, An die Tragen! but we didn’t know what he was asking us to do, so we began running around the bodies. Then the Jews who were already working there told us, Two of you grab hold of a corpse and put it on a stretcher. Then we carried the bodies some two hundred metres to a mass grave and flung them down below.

How deep was that grave?

Roughly seven metres.

And you carried the corpses that way all day?

All day. From the gas chambers to the grave.

What did you do later? You carried corpses?

And burned them. Some couldn’t stand it. They killed themselves, hanged themselves with their own belts.

You witnessed the entire process of destruction?

The whole process.

Describe it briefly.

The people walked along the famous Himmelstrasse from Treblinka 1 to Treblinka 2. There were S.S. men and Ukrainians standing along Himmelstrasse with dogs, whips and bayonets. People walked in silence. That was in the summer of 1942. They didn’t know where they were going. When they entered the chambers, the Ukrainians turned on the gas. Four hundred people in one small chamber. The outer doors could hardly close behind them. We stood by the door. We heard screams from inside. Half an hour later they were all dead. Two Germans stood there listening to what was going on. At the end they’d say, Alles schläft—They’re all asleep. Then we would open the door. The bodies fell out like potatoes. Bloody, covered with urine and shit. People bled from their ears and noses. It was dark inside the chamber. People would jump over one another to catch some air. They’d try to break down the door. The stronger ones would trample the children and the weak. Some people were unrecognizable. There were crushed children’s skulls…

After a while they started burning the corpses?

In February 1943.

Did any of the high-ranking officials visit the camp?

Himmler came in January 1943. He ordered that the bodies be removed from the graves. We took the corpses out with excavators and burned them.

Did the transports arrive every day?

Yes. Until the winter of 1943. Then they came less often. A transport would arrive every two or three days.

How many people worked on removing the corpses from the gas chambers?

About two hundred.

Were the people who arrived at Treblinka killed that same day?

Yes. Very quickly.

Where did the people who were killed at Treblinka come from?

At first they came from Poland. Later from all over Europe, from Belgium, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, from Serbia, from the Netherlands…

How do you know?

When I carried the corpses out of the gas chambers, I saw documents falling out of their anuses and vaginas. There were those who remained alive, too.

What happened to them?

Sometimes when we were removing the corpses we’d find a child still alive. The Germans immediately shot all survivors.

Were the Ukrainians in uniform?

Yes.

What sort of uniforms?

Black.

Like the S.S. men?

The S.S. men had green uniforms. With a skull.

Were there several gas chambers in every building?

In one there were three chambers, in another five on one side and five on the other. I remember when all the chambers were working simultaneously. In forty-five minutes ten thousand people went in. Thirteen thousand people arrived at Treblinka that day.

The gas chambers were hermetically sealed?

Yes.

I call witness Avraham Lindwasser.

I am Avraham Lindwasser.

How old are you now?

If I were alive, I would be eighty-seven.

On 28 August, 1942, you arrived at Treblinka from Warsaw?

Yes.

Was there a sign at the station, in German and Polish?

Yes.

What did it say?

It read: after you have bathed and changed your clothes, your journey will continue to the east, to work. But then they opened the freight carriages and started shouting, Get out! Get out! and they beat us with their clubs. We didn’t understand what was happening. We were chased to the square and ordered to hand over our money and jewellery. We were told to take off our shoes. Then they lined us up in threes and went on beating us. Then a man with stripes appeared, I later learned he was called the Hauptmann with spectacles, and he began asking us one by one what our professions were. When he came to me he looked at me — I also wore spectacles, in a golden frame, he came up close and asked, Is that frame made of gold? and I said, It is, it is gold, and he then said, Do you know what gold is? Do you know what silver is? Do you know what jewellery is? and I said, Yes, and he struck me again with his club. Then he told me to step forward. A Jew was standing next to me, an electrical engineer, and he was also ordered to step forward. We were the only two to step forward from the line.

How many people were there in that transport?

More than a thousand.

When you came, did you know where you were?

No. Only that we had arrived at Treblinka.

You had heard about Treblinka in Warsaw?

We had heard.

Did you know that Jews were being exterminated at Treblinka?

We did not believe those stories.

You did not believe?

One simply could not grasp that it was possible — extermination. But when we set out from Malkinia towards Treblinka, I saw the Polish railway workers making signs at us — they were drawing their fingers across their throats. I remembered that later.

Did you see corpses when you got off the train?

Yes.

And?

At first I thought they were the corpses of those who had died on the trip, that they would be bathed and buried. Then Matthes took me into a building at Treblinka 2 and ordered me to begin dragging bodies towards the graves.

In the evening, you again came across the Hauptmann with spectacles?

Yes.

What did he say when he saw you dragging bodies?

He asked why I was dragging bodies. He said, After all, you’re a dentist, you shouldn’t be dragging bodies.

You are a dentist?

No, I am not.

And?

He pulled me by the sleeve, seized me by the hand, dragged me by force, again with blows to the back — I want to stress this — he kept hitting me, and he brought me to a well. Next to the well there were basins with gold teeth and also pairs of forceps for extracting teeth. He said, take the forceps and start extracting teeth from those corpses over there. The corpses were lying by the back exit of the gas chambers.

From where they took them to the graves.

Yes.

And you extracted their teeth?

I did.

You extracted teeth from corpses until the revolt?

Not exactly. I extracted teeth for about a month, a month and a half, until I recognized my sister’s body.

She was lying there, among the dead?

Yes. Then I told the group commander Dr Zimmermann to give me another job. I told him I couldn’t go on with that one.

Who was this Zimmermann?

Dr Zimmermann was the kapo of the dentists.

A Jew?

Yes. I asked him to take me off teeth extraction and put me on cleaning the teeth in the cabin where we lived.

Teeth were being cleaned there?

Teeth were being cleaned there.

How much gold from extracted teeth was sent out of Treblinka each week?

Two suitcases, each weighing between eight and ten kilograms.

Where were the suitcases sent to?

Matthes, one of the camp commanders who also supervised our barracks, said they were dispatched to Berlin.

Did they only contain gold teeth?

Gold teeth and also false teeth removed from bridges. Porcelain teeth.

What did the Germans call the transports of Jews?

They called the bodies die Figuren, as if they were dolls, and the actual transport they called die Scheisse, die Lumpen and other insulting names. It was forbidden to mention victims or corpses or bodies. Everything was secret. When Matthes came down with typhus, he raved in a delirium about the burnings and the gas chambers, so they posted a guard by his bed to silence him if necessary.

Gustav Münzberger, S.S.-Unterscharführer, born on 17 August, 1903. Works as a carpenter, first at his father’s firm, then at a paper factory, and then in the euthanasia centre at Schloss Sonnenstein where he helps in the kitchen as well, so becoming a cook. Was in the S.S. from 1938, in Lublin in 1942, at Treblinka 1942–43 assists Heinrich Matthes in managing gas chambers. Member of team for transporting corpses. In Trieste and Udine in November 1943. Arrested in 1963 at first trial for crimes committed at Treblinka in 1965; sentenced to twelve years in prison. Released for good conduct in 1971. Dies in 1977. His son Horst remembers him as a tender father.

August Miete, S.S.-Unterscharführer. Born in 1908, member of the Nazi Party from 1940. Part of T4 (Grafenek and Hadamar) 1940–42. Treblinka: June 1942-November 1943. Nickname: “Angel of Death”. One of cruellest S.S. men. Shoots without remorse, straight at head, whenever moved to do so. Sentenced in 1945 to life imprisonment. Dies in prison.

Josef Hirtreiter, S.S.-Scharführer, born in 1909. Nickname: “Sepp”. Low I.Q. Held back twice in elementary school; fails locksmiths examination. Finds work as labourer at construction site. Member of Nazi Party from 1932. Hadamer 1940 (washes dishes); Sobibor and Treblinka 1942–43. Speciality: killing one- and two-year-old children: when transports are being unloaded, grabs children by the legs and smashes them against a freight car. The children expire instantly, their skulls crack open. In October 1943 transferred to anti-partisan unit of Trieste police force. Arrested in 1946. Sentenced in 1951 to life imprisonment at the Frankfurt trial. Released in 1977 due to illness and dies six months later in old people’s home in Frankfurt.

August Hengst, S.S.-Unterscharführer, born in 1905 in Bonn. Cook and pastry chef. Member of Nazi Party from 1933. Member of T4 from 1940. Installs kitchen at Brandenburg euthanasia centre and cooks there. Also cooks at Treblinka before 1943, then transferred to Udine, and on to San Sabba, where apart from cooking up swill for camp inmates, he bakes cakes for the commanders. Rainer adores his poppy-seed cakes and strudels. After the war Hengst opens a bakery near Hamburg and local housewives fight over his butter rolls. Closes bakery due to illness and finds work as courier in the port of Hamburg. Likes to wear wide-brimmed hats. Date of death unknown.

Karl Schiffner, S.S.-Unterscharführer, born as Karl Kresadlo in 1901 in Weisskirchlitz, now Novosedlice, the Czech Republic. Trained as carpenter and tradesman. Serves in Czech Army 1921–23. After Czech occupation joins S.A. and later the S.S. troops “because the black uniforms look better”. Works at Sonnenstein euthanasia centre until 1942. In Lublin, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka until late 1943, when he is transferred to Trieste to an antipartisan police unit. After the war flees to Carinthia, arrested and held by the British Army at Usbach camp until October 1945. Leaves the camp to go to Salzburg.

Fritz Küttner, S.S.-Oberscharführer, born in 1907. Sentry for many years in German police, supervisor in Camp 1 at Treblinka. Despised by camp inmates. A snooper. Follows and searches inmates, beats them ferociously, then flogs them with a long whip and takes away the smallest piece of personal property they have (family photographs, letters, money), then sends them to infamous Lazarett. Nickname: “Kiwe”. Takes advantage of the helplessness of certain inmates and turns them into informers. Dispatches children to gas chambers without blinking. After Treblinka transferred to Trieste. Dies before trial begins.

Fritz Schmidt, S.S.-Unterscharführer, born in 1906 in Eibau, Germany. Guard and chauffeur in Sonnenstein and Bernburg 1940–41. Chauffeur and head of garage at Treblinka in 1942; looks after equipment for gas chambers. In Trieste in 1943. Arrested by the Allies in Saxony. In December 1949 sentenced to nine years in prison, but escapes to West Germany and no-one cares. Dies in 1982.

Albert Franz Rum, S.S.-Unterscharführer, born in 1890 in Berlin. Nightclub waiter and policeman. Member of Nazi Party from 1933. Stationed at the Berlin T4 headquarters after 1934, works there as photographer. Treblinka 1942–43. When Treblinka is dug up and the camp closed in autumn 1943, Kurt Franz orders him and Willi Mentz to kill the last thirty Jews, which they do, of course. After Treblinka transferred to Trieste as Wirth’s orderly. Sentenced to three years in prison in 1965, but dies before verdict is announced.

Franz Suchomel, S.S.-Unterscharführer (sergeant), born in 1907 in Krumau, today’s Czech Republic. Tailor. From 1940 to 1942 part of the T4 euthanasia programme in Berlin and Hadamar (department of photography). Treblinka 1942–43. Assigned to Treblinka “railway station” where he supervises the processing of women (stripping, gynaecological examinations, shaving of hair) before they are escorted to the gas chambers. Later runs section of “Goldjuden”, in which some twenty inmates — Jews, mostly goldsmiths, watchmakers and bankers — are assigned to collecting and sorting confiscated money and jewellery. In October 1943 sent to Sobibor, then to Trieste. Arrested in 1963 and at first trial for crimes committed at Treblinka in 1965 sentenced to six years in prison. Released in 1969. Dies in 1980 with a relatively clear conscience.

9

So, in 1976 Haya makes a little file, utterly pointless. She writes out notes, arranges them, rearranges them, as if shuffling a pack of cards. I could play solitaire with these notes, she says, which, in a sense, she does. This dog-eared file, full of cracked photographs of people, most of whom no longer exist, becomes Haya’s obsession; over the year she supplements her collection, slips into it little oddities, terse news items which after two, three, four decades she digs out and peruses, as if grabbing at dry dandelion fluff, as if catching eiderdown in a warm wind. Pointless, pointless. Forgotten dossiers, sealed archives open slowly, slowly, and what emerges is no more than water dripping from cracked sewage pipes. During the Trieste trial in 1976 only two “big fish” remain: Josef Oberhauser,* brewer in Munich, former San Sabba commander and — from 1941 to the end of the war — Dr Dietrich Allers, a high-ranking official, one of the executive directors of the T4 programme, a lawyer and S.S.-Obersturmbannführer (approximately a colonel). But Allers dies a year before the trial, in 1975. Born in 1910 in Hamburg, Allers works as an attorney until 1968, when he is sentenced to eight years in prison, which he does not serve out. So all the fuss, all the pursuit of justice — for nothing. The Italian judiciary does not call for Oberhauser’s extradition, because according to the agreements in force at the time between Italy and Germany, only those suspected of crimes committed after 1948 may be extradited. The trial goes on literally in a void: no defendants sit in the courtroom, the judges natter on, journalists snap their cameras — at no-one. In a solemn voice the judgement is read out to unschooled farmer Josef Oberhauser, but Josef Oberhauser is nowhere to be seen, so to whom is the judgement read? Oberhauser is sentenced in Trieste to life imprisonment, yet in Munich he goes on selling beer, especially during the Oktoberfest, when he is in particularly fine fettle. Three years later, in 1979, fat Oberhauser dies of a heart attack.

There is one dossier Haya never gets around to closing. One name she skips over. Thirty years have passed. The name, printed next to the number eight on the newspaper clipping, looks wholly innocent, a cluster of letters arranged in two short words: Kurt Franz. Kurt Franz. Letters that elude harmony; letters that zing in staccato out of their context and slam into Haya’s temples like bullets. Kurt Franz watches Haya, Haya watches Kurt Franz, and then, in 1976, under him, under her, all around, gapes a chasm into which Haya strides, into the forecourt of Hades.

Who is Kurt Franz?

Kurt Franz cannot be put into Haya’s archive. His story doesn’t end in 1976. Kurt Franz’s story doesn’t even end with his death, furthermore with Kurt Franz’s death the story of Kurt Franz, the story about Kurt Franz, spreads, flows into waiting, into Haya’s wait, today’s, into our wait.

It was late summer or the beginning of autumn 1942 when I came from Belzec to Treblinka. It was night… Everywhere in the camp there were corpses. Bloated corpses. The corpses were dragged through the camp by working Jews, and these working Jews were driven by the Ukrainian guardsmen and also by Germans… I reported to Wirth in the dining room. Stangl and Oberhauser were with him…

Kurt Franz, S.S.-Untersturmführer, was born on 17 January, 1914, in Düsseldorf. A cook. Trained at Restaurant Hirschquelle, then at Hotel Wittelsbacher Hof, but does not pass his final examination. Serves in the army from 1935–37. Joins the Waffen-S.S., given number 319,906. Begins his career in late 1939 as a cook at the Grafeneck euthanasia centre, and later, when the job at Grafeneck is done, Kurt Franz moves to Hartheim, then to Sonnenstein, and then to Brandenburg, and he cooks less and advances more.

Grafeneck is a medieval castle located in the state of Württemberg on a hill overlooking the town of Marbach, where Schiller was born, so there is a Schiller Museum in Marbach and a rich literary archive. The air is fresh at Grafeneck; the nights are chilly. In the early 1930s a samaritan organization turns the castle into an institution for the mentally handicapped. Then S.S. men come in the late 1930s, members of Aktion T4 arrive, headed by Viktor Brack, to have a look at the castle, to see whether it suits them; the natural surroundings are beautiful, and the software is already there. So the S.S. elite requisition the castle with all the patients and throw themselves into work. The castle is adapted for the personnel. A small settlement of barracks goes up nearby. The barracks are surrounded by a four-metre wall. The patients sleep in the barracks and are killed in the barracks by S.S. men. The S.S. men are playing. Experimenting. At one of the barracks S.S. personnel install two mobile crematorium ovens, which dangerously heat the roof, so they remove the roof, and into the sky goes the smoke, turning nature black, the trees, grass, flowers, the sky — everything is black. Even when the sun shines the environs are black. Even the birds are black. This primitive gas chamber (gas chambers will be perfected later), this barrack, has a capacity of seventy-five people per session. The entire castle is surrounded by barbed wire and guards. And dogs. Expert personnel work at Grafeneck, twenty-five female and male nurses, Dr Horst Schumann is there with his colleagues, and Christian Wirth becomes head of administration.

In January 1940 Dr Horst Schumann, S.S.-Sturmbannführer (major), runs the Grafeneck euthanasia “institute”. Once the work is up and running, Dr Horst Schumann transfers to Sonnenstein “institute” in Saxony, in order to start up a new euthanasia programme. Schumann is, otherwise, a member of a medical commission, the task of which is to dispatch ailing camp inmates from Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenburg, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen, Neuengamme and Niederhangen to the euthanasia centres which are beginning to flourish all over the Reich.

Dr Schumann arrives at Auschwitz in June 1941 and selects 575 prisoners whom he sends to Sonnenstein where the guards inject them straight into the heart with super-toxic phenol. Schumann returns to Auschwitz to try out a “cheap and effective” method of mass sterilization of women and men using X-rays. Hardly any of his guinea pigs survive. They die of internal haemorrhaging, of burns. They die after additional “operations”, meaning the removal of ovaries and testicles. They die of exhaustion and shock. At Auschwitz, and maybe later as well, Schumann examines the efficiency of devices he never patents — ah, events follow one upon another with such speed, devices that serve for the experimental harvesting of sperm, a small rectal insertion to stimulate the prostate and ejaculation. Dr Schumann leaves Auschwitz in 1944. A Dr Schumann, such a nice name, shows up in October 1945 in Gladeck, a small industrial town in the Ruhr region, where the local authorities employ him as a sports doctor. Somewhat later, Dr Schumann opens a private practice that prospers for him until 1951, until someone — Lord, such a classic! — someone identifies him as a war criminal. Dr Horst Schumann vanishes, of course. He works for three years as a doctor on a transatlantic ocean liner, then travels to the Sudan and is joined there by his wife and three innocent, golden-haired children. Four years later the happy family hurry through Nigeria and Libya to Ghana. In fact, Dr Schumann does end up in prison around 1966 after President Kwame Nkrumah dies. Nkrumah thinks highly of Schumann for all he does for the people of Ghana, because this tall, well-built man with elegant hands and long artistic fingers, this man who is nearly a saint, living in a damp Ghanaian province where malaria rages, the rains never cease, the tropical heat steals the breath, the poverty is immense, this humanist, in his (Nkrumah’s) African backwoods builds a hospital with forty beds and lives there with his family in a modest bungalow, three day’s trek from the nearest town, because the roads are so ghastly and no white men anywhere, and if someone, a white-skinned visitor, happens to stumble across him, Dr Schumann brings the guest to the humble clinic and shows him the charters from the World Health Organization hanging there, clearly visible, reads them to the visitor so that the visitor remembers that it is the duty of every doctor to furnish mankind with the best possible conditions for a healthy and happy life.

Once Nkrumah is no longer there to protect him, Dr Horst Schumann leaves Ghana handcuffed to two detectives. Ah, happy days, schöne Zeiten. Dr Schumann will remember his African interlude; so many old acquaintances from Hitler’s Chancellery, the occasional encounters with Dr Helmut Kallmeyer, for example, the exotic hors d’oeuvres… perhaps it is better not to remember. Detained in 1966, Dr Schumann appears before a court in 1970 and then announces he is not well. He’s troubled by high blood pressure. He collapses at trial (this turns out to be a feigned heart attack), so the administration of the prison, humane to a fault, releases him for treatment. No-one protests, not the public or the media, and for twelve years thereafter Dr Horst Schumann lives in Frankfurt, attends the Frankfurt Book Fair, goes to concerts (Frankfurt has a passable symphony orchestra). He strolls in spring through the streets, but he does not leave town on outings, because Sachsenhausen is nearby, and Dr Schumann is not eager to see Sachsenhausen, as his blood pressure might skyrocket. Now and then Dr Schumann enjoys a frankfurter, and this ultimately kills him: he dies on 5 May, 1983, just after his seventy-seventh birthday.

The killings at Grafeneck last until mid-December 1941. Then they stop abruptly. There are no handicapped and retarded left; they have all been successfully executed: 10,654 people. Grafeneck and its surroundings are now cleansed, and so much the healthier. Grafeneck is dropped from the euthanasia programme. All traces are erased, the walls and the wire; the natural surroundings revert to green; the staff go on holiday. It is nearly Christmas, and so begins the season of goodwill and endowment. With the new year comes a new location: Hadamar. At Hadamar 10,824 patients are gassed. After the war, of the hundred or so staff members who run the Grafeneck euthanasia programme, eight are charged and three receive prison terms ranging from eighteen months to five years. Fifty years later, in 1990, a memorial is raised at Grafeneck listing the names of the patients who were killed, and the “patients” who killed them.

Yes, Kurt Franz. Kurt Franz still works as a cook at Buchenwald; then in 1942 he goes to Belzec for a time, then on to Treblinka. Treblinka becomes his kingdom. After the revolt in August 1943 Kurt Franz is made camp commander. He oversees the last “gas operations” and finally shuts down Treblinka.

That’s not true! I was not commander of the camp! I had the rank of Oberscharführer at Treblinka, and as a member of the Waffen-S.S. units I was responsible exclusively for the camp guards. The Oberscharführer is technically a sergeant, not an officer. My conscience is clean.

At Treblinka Kurt Franz struts about, rides, goes off for a morning jog, sings, sings a lot (Kurt Franz loves music, especially orchestral music), keeps himself in shape, keeps his beautiful body trim, and faithful Barry is always at his heels. At Treblinka Kurt Franz lets his imagination run wild, he comes up with little extravagances, he plants flowers.

We planted flowers in the end, when we were getting ready to leave. I ordered the excavators to level off the camp. We planted lupins. What? Lupins are perennials, lovely flowers, spectacular floral candles. Against an attractive leafy background they create a stunning floral landscape. Lupins are ideal for planting in colourful clusters in full sun. I love flowers. I have a well-tended garden.

Before closing down the camp, Kurt Franz kills time by killing people.

Lies, all lies. I heard with my own ears how Wirth, in quite a convincing voice, explained to the Jews that they would be deported further and before that, for reasons of hygiene, they must bathe, and their clothes would have to be disinfected. Inside the disinfection barrack was a long wooden counter for the deposit of valuables, jewellery, money and such — small things. It was made clear to the Jews that after the bath their valuables would be returned to them. Then the Jews applauded Wirth enthusiastically. Their applause is still ringing in my ears. So, the Jews believed Wirth.

In late 1943 Kurt Franz is transferred to Trieste and tasked with killing partisans and Jews. From Trieste he flees to Austria in April 1945, but American soldiers catch up with him and put him behind bars. Big and strong, Kurt Franz escapes from prison. He goes back to his native Düsseldorf and, using his own name, works first as a labourer at a building site, then returns to his old profession, cooking. For fourteen years Kurt Franz goes fishing, tells his children all sorts of fairy tales, plays football on Sundays, compiles new albums of colour photographs of nature, friends, animals, soon loses his hair and puts on weight. Still, it’s as if the happy days are here again. Then in 1959 Kurt Franz is arrested once more and on 3 September, 1965, at the first Düsseldorf trial for crimes committed at Treblinka, he is charged with murdering at least 139 camp inmates and participating in the killing of more than 300,000 Jews, and sentenced to life imprisonment. During the trial, as evidence, the police present a photographic album they find in Kurt Franz’s garage behind empty, dusty wine bottles and the muddy rubber boots Kurt Franz wears when he waters his garden flowers. On the album in large letters are the words Schöne Zeiten, which would be “The Good Old Days” or “Happy Days” or “The Joy of Life”, ah, the age of ignorance.

10

This much Haya is aware of in 1976. Only later, only now, in 2006, according to the surprises that life serves up to its drowsy consumers, only now does Haya learn that in 1993 Kurt Franz is released from prison and dies in an old people’s home in Wuppertal on 4 July, 1998, when the Red Cross send her a photograph of a fat bald man, a doddering old geezer, actually, sitting hunched over a wooden table, and next to him an elderly woman in a rumpled house dress, dishevelled, obese, sagging and slovenly. The wall behind Mr and Mrs Franz is covered in paisley wallpaper, and on it hang a number of small trophies, hunting trophies, and insignia that look like medals. This photograph does not hold Haya’s interest. By then, in 2006, she has a thick file on Kurt Franz, a file which lies like a memento at the bottom of her red basket, like a deep blue tattoo on her bosom, like a shroud under which her brain pulses more and more feebly, relegated to the past.

The Red Cross is always late or never gets there at all. The Red Cross is so busy everywhere in the world. The Red Cross is caught up in a broad range of activities, chiefly humanitarian, so it has trouble concentrating on individual activities, so its work is dispersed, aflutter and it never takes sides. The imperative of the Red Cross is to sustain a universal, global neutrality. In terms of history and people. The Red Cross has been reminding Haya for six decades, every 8 May, of its day, thanking her for the trust she has shown it, the Red Cross, of course, hoping that soon it, the Red Cross, will contribute to solving her “case”, regardless of the fact that, of course, Haya Tedeschi may no longer be alive by then. Haya, on the other hand, does not think of the case of the disappearance of her son Antonio Tedeschi on 13 April, 1945, as hers, because she did nothing to bring about the disappearance of her son Antonio Tedeschi, it was due to, let’s say, historical circumstances. The Red Cross has contacted Kurt Franz, in and out of prison, but Kurt Franz knows nothing of an Antonio Tedeschi, and the name Haya Tedeschi is completely foreign to me, Kurt Franz says, he holds and fiddles with a copy of the birth certificate that the Red Cross workers have given him to inspect. And besides, Kurt Franz says, Tedeschi ist ein jüdischer Name. You don’t think that I would risk my life for a Jewish woman, do you?

North-west of Kassel and east of Dortmund is the little town of Bad Arolsen. In a baroque palace in the middle of a dense forest — deliberately hidden, one might suppose, from the eyes of the public — at Grosse Allee 5–9, is housed the largest archive for World War Two. For fifty years now in this stately home an army of 430 people arranges, copies, digitalizes, registers, analyses and classifies the documents of the Third Reich in the forlorn hope that here, maybe now, sixty-plus years after the fact, they will contribute to picking apart and laying bare at least one little piece of the past. The International Tracing Service is in Bad Arolsen, and they still receive almost half a million enquiries annually regarding the missing and the dead, those torn violently from their families, the uprooted, robbed and murdered; enquiries pertaining to children and adults, as if people do not die, as if people do not give up, as if the past doesn’t wear thin (it seems not to) the nightmares of the dead times continue to circle the world.

Few people know of Bad Arolsen’s vast functional archive, which could bring succour to millions and disturb millions were it made available to the public. Every day through the fingers of the officials of the International Tracing Service slip human lives with names, both real and fabricated, with names added or erased, lives with identities or without them, lives with meaning and those bereft of meaning, regardless, lost lives. Mislaid lives. At the baroque palace in Bad Arolsen, on huge sliding shelves marked with the names of the camps, cities, battles, regions, in alphabetical registers, lurk unfinished stories, trapped fates, big and little personal histories, embodied histories, there are people huddled there who languish, ghost-like, and wait for the great Mass of Liberation, the eucharistic celebration after which they will finally lie down, fall asleep or depart, soaring heavenward. Bad Arolsen, this vast collection of documented horror, preserves the patches, the fragments, the detritus of seventeen, yes, in digits, 17 million lives on 47 million pieces of paper collected from twenty-two concentration camps and their satellite organizations; from factories, from an array of institutions, from ghettos, from prisons, from these commands and those commands, from hospitals and hospital files (medical records), from the laboratories (experiments), from institutes, local archives, the police and police files; there is information here about executions, political, criminal and racial, about murders “for reasons of health”, everything is here that the Allied Forces collected when Germany surrendered, first to be warehoused in London, then in Frankfurt and, in 1952, finally, in Bad Arolsen.

In Bad Arolsen, in this “library” of horrors, in this alchemist’s kitchen of maniacs, little lives of little people have been foundering already for sixty years; they are waving their deportation I.D.s, their brittle, faded and cracked family photographs, their hastily penned letters, diaries, their birth certificates and marriage licences, their death certificates, sketches, poems, their coupons for food and clothing, anything that can supplant their cry, they are waving: Here we are, find us.

Information about missing children is collected and preserved in a special department in Bad Arolsen. Missing children from World War Two. The 250,000 children who went missing during World War Two. Fewer than 50,000 of them have found their families to date, what is left of their familes, their — roots. And so about 200,000 people (an entire medium-sized city) have no notion of who they are; some of them wonder, some of them wonder where they are from, while others live thinking they are someone they are not, and they do not ask themselves any questions, and they do not wonder if they might be someone other than who they are, but actually they are the very person they think they are not, a person who is altogether strange and foreign to them, until one day, sometimes after two, three, four, five, six decades, when these children are no longer children and are getting old, one day a warm breeze wafts the “happiness”, the “realization”, a white sheet of paper, a document, a stamped certificate (from Bad Arolsen) to one of these elderly children, which declares that they do not exist at all, because who they thought they were, they aren’t, they are someone else, someone who has, as far as they are concerned, never existed, and then overnight the person who has never existed for them becomes who they are. In Bad Arolsen, in that special department, they keep information about children (and infants) who were killed or taken from their non-Aryan parents to be given to “pure Aryans” to be looked after and raised. About children who are lost forever to their parents, most of whose parents no longer exist, just as these children are now non-existent for themselves.

The baroque palace in Bad Arolsen preserves, cleans, cleanses, fine-tunes in its belly a city of paper, a paper city, a papier-mâché model of Europe, of life, of compacted tragedies, gigantic tragedies squashed on to yellowed slips of paper.

But. The information kept in Bad Arolsen is accessible only to those who sit in the baroque palace in Bad Arolsen, and the staff of the International Red Cross, who have been permitted, — and only they, in the name of the victims and their children — to stroll through the renovated rooms of the International Tracing Service and nibble at warm cakes in the small cafés scattered here and there for atmosphere and increased staff productivity. The Red Cross is slow, just as the United Nations is slow, and not so very united. It takes the Red Cross between three and thirty years to find a concrete piece of information, confidential information that often leads nowhere. But they send out their cards wishing everyone a Happy 8 May, Red Cross Day, without fail, in perfect order, to those they know and those they do not, to the living and the dead, potential and genuine consumers of the services of the International Red Cross, like a little reminder, like a slogan—we are thinking of you, we are working for you. To all others, to historians, journalists, sociologists, writers, to everyone, and especially to those with a personal stake in this, whose wanderings through the historical twilight might lead them to an occasional lit path, to all of these, access to the baroque palace in Bad Arolsen is forbidden. Out of the question. The baroque palace in Bad Arolsen is fiercely guarded. With the excuse of protecting the privacy of the victims, Germany has been protecting its own reputation for fifty years. Italy’s as well. And countless other big and little, powerful and powerless countries scattered across all the continents of the planet.

Now and then a curious piece of information leaks from the palace in Bad Arolsen to the public. For example, while they were looking for the family of a Mr Weiss, workers at the International Red Cross stumbled upon the Mauthausen “Book of Death” in which it states that on 20 April, 1942, at a special celebration in honour of Hitler’s birthday, an additional 300 people were put to death at the camp, after which the guests enjoyed a festive meal.

Germany resists the opening of the Bad Arolsen archive for twenty years. The International Red Cross declares with pride that it opened its archives to the public ten years earlier, without mentioning the secrecy of the fifty years before that, during which there was time to “reorganize” the data, erase and destroy evidence that might compromise the war (in)activity of the International Red Cross. All parties protect their asses as much as they can, and so does the International Red Cross. And so does the Church, particularly the Catholic Church.

Then there is a change in April 2006. After years and years of negotiating, Germany, the United States, France, Belgium, Great Britain, Israel, Greece, the Netherlands, Poland, Luxembourg and Italy, the eleven countries which signed the agreement on establishing the protected archives of documents captured from the Third Reich in 1946, come much closer to reaching a consensus. Germany agrees that the Bad Arolsen doors should be opened, though not straight away. They call for additional meetings, more consideration, further assessment.

Haya comes across the news of the opening of Bad Arolsen in the newspapers L’Unità and Corriere della Sera. It is a small news item, appearing at the bottom of the fifth and sixth page, respectively, of the newspapers Haya regularly reads. Haya reads many papers. By this time she has experience with newspapers. Haya snips out the article about the opening of the German archives and places it on the desk by the window. Soon, she says. Soon it will be time to go to Bad Arolsen. There is no-one around to tell Haya, Take it slow, Haya. It is too soon to start packing. Bad Arolsen is not yet open, and you are old.

Anyway. After the news that the Bad Arolsen archive might soon be opening its doors, Haya decides: I am coming back among people. It is springtime. I will hold a little dinner party for my closest friends. Yes, Haya is old. The preparations for the dinner take a long time. For a week Haya brings home food supplies, bottles of Merlot and Picolit, fresh vegetables, strawberries are available, she gets prosciutto, prosciutto di San Daniele, she has no flour at home, no sugar, she buys asparagus, gli asparagi della Bassa friulana, she has no cooking oil, she buys spring beans and potatoes, i fagioli e le patate della Carnia, she buys cheeses, especially formaggio Montasio. Haya doesn’t eat much, mostly Zwieback, on the day of her dinner Giovanni the fisherman leaves at her door trout he has just caught, lovely, plump trout, le trote del Natisone, oh, it will be a feast, a real feast after so many years of fasting. Haya gets out her fine glasses, the ones with the gold rim. She washes them so they glisten. She takes out her special tableware. Carla comes over. Carla cleans the house. The windows gleam, the floor gleams, there is a sense of gaiety in the air, a long-since-vanished gaiety that now sticks to the sun’s rays, and prances with them, prances like flies driven mad by impending rain. And Freddy, Freddy comes over, to braid a black velvet ribbon into her heavy grey hair.

No-one comes.

Everyone is busy. They all apologize. We’re busy, they say. Fanny is busy, Igor is busy, Albina is busy, Frau Helga, nicknamed “Hitlerchen”, is also busy, Don Sebastian is busy, Olga is busy. Who else had she invited? she can’t remember just then. She invited Roberto. She invited Roberto, and Roberto is busy. All her guests, all twelve of her guests are busy. They have more pressing things to see to. Haya can’t remember what these things are, pointless things, yes, she doesn’t remember what they are busy with, who they are busy with. No-one comes to her little party, to the last dinner of her fast, to her return to the living.

So what? That’s fine. Bad Arolsen will open and she will go there.

Arolsen will open and I will go to Arolsen, Haya says. And further she says, I would like my name to be Babette. Babette knows about feasts. Eating and celebrating are ordinary deceptions, she says. Waiting lasts, waiting endures.

What’s with Zion? Divine salvation? Ridiculous. What does he have in mind, this God, this god of the Jews, this god of the Christians, that a feast can bring salvation, that one little feast can overpower death, plough up the cemetery in her breast? Ha! Reconciliation? One big or little bash, either way, will that bring liberation? How, on a platter?

Listen, Haya, I know something about this. It’s true, salvation is, in human terms, absolutely unattainable; but everything is possible for God! This is a struggle of faith, which, if we can say so, fights madly for possibility. Possibility is the only force that saves… At times the inventiveness of the human imagination may be enough to create possibility, but ultimately this means when one should believe, the only thing that helps is that everything is possible for God.

Leave me, Kierkegaard. I don’t feel like talking. This little gastronomical defeat is an ordinary “decoration”. There is no despair in it. I am too old for new despair.

Despairing is not a trait of the young alone. No-one outgrows the way that one “moves beyond an illusion”. But an illusion cannot be outgrown and no-one is so mad as to believe that. Indeed, we will often run into men and women and the elderly who have more childish illusions than any young man or woman. But we forget that illusion has essentially two forms: the form of hope and the form of recollection. Youth has the illusion of hope, age — the illusion of recollection.

My recollections are not illusions. They are not the past. My memories are my present.

This past-present of yours is perhaps something that remorse, in fact, should be dealing with. But for there to be remorse, one must first reach the ultimate point of despair, and spiritual life must reach its foundations. This is difficult. Young people despair for their future as a present in futuro. You despair because of the past as present in praeterito.

I despair because I remember. Leave me, Kierkegaard. Don’t you see that time has arranged itself in circles? The past is reality. The past is a factual state. The past is a fait accompli. But the future offers branching possibilities. Think a little about temporal logic. I am fine with my despair. As with my solitude.

Yes. Only the breed of incoherent, talkative people, this herd of the inseparables, feels no need for any kind of solitude, because they, like little parakeets, die immediately, as soon as they are for a moment left alone. Preserve your despair.

I know. You keep saying that. “Despair — a sickness from which one languishes but does not die. Sickness unto death.” You talk too much, Kierkegaard. I don’t need language any more. Numbers and a few letters suffice, because everything is in formulas, everything.

May I say something?

Who are you?

Pound, the crazy poet

Speak, Pound, tell Kierkegaard.

And the betrayers of language

……… n and the press gang

And those who had lied for hire;

the perverts, the perverters of language,

the perverts, who have set money-lust

Before the pleasures of the senses […]

The slough of unamiable liars,

bog of stupidities,

malevolent stupidities, and stupidities,

the soil living pus, full of vermin,

dead maggots begetting live maggots,

slum owners,

usurers squeezing crab-lice, pandars to authority,

pets-de-loup, sitting on piles of stone books,

obscuring the texts with philology,

hiding them under their persons,

the air without refuge of silence,

the drift of lice, teething,

and above it the mouthing of orators,

the arse-belching of preachers.

And Invidia,

the corruptio, fætor, fungus,

liquid animals, melted ossifications,

slow rot, fætid combustion,

chewed cigar-butts, without dignity, without tragedy,

….. m Episcopus, waving a condom full of black-beetles,

monopolists, obstructors of knowledge.

obstructors of distribution.

So it is that in 2006 Haya largely stops speaking; she mainly listens to ghosts. And waits.

I stand at the door to the “baths”; under a tree I see a small orchestra: three Jews, yellow stars on their chests, are singing, and three are playing instruments. They have a violin, a mandolin and a flute. The S.S. men like music. They love it when there is playing and singing. They dance at night in their club. The club at Treblinka is called “Casino”. A little orchestra plays the latest hits. Artur Gold performs his popular tango “Autumn Roses”. In the rhythm of autumn roses people go off to the “showers”. They march to the sounds of the violin. The S.S. men smile wistfully.

It is 1942. The anniversary of the outbreak of war is being celebrated at the camp. All night between 31 August and 1 September Jews sing and dance for the Germans. The next day these Jews are no more. They die with a song on their lips. I am Abraham Krzepicki. I escape Treblinka in late 1942. Later I am killed in Warsaw, in 1943. I am twenty-five years old.

There are many musical instruments at the camp, but not enough musicians. Musicians disappear into the “showers”. S.S.-Hauptsturmführer Stangl loves jazz, so he decides to form an orchestra. When he returns from his vacation, he brings back a collection of cymbals. Kurt Franz orders the tailors to make white suits for the members of the orchestra with shiny, blue lapels and collars and giant, monstruous, blue bow ties of the same fabric. Gold trots out on to the stage in a white tuxedo jacket. He is wearing a white shirt, perfectly pressed trousers, patent-leather shoes. His blue lapels and blue collar glitter in the spotlights. As if we are in a Warsaw cabaret. The S.S. men love Gold. And the camp inmates love Gold. For his forty-fifth birthday they throw him a little party in their workshop. That same evening Gold plays for the S.S. personnel in their casino. Then Kurt Franz orders: Compose me an anthem for the camp. Gold writes the melody; the Czech, Walter Hirsz, writes the words. Afterwards both are killed. The anthem is called “Fester Schritt”. The anthem is played during evening roll-call, while S.S. men whip disobedient inmates, and it is played most often when the inmates do exercises in the yard. At the end of roll-call the inmates sing their hymn once more and Kurt Franz shouts, Lauter, lauter! Kurt Franz loves music at Treblinka. Life was lively at Treblinka.

By the way, my name is Oscar Strawczynski. I arrive at Treblinka on 5 October, 1942. I am a smith and there was work at Treblinka for smiths. When I wasn’t working as a smith, I sorted stolen clothing. I took part in the revolt. I saved my brother and sister. Everyone else from my family was killed, my mother, my father, my grandmother, my grandfather, my uncles. Everyone. Some at Treblinka, some at Auschwitz. After escaping from Treblinka I joined the partisans. I testified in Düsseldorf in 1965. I died in Montereale in 1966.

I killed myself.

My name is Richard Glazar. I killed myself in Prague in 1997.

I survived the camps. The Americans liberated me. I testified at the trials of Kurt Franz, Stangl, and his companions. I studied in Prague, Paris and London. After the Prague Spring I left Czechoslovakia and lived for a long time in Bern.

In the spring and summer of 1943 there were fewer transports. One evening at roll-call, Kurt Franz said, Sundays in the afternoon we won’t work. We’ll have some fun. We’ll have a cabaret. We’ll play music. We’ll sing. We’ll perform sketches, and sometimes we’ll box, that is what he said. Kurt Franz loved boxing.

Let’s box a few rounds, Kurt Franz said to an inmate. We called Kurt Franz “Lalka”. In Polish lalka means doll. This inmate was a professional boxer from Cracow. He was about twenty years old. The soldiers tied the gloves on to the inmate. Lalka took only one glove, the right one. In that glove he tucked a small pistol and grinned. Go! Now! shouted the S.S. men from behind Lalka’s back. With one hand raised, with the hand in the glove, Lalka stepped up to the inmate as if he were ready for a fight, and then he shot the man between the eyes. The boxer fell dead on the spot. That is how Franz boxed. My name is Jacob Eisner.

This is Strawczynski. I’d like to add something. Do you remember Wolowanczyk? He was the terror of the Warsaw underground. Tall, blonde and robust, stronger than Franz. A dangerous man. He wasn’t more than twenty. He was killed afterwards during the revolt. Once Franz — Lalka — started boxing with him, but Wolowanczyk, quick on his feet and spry, kept evading him. Lalka got dangerously angry. He grabbed Wolowanczyk by the shirt and tried to punch him in the head, but the boy flung himself on the ground and Franz missed, lost his balance and fell right next to Wolowanczyk. Then he really went wild. He flung bricks and stones at the boy, threw him to the ground again, kicked him hysterically and flogged him. I watched it all from the roof of the barrack and I was sure Wolowanczyk was dead, that Franz had killed him. But no. Wolowanczyk got up, brushed off the dust and walked away as if nothing had happened. Go on, Glazar.

Concerts were rehearsed in the hallways in front of the gas chambers. One sunny afternoon we gathered around the ring. The S.S. men, trim in their uniforms, sit in a semi-circle. We stand behind them, our heads shaved, in rags; the guards, the body carriers, the tailors, the cobblers, the upholsterers, the cooks, all stand, the washers, clerks, accountants, doctors, gravediggers. We inmates stand behind the S.S. men, and our backs are guarded by soldiers with guns at the ready. Artur Gold and his boys, all in white jackets with broad blue lapels, play a march, after which “the show may begin”. Stangl, head of the camp, sits in the middle. He keeps the beat with his foot and light flicks of the whip to his polished boot. Salwe comes onstage and plays an Italian tarantella. After him, one of the best Warsaw tenors performs an aria from Tosca, the music ascends heavenward, above the barracks, above the gas chambers, disappearing into the pine trees. Then Salwe sings. Salwe sings an aria from Halevy’s opera La Juive. He sings “Rachel, quand du Seigneur”, and we look on, frozen. The S.S. men do not react. Only Stangl turns.

Artur Gold and his brother Henryk were Polish musical stars, especially Henryk. He survived. They performed with their eight-piece jazz orchestra at the Café Bodega in Warsaw. At first they played ragtime, then later waltzes and tangos. They cut records for Syrena, Electro and Columbia. Jerzy Petersburski played with them, author of the hits “O, Donna Clara”, “The Last Sunday”. There were quite a few musicians at Treblinka. The Schermann brothers were there, and little Edek who played the accordion…

One day in October 1942, while I was taking bodies out of the newly constructed gas chambers, a kapo came up to me with a violin in his hand and asked, Do you know anyone who can play? I know, I said, I play.

They immediately moved me into the kitchen to peel potatoes. There were six of us. One was Fuchs, who played the clarinet and who had worked for the Polish Radio before Treblinka. At first just the two of us played, Fuchs and I, from time to time during roll-calls. Then we were joined by a pianist and composer from Warsaw who played the accordion, and from that time we were a trio. The most popular song was the love song “Tumbalalaika”. That spring an S.S. man often came by whose nickname was “Blackie” (der Schwartze). He would sit himself down on a chair near the well and order us to play for him. He’d say, Play one for my soul. At Treblinka once we played at a Jewish wedding. That day there was a lot of dancing. Then the happy couple was led to the “showers”.

My name is Jerzy Rajgrodzki.

Lager zwei ist unser Leben, ay, ay, ay! Lager zwei ist unser Leben, ay, ay, ay! we sang in chorus, on the open area between the gas chambers and the mass graves. I am a singer and actor from Prague. My name is Spiegel. I died, too.

Pause.

It will be summer soon. Haya goes out for walks again.

The shop windows are full of women’s suits in pastel hues. Haya looks at them. The skirts are too short, she says. Women have fat knees. The suits close the construction and express a function as a power series of the argument x with the assumption that the function is infinitely differentiable at 0. That would be a Maclaurin series. In a Taylor Series, the function y = f(x) is expressed as a power series in a neighbourhood of point a, Haya says to a woman who is also standing in front of the display window.

I don’t understand, the woman says.

I’m not surprised, says Haya and walks on. Haya walks slowly. Her step is not unsteady. Haya is a hale old woman.

Haya walks and hums. The noise levels are mounting in Gorizia. Gorizia is loud, Haya says. Whenever she goes out, Haya senses more noise. The noise sits on her brow and weighs down on her head. Gorizia is full of exhaust fumes today. There are new cafés. Haya goes to the park. The greenery at the park is intense; it soothes her eyes. Haya sings to outnoise the noise rolling down the Corso. If she could, if she were younger, she’d chase the noise; she’d say to it Shoo! or maybe she’d say to it Come, lie on my bosom, because there is too much quiet in her breast. She is not younger. What can she do about that? Haya hums. How is it that Haya hums when she isn’t particularly happy? Generally when they sing people feel glad. They probably first feel glad, then they think, Ah, I’m filled with gladness, and then they sing. Is that it? But what if the songs people sing when they are glad, what if these songs are sad? It must be that they are moved then by a sorrow that mingles with their happiness. As with mathematics. Formulae. Planes interweave. Planes of sorrow and happiness melt to zero, to nothing. What is going on? Haya says, surprised. Nothing is coming out of my breast, she says. A big immobility is crouching inside. By the time she died Ada could no longer sing; something had happened to her voice box. When she tried to sing, though seldom, as she neared death, she could only squawk. She’d look at Haya and say, Something’s broken. She died wearing a yellow, short-sleeved blouse with Richelieu embroidery and red wine stains that had gone dark blue. A beautiful blouse. This is the blouse my mother wore when she brought the soldiers their macaroons, Ada told Haya, then she died. In that hospital. In Dr Basaglia’s ward. Haya did not bury Ada at Valdirosa. When Ada died the Valley of the Roses was in another country. Haya put Ada in a little niche, here, at Gorizia cemetery. There are poppies with silk petals in front of the niche. Now that they are sewing Gorizia back together again, Haya might be able to move Ada. She won’t. There is nothing left to move. Ada is now little more than a handful. It seems silly to move little objects, little things. Little things can be carried in the pocket; they go with us.

The weather is getting warmer.

A small white cat with one eye and no nose creeps by Haya’s feet at the Parco della Rimembranza. And breathes its last. Here, right at Haya’s feet. Deterioration lies everywhere, Haya says. Haya looks a little at the dead kitten, a little at her shoes. My shoes are so unsightly, she says. I won’t buy shoes with round shoelaces any more. Round shoelaces always come undone. I could play bridge. With whom?

Haya closes her eyes. There on the bench at the Parco della Rimembranza beneath her eyelids surfaces the large eye of an ox, a wrinkled eye, a horrible, open eye. There is no person who can gaze like that, that way, like an ox. The huge eye watches Haya from the inside. It draws itself in, squints, then opens even more. How unpleasant, says Haya and gets up. What will I do with my time? wonders Haya, then sits again. I am dragging time along like a dog on a leash. This is becoming an effort.

A woman walks by with a dog. The dog wags its tail. It wants to go to Haya. In a high voice the woman says, Be good! DON’T bother the lady. The woman has narrow hips. Women with narrow hips have more trouble giving birth. Haya has broad hips. Mothers talk to their children, especially in parks where the children like to explore, they tell them, DON’T bother the lady! Children do not bother Haya. Even dogs do not bother her. But the people in charge boss around children and dogs—DON’T be a bother! In general, they speak with dogs and children the same way. That’s a no-no, nasty! they tell them. Maybe I should go mushrooming? wonders Haya. Collect medicinal herbs, brew herbal teas?

In Berlin once, many years before, Haya got to know Jarmušek, a painter, who brewed her berry teas. Red teas and purple teas, nearly black. In Berlin that year, at a flea market, Haya bought an old doll whose eyes wouldn’t close. Jarmušek told her, Dolls keep secrets even when their eyes are open. Then Haya and Jarmušek went to Nuremberg. Let’s go to Nuremberg, Jarmušek said. Nuremberg is the city of toys. So Haya and Jarmušek went to Nuremberg in 1968 and looked at the toys, though they were already adults, over forty.

While in Nuremberg Haya studies the city. It is a green city; it has a lot of greenery. In Nuremberg Haya and Jarmušek discover stories about dolls. Nuremberg is an old city, almost a thousand years old. For seven hundred years people have been making dolls in Nuremberg; first little ones, then big ones. The little dolls are old, they are white clay dolls the size of a finger, they are little women and little men, little horsemen, little monks and remarkably little babies, who are little anyway. I would like to have a doll like that, says Haya, a little white baby. At the exhibition of dolls and toys someone says, Only Strasbourg dolls from the thirteenth century are older than the Nuremberg dolls. At the doll exhibition Haya and Jarmušek listen to the story of Nuremberg doll-making.

I don’t know whether we need this, this history, Haya says.

There are terrible dolls, Jarmušek says.

That is how Haya and Jarmušek learn that more than six hundred years before, two doll-makers — two Dockenmacher—live in Nuremberg, and that wooden dolls follow the clay dolls, and later there are dolls made of alabaster, wax, rags; there are colourful dolls and dolls dressed in the fashions of the day. They learn that toy production in general follows the making of dolls; that Georg Hieronimus Bestelmeier, a Nuremberg merchant and shop owner in the centre of the Old City, in his catalogue for 1798 lists 8,000 items produced in the Nuremberg workshops, including rocking horses, wooden blocks, doll’s houses completely furnished, kitchens for dolls with all the equipment, miniature shops, an array of pewter animals and other wind-up figures, children’s musical instruments and all sorts of other wonders.

They are making little worlds of the dead, whispers Haya to Jarmušek.

Worlds for fun. Worlds people play with, Jarmušek says.

In the eighteenth century the so-called Papierdockenmacher make dolls, animals, papier-mâché masks, or only body parts, which are then glued or sewn onto a stuffed leather torso. In the second half of the eighteenth century the Hilpert, Ammon, Heinrichen, Allgeyer and Lorenz families dictate the production of pewter dolls. Shops and children’s stores are inundated with an exotic (pewter) animal world, with mythological characters and medieval knights. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Trix, Schucho, Bub, Fleischmann, Arnold, Plank, Schoenner and Bing companies become synonymous with the desirable toy. The number of people involved in designing and producing toys keeps growing. While, for example, 1,366 people work on making toys in 1895, ten years later there are more than 8,000 of them, and 243 companies or small toy factories are at work in Nuremberg in 1914. And so, the Nuremberg world of imagination grows and grows and travels everywhere, especially to the United States. Toys feed Nuremberg and Nuremberg feeds on toys.

Then comes World War One, and with World War One begins the quiet demise of Nuremberg toys. Instead of toys, weapons are produced. Instead of little varnished, mechanical cars, big olive-drab caterpillar tanks are produced. Instead of swift electric trains that circle through mountain landscapes in elegant salons and spacious children’s bedrooms, the hit is Big Bertha. Then, from 1933 on, Jews, the majority owners of the factories begin to disappear from Nuremberg at a dizzying rate, so the toys disappear, too. In the summer of 1943 Hitler announces a ban on manufacturing toys, all toys. Hitler advises children to Play at the arts of combat and sing war songs, marches.

At the doll and toy exhibition Haya and Jarmušek look at a photograph beneath which there is a pile of old toys, stained and broken. The picture shows first-grade Nuremberg pupils from the Jewish elementary school located at the time at Obere Kanalstrasse 25. The picture is dated 1936. Each child in the picture is holding a toy. The boys hold a paper cone of some sort in which there might be sweets, models of little metal automobiles in lively colours, perhaps a small train, a tin soldier or a miniature tank. Most of the girls are holding dolls.

But by 1943, when Hitler puts a stop to toy manufacturing, the children in the picture no longer exist. Four of them (numbers 10, 18, 32 and 33) are deported to Poland with their families in 1942, to Izbica, the packed departure lounge for Belsen. Their teacher is taken to Krasniczyn. No-one knows who the children marked 2, 8, 9, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 24, 28, 30, 31, 35 and 36 are, where they have gone or what has happened to them. Perhaps they are riding along on a moveable shelf in Bad Arolsen, which Haya knows nothing about at that point, though she might have known. But no matter where the children from the picture went, no matter where they were taken, in 1942 they probably carried a toy with them. They were the children of Nuremberg, connoisseurs when it came to dolls, trains and automobiles.

When Birkenau was liberated, aside from the gold teeth, the hair and clothing, the piles of bones, dolls were also found, many of them from Nuremberg. Their hair pulled out, naked, with no limbs, often with eyes missing, so similar to their little owners. In camps, objects and people merge. In camps, objects and people become symbiotic.

These camp dolls are like Bellmer’s, but smaller, Jarmušek says.

Bellmer who? asks Haya.

Three years before the picture of the first-graders of the Jewish elementary school was taken in Nuremberg, in Berlin Hans Bellmer fashions his first life-size doll, as if mocking the future Borghild. Afterwards, Bellmer makes many more “sick” Puppen in Paris. He makes Puppen with moveable pubic bones, with mobile, twisted limbs, with extra limbs; Puppen with feet in white socks and children’s shoes, their private parts without pubic hair; gigantic monstrosities of immature adults who mock the impeccably modelled, muscular bodies which Leni loves photographing and Adolf loved watching. Bellmer’s Puppen were monster Puppen, huge mirrors reflecting history and its Macher.

Albrecht Dürer was born in Nuremberg, Jarmušek says.

And Hans Sachs, Haya says.

The first pocket watch was made in Nuremberg, Jarmušek says.

The first European railway line was built in Nuremberg, Haya says.

The Nuremberg laws were adopted in Nuremberg.

There were trials in Nuremberg.

Nuremberg was reduced to rubble by bombs. Nuremberg was a rubbish dump with 100,000 people left homeless.

Nuremberg has a promenade along the River Pegnitz. Let’s go for a walk along the Pegnitz, Haya says. Are there any Jews in Nuremberg?

We learned a lot about Nuremberg, Jarmušek says.

Yes. Nuremberg is a green city, Haya says.

Later, Haya left, Jarmušek flew away. Like a blonde angel Jarmušek flew over Berlin, and Haya went back to Gorizia. I cannot fly with you, she said. I cannot.

Do birds chirp in flight? Haya asks a woman who is sitting next to her. The woman who is sitting next to Haya is elderly, about seventy, and she appears to be agitated.

It is a crime to catch song birds and cage them, says the lady sitting next to Haya. That’s what my neighbour does. My neighbour has nine caged birds, which no longer sing, she says.

We started out down Himmelweg.

To paradise?

To the chirping of birds.

What is your name?

Rajzman, Samuel Rajzman.

What did you do before the war?

Before the war I was an accountant at an export firm.

When did you turn up at Treblinka and how did you get there?

In August 1942 they picked me up in the Warsaw Ghetto.

How long were you at Treblinka?

For a year. Until August 1943.

Describe the Treblinka camp.

Trains arrived every day, sometimes three, sometimes four, sometimes five of them. All the travellers were Jews. Jews from Czechoslovakia, from Germany, from Greece and Poland. As soon as the trains stopped, the people had to disembark at once, within five minutes. On the platform they were sorted into groups, men in one group, women in another, children in a third. Then they ordered them to take off their clothes. While the people hurried to strip off their clothing, the German guards snapped their whips. Then the old camp inmates would come. They would collect the clothing and take it to the barracks. The people walked naked along a special path to the gas chambers.

What did the Germans call the path?

Himmelfahrtstrasse.

The Street of the Heavenly Path? The Road to Heaven?

Something along those lines. I can draw you where the path went.

No need. How long did people live after they arrived at Treblinka?

Not long. From when they stripped off their clothes to when they arrived at the gas chamber, at most ten minutes. The men. Fifteen minutes for the women, because first they had to have their hair cut.

Why did they cut the women’s hair?

There was talk that they were using the hair to make mattresses for German women.

I cut women’s hair.

You are?

Abraham Bomba. I was a barber before the war. At Treblinka I cut mens and women’s hair, mostly women’s. After the war I opened a hair salon in the basement of New York Grand Central Station.

Where did you cut the women’s hair?

First in the gas-chamber, before they gassed them, later in the undressing barracks. When they stripped them naked the women were first examined, then sent to us for a haircut. The women were always naked when we cut their hair.

How were they examined, by whom?

They were laid on tables and their intimate parts were examined. Those were not professionals, not doctors. They were supposed to find out if the women hid any valuables, gold, money, jewellery, in their vaginas. These men used leather gloves for their examinations, so the women bled terribly.

How many barbers did the work?

I don’t remember precisely. Some were professional barbers, others were not. There was this Jewish Camp Elder, engineer Galewski. He told us what to do.

What did he say?

He said we should make believe we’re giving the women a real haircut, so they wouldn’t know they were going to be gassed, so they would believe that after the haircut they were going to take a shower. He said, don’t make them look like monkeys.

How much time did you have for each haircut?

Two minutes. It was very painful. Some barbers recognized their wives, their mothers, their grandmothers, and they just had to go on cutting. And they weren’t allowed to say a word. Not even hug before their dear ones were to be gassed. It was very hard to watch. It was horrible. It was awfully painful.

Rajzman, describe the railway station at Treblinka.

At first there were no signboards whatsoever at the station, but a few months later Kurt Franz, the camp commander, ordered they be put up. The barracks where the clothing was stored had signs reading “RESTAURANT”. Then there were signs for “TELEPHONE”, “POST OFFICE”, “WAITING ROOM”. There were even train schedules for the departure and arrival of trains from, say, Vienna and Berlin.

How did the Germans at Treblinka behave with the victims?

They each had their duties. For example, Scharführer Mentz, Willi Mentz, was in charge of the Lazarett. Weak women and children who couldn’t make it to the gas chambers on their own were killed at the Lazarett. There was a Red Cross flag flying at the Lazarett entrance. Mentz specialized in killing and he didn’t let anyone replace him when there was killing to be done. Mentz loved to kill. I remember, they brought him two sisters, one ten, the other two years old. When the older girl saw that Mentz was pointing a revolver at her sister, she threw herself at his feet and pleaded with him not to do it. Then Mentz didn’t kill the two-year-old, he flung her into the oven alive and shot the older one. Once they brought to the Lazarett a woman and her daughter who was about to give birth. They laid the pregnant woman on the ground, and around her gathered S.S. men to watch her labour. The birth lasted about two hours. Then Mentz asked the baby’s grandmother whom he should kill first, her or the baby. The woman said, Kill me. She pleaded with Mentz, Kill me. But of course Mentz first killed the baby, then he killed the baby’s mother, then in the end he killed the grandmother.

Do you know who Kurt Franz was?

Unfortunately, I do. I also know his dog Barry. Kurt Franz was a savage murderer. One of the worst in the camp.

Substantiate that statement.

The train from Vienna arrived. I stood on the platform as people were led out of the wagons. An older woman approached Kurt Franz, produced an identity card and said, I am Sigmund Freud’s sister. Assign me to office work. I am frail and old, she said. Franz studied the card very thoroughly, and then said, Yes, ma’am. This is an error. Look, he said, here is the train schedule. You have a train to Vienna in two hours. Leave all your valuables and documents, Kurt Franz said, and go and take a shower, he said. When you get back your ticket to Vienna and all your things will be waiting for you. Naturally, the woman went into the bathhouse and never returned.

You were saying, Glazar?

Tölpel. His name was Moritz Tölpel. He was very short, nearly dwarf-like, almost completely bald and a bit of an oddball. So, Moritz Tölpel stands there during roll call, his trouser legs dragging on the ground. He stands there, cringing. Kurt Franz — Lalka — takes his measure, and says: Yes, you’re the one. A Ukrainian guard manages to dig out a smelly old robe from the grisly pile of clothing belonging to the men, women and children who had already been murdered, and tells Tölpel, Put that on. The garment drags on the ground. Tölpel can’t even take a step. He trips, falls, gets up, falls, and Lalka howls, Step, march, one-two! and keeps snapping his whip. Then a guard digs out a black hat that used to belong to a rabbi long since dead, a grimy Halbzylinder, pins a shiny half-moon onto it, then into the tiny hand of dwarfish Tölpel he thrusts a heavy club. A sign will be put on each of the latrines, Lalka says. “TWO MINUTES FOR SHITTING. WHOEVER TAKES LONGER LIVES A DAY SHORTER” Then Bredow hangs a large kitchen clock around Tölpels neck and says, Here he is, our Treblinka “Scheiss-Meister”, and Lalka howls: From now on you are Commander of the Shit! You are now the grand sovereign over everyone and their shit. Anyone who takes longer than two minutes, do with them what you will!

I am Strawzcynski. Once Lalka was out walking with a camera in one hand and a gun in the other. He didn’t know whether he’d rather be snapping some pictures or doing some shooting. Then he spotted Sztajer, whose back was turned to him. Sztajer was my neighbour from Czestochowa. Lalka took aim and shot Sztajer in the buttocks. Sztajer screamed and fell to the ground. Lalka came over, beaming. Get up and drop your pants, he said. The man obeyed. He was barely conscious, blood gushing from his buttocks. Lalka scowled, shrugged and said, Fuck it. I missed your balls. Then off he went looking for another target.

Rajzman, how did you manage to stay alive?

There were about eight thousand Jews in my transport, brought from Warsaw. I had already undressed and was heading towards Himmelfahrtstrasse when Galewski, a friend of mine of many years, noticed me. He whispered, Go back. Go back quickly. He said, They need a translator for Hebrew, French, Russian, Polish and German, and I convinced them to let you go. Galewski was in charge of a group of camp workers. He took part in the revolt. He was killed. I was assigned to the job of loading. Onto trains I loaded bundles of clothing belonging to people who had been killed. After two days, from a small town near Wa rsaw, they brought to Treblinka my mother, sister and two brothers. I watched them being taken to the gas chambers. Then, while I was loading clothing, I found my wife’s documents and a photograph of her with our child. That is all I have left of my family. That photograph.

On average, how many people were killed every day?

Between ten and twelve thousand.

How many gas chambers were there?

At first there were only three. Then they built another ten. They were planning twenty-five.

How do you know?

I know. There was construction material on the small square. I asked someone, What’s that for? There aren’t any Jews left. Then someone said, There will be more. We still have plenty of work to do.

Have you heard? says the woman who is now sitting very close to Haya and makes no effort to leave. Have you heard? A bedridden little old lady on Via dei Magazzini was eaten by rats? she says. Do you have a dog? A person needs a dog. Dogs protect us from rats and loneliness, says the lady sitting next to Haya. My dog died recently. Ever since my dog died I haven’t been sleeping well. I listen. I do a lot of walking. I had a nice dog, a golden retriever, she says.

They call the new Pope “Rottweiler”, Haya says. The definition of hyperbolic functions is:

, did you know that? The Panzer Pope Rottweiler.

The lady sitting next to Haya on a bench in the Parco della Rimembranza pretends not to hear what Haya has said about the new Pope, because she has heard. A little later it will become clear that the elderly woman has excellent hearing. Have you read? asks the lady sitting next to Haya, right next to her, on the same bench in the Parco della Rimembranza, their shoulders nearly touching, but not touching, for had they touched Haya would have moved away, that’s for certain, she would have slipped off the end of the bench, Do you know that postmen in Germany have recently been attending workshops on canine psychology? asks the lady next to Haya. The German post office is offering classes on canine psychology to all their staff the lady says to Haya. The heads of the post office insist, says the lady sitting next to Haya in the Parco della Rimembranza, that dogs continue to attack postmen because postmen are particularly attractive to dogs, the lady says, but ever since the German post office has been offering these workshops, the number of attacks has dropped drastically, or so says the post office spokeswoman, a certain Sylvia, says the lady sitting next to Haya. The number of attacks has dropped by half, says Sylvia, says the woman next to Haya, and that has been happening ever since the postmen were advised at the workshops not to run when they see a big dog coming at them. The spokeswoman says, says the lady next to Haya, that some eighty thousand postmen and postwomen attended the workshops on canine psychoanalysis this year, she says, and the exercises included theoretical and practical advice, and the psychologists explained to the postmen that they must not rely on their bicycles, because one cannot escape a chasing dog even on a bicycle, so says Sylvia, the spokeswoman of the German post office, says the woman next to Haya. So the postmen said, Buy us vespas, or mopeds at least, says the woman next to Haya, but Sylvia the spokeswoman tells them that is out of the question.

What is your name? Haya asks the woman sitting next to her.

Aurelia.

And just now, on Tuesday, a boy was attacked by a pack of dogs. The boy was on his way to kindergarten, the police reported, says Aurelia. Three dogs attacked the boy not far from the house where he lives, where he lived, and there wasn’t anyone on the street to help him, so the police say, says Aurelia, and the boy died. The police say it still isn’t clear why the dogs attacked the boy, says Aurelia, and now the spokesperson for the police is saying, We locked up the dogs, and we’ll speak to the owners, because, so the spokesperson says, in this region alone dogs bite at least thirteen thousand people every year. Do you have a dog? Aurelia asks Haya. One should have a dog, she says. Dogs protect us from rats and loneliness, says Aurelia. My dog died recently. I had a nice dog, a golden retriever, she says.

The dog was called Barry.

Barry was a nice dog. A black-and-white dog. A big one.

Barry belonged to Kurt Franz.

Kurt Franz was called Lalka. In Polish “Lalka” means “doll”. Kurt Franz was a handsome man, tall, big and strong. A blond man, blue-eyed.

The dog Barry was a trained dog. The dog Barry was trained to attack camp inmates, especially their genitals.

The dog Barry attacked inmates when ordered: Man, grab that dog!

The dog Barry lived at Treblinka.

What is your name?

Ya’akov Wiernik

When were you deported to Treblinka?

23 August, 1942.

How long did you stay at Treblinka?

Until 2 August, 1943.

How old are you?

I’m dead.

Do you recognize the person in this photograph?

Even if I were on my deathbed Kurt Franz’s name would make me tremble.

You said that Franz amused himself with the prisoners. How did Kurt Franz amuse himself?

He had a big dog he called Barry. When Franz ordered, Mensch, schnapp den Hund! the dog would attack people and tear off pieces of their flesh.

You are Kalman Teigman?

Yes.

You live in Israel?

Yes.

How old are you?

Eighty-four.

You were deported to Treblinka from the Warsaw Ghetto. When?

4 September, 1942.

Do you remember the late Dr Chorazycki?

Yes, very well.

Who was Dr Chorazycki?

A physician from Warsaw. At Treblinka he treated the Ukrainians and Germans. Once the deputy camp commander Kurt Franz searched him. I don’t know why. Maybe someone snitched on Dr Chorazycki. Maybe it was a routine search. I don’t know. And Kurt Franz discovered that Chorazycki was hiding money in his clothing. Chorazycki knew what would happen to him. People were hanged or shot for that.

Why was Chorazycki hoarding money?

He belonged to a group that was planning an armed revolt. Chorazycki didn’t hesitate. He rushed at Franz. He was already old, while Kurt Franz was young, tall and strong. Then he spun around and ran towards his barracks. He didn’t get far. After a few metres he dropped suddenly to the ground. Clearly he had taken poison of some kind. Then they called us to the scene, prisoners and personnel alike, to watch how they pumped Chorazycki’s stomach to revive and torture him. Franz’s faithful assistant Rogozo, a Ukrainian who had worked for the railways, grabbed a hook and with it drew out Chorazycki’s tongue. Franz poured water from a filthy bucket in to the man’s mouth, and then like a madman he began to jump all over him. Then the guards turned Chorazycki upside down, but nothing. By then completely and utterly dead, Chorazycki was stripped and beaten savagely with thick poles. Later they carried him off to the Lazarett on a stretcher.

Who is in this photograph?

Kurt Franz and his dog Barry.

What do you know about Barry?

Barry arrived at Treblinka in late 1942. He was as big as a calf. He was white with dark spots. He was a mongrel, a lot like a St Bernard. Whenever Franz went out to tour Treblinka 1 and Treblinka 2, Barry went along. Without any reason whatsoever, Franz would order Barry to attack prisoners. Go, man, bite that dog! he’d howl: Mensch, beiss den Hund! But Barry didn’t have to wait for the order. He’d pounce on the inmates as soon as Franz raised his voice. Barry was so big that his head came up to a persons thighs, so the first thing he went for were a man’s privates. He’d bite like crazy. He managed to bite the penis off several inmates; blood gushed everywhere. Barry knocked others over on to the ground and mutilated them. Until they were unrecognizable.

You are?

Henryk Poswolski. I watched S.S.-Hauptscharführer Küttner toss a live infant into the air as if it were a clay pigeon, and Kurt Franz “picked it off ” with two bullets. Then they went for a beer at the zoo.

What is it, Zabecki?

Once, when Kurt Franz was making the rounds at camp, Barry drew him off into some bushes. We were standing to the side. Franz parted the branches and saw a woman on the ground with a very small baby, only a few months old, lying on its mother’s breast. Apparently the woman was dead. Barry yanked free of the leash, went over to the baby and lay down next to it. Then the dog began to whimper and lick the baby’s hands and face. Franz went over to Barry and held his gun to the dog’s head. Barry looked up at his master and wagged his tail. Just then Franz, cursing loudly, whacked Barry on the back with a pole. Barry fled. Franz kicked the dead woman several times, then he started kicking the child and stomping on its head until it died. Then he continued his walk through the woods, calling the dog, but the dog played deaf, though he was nearby. We saw Barry lurking in the bushes and whining softly, as if searching for someone. After a while Franz went out on to the road and Barry came trotting over to him, but Franz started beating him with such violence that it was as if he’d lost his mind. Barry snarled and barked, and he even lunged at Franz’s chest, we thought he’d gone mad, but when Franz ordered him to sit, Barry sat. Then Franz shouted, Lie down! and Barry lay down. Then Franz shouted, Stand! and the dog stood and began licking his master’s boots, splattered with the baby’s blood. Franz fired several shots into the air and sent Barry after some Jews who were trying to escape from the railway station.

I heard that after the war Barry ended up with a family, and that he became a docile, tame household dog. That he adored children.

I don’t know how he was with children, but he was docile. After Treblinka closed, Barry was taken in by a Nazi physician and in 1944 the doctor sent Barry to his wife in northern Germany. Several years later they put Barry down, because he was old and feeble. Later, in 1965, veterinarians and psychologists from Düsseldorf asked the famous behavioural scientist Konrad Lorenz to shed some light on the dog’s behaviour. Lorenz told them that such behaviour in a dog is altogether plausible; that a dog’s behaviour expresses the subconscious of the dog’s master, as Lorenz put it. If he has an aggressive master, the dog will probably attack other people, Lorenz said, and if the behaviour of his master changes, the dog’s behaviour will change as well, Lorenz said, and Lorenz can be believed, because during the war he was a loyal Nazi who “changed masters” after the war and was given the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his research into animal and human behaviour.

Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,

Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!

I would add something.

Please do, Pound.

See, they return; ah, see the tentative

Movements, and the slow feet,

The trouble in the pace and the uncertain

Wavering!

See, they return, one, and by one,

With fear, as half-awakened;

As if the snow should hesitate

And murmur in the wind,

and half turn back;

These were the “Wing’d-with-Awe”,

Inviolable.

Gods of the wingèd shoe!

With them the silver hounds,

sniffing the trace of air!

You have something against the Pope? Aurelia, who no longer has the golden retriever, asks Haya. People love the Pope, she says.

There is a kind of sausage called Ratzinger, Haya says. Or is it Rottweiler? I’ve forgotten. Birds don’t chirp while they fly, that much is certain; while they fly, birds do not chirp. Ah, Aurelia, Haya says, and then again she says, Ah, Aurelia!

Haya wants to talk, but she cannot. The year is 2006, it is the spring of 2006. In her purse Haya carries a newspaper article from the Corriere della Sera, wrinkled and tattered, stained, creased in several places, which was published on 28 December, 2005, and which for months she has been unfolding and refolding, reading and rereading then reading it again, and by now, of course, she knows it by heart. Haya would like to show this, this article, to Aurelia, who is so fond of the Pope and who is grieving the passing of her retriever. Alfonso Morelli of Bologna says that he found a document in the archives of the French Roman Catholic Church dated October 1946 in which Monsignor Angelo Roncalli, papal nuncio to France and future Pope John XXIII, is ordered to keep track of the fact that the Church must retain supervision and guardianship over Jewish children who were baptized. In this document, Morelli declares, it says that children who have been baptized must under no circumstances be handed over to Jewish agencies with responsibility for the care of children, because these agencies cannot guarantee the further Christian upbringing of these Jewish children, who were saved by the Church during the war and were Catholicized with such benevolence and salvation, especially if these Jewish agencies are handing these, during the war, benevolently Catholicized children back to the Jews, the document says, writes Morelli, and the Jewish agencies can do even less to guarantee anything regarding children Catholicized during the war if the children are given back to their parents, who are searching for them frantically, who pound urgently on the heavy door of the Catholic Church. Further, the document states, Morelli quotes, such children, who have been baptized, should be kept at all costs within the embrace of the Catholic Church, even if their parents are found, even if their parents demand that their children be restored to them. In closing, the document states that this decision, or rather this order, is “confirmed by the Holy Father”, meaning Pope Pius XII, born Pacelli, as Alfonso Morelli from Bologna writes, and Cardinal Angelo Roncalli, future Pope John XXIII, known as “il papa buono”, Morelli writes, had been deeply concerned about the fate of the Jews, because he knew everything about what was going on, because he kept track of what was going on, because he listened to what people told him, among them some Catholic priests as well, and for that reason, Morelli writes, precisely for that reason, after the war Cardinal Roncalli does all he can to reunite the Jewish children, the Jewish children hidden during the Holocaust in Catholic monasteries and various Catholic institutions, to reunite those very children with their parents and their families. The document states that the children who have been baptized, Morelli writes, cannot be handed over to families who will not see to their Christian upbringing. Parents who entrusted their children to the Church, as it also says in the document upon which I stumbled in the archive of the French Catholic Church, quite by accident, since all Catholic Church archives are well guarded and absolutely inaccessible, especially the one in the Vatican called Archivum secretum apostolicum Vaticanum, writes Morelli, those parents who entrusted their children to the Church and are now asking for the return of their children, says the document, which is actually less a document than a directive, writes Morelli, it says “these children” as if they are gifts of God, but they are not, they are someone’s children, writes Morelli, it says these children could only be returned if they were never baptized; if they were baptized, then there is no chance of returning these children to these parents. The directive also stipulates that the Church will consider each case relating to the return of children on its own merits, and issue a final decision, whether to return the child or not, and further, the directive orders that the Church must never under any circumstances respond to official Jewish enquiries in writing. Secrecy and mystery are the underpinnings of the ideology of the Catholic Church, writes Morelli. Since the document which I stumbled upon is a legal Church document written in the spirit of the general principles of the Catholic Church and its policies, and since this document actually forbids the return of children to their legal parents, and as such is approved by the highest Church authority, Pope Pius XII himself, one can assume, writes Morelli, that the order was to be implemented throughout Europe. After this discovery, of course, Morelli continues, the canonization of Pius XII, about which so much has been written and said these past few months, is now in question. My colleagues, journalists and historians, writes Morelli, but also some institutions, he writes, are asking the Vatican to establish a fully autonomous international commission, which they will finance in full, to establish a commission staffed with historians, ecclesiastical officials and forensic experts in order to ascertain how many European children the Church kidnapped. Some estimates posit the number as high as eight thousand. The commission would have to have free access to all Church institutions, writes Morelli, and complete access to all documents. But, writes Morelli, the diaries of Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, Pope John XXIII, are soon to be published, and it may be possible to learn more regarding this question, the question of the children kidnapped all over Europe. I am appalled at the language in which this document-decree is couched, my friend Leo Levi, president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, tells me, writes Morelli, because this document is addressing a serious question, a very painful question, in a manner that is utterly bureaucratic, as Leo Levi tells me, writes Alfonso Morelli. This document makes no mention of the extraordinary historical circumstances under which the Catholicization of Jewish children went on, circumstances in which all these children came under the protection of the Catholic Church, Leo says, Morelli writes. In this directive the Holocaust, which is what led to the baptizing of the Jewish children, in this decree, the Holocaust is never mentioned, Leo Levi says. And furthermore, when the document, or better yet — directive — was written in October 1946, memory of the liberating of Auschwitz was still fresh, Auschwitz had been liberated only a few months before this high-level Church decree was penned, but in it, in this decree, Auschwitz is never mentioned, nor is the Holocaust, Leo Levi says, writes Alfonso Morelli. However, writes Alfonso Morelli in Corriere della Sera on 28 December, 2005, we still don’t know how far Roncalli and other Church functionaries went in implementing the Vatican directive, since all documents pertaining to Church policy are sequestered either in the Vatican archives or in the archives of national churches. It is known, writes Morelli, that at the time of the war many children found shelter in Catholic monasteries, in boarding schools and in schools, but not at the behest of the Pope, writes Morelli. It is well known that after the war the Jews who survived had serious difficulties locating their children, retrieving their children from Catholic institutions, writes Morelli, but until now it was only possible to surmise that the Church was systematically stealing Jewish children in order to indulge Jesus. For sixty years the Church and its “servants” have been striving to prove to the world that they have no blemish on their conscience for their activities as far as World War Two is concerned, writes Morelli. For sixty years the Church has been trying to prove the innocence of Pope Pius XII and many of his bishops and priests. If there is anything that has been preserved with dedication and faith, anything that has been sacrosanct in the church books, then it is the dates of baptisms and deaths, writes Morelli, so it wouldn’t be difficult to ascertain what happened to the baptized Jewish children. If Switzerland, so-called neutral Switzerland, has mustered the strength to set up the Bergier Commission, the I.C.E. — an independent commission of experts — though only on 12 December, 1996, writes Alfonso Morelli, to prove the ties between the Nazi regime and the Swiss banks who had at their disposal vast quantities of stolen Jewish property; if Australia has spoken out about the children kidnapped by their authorities, stolen from Aborigines during World War One, writes Morelli, then instead of obscuring history, the Catholic Church can get off its arse and throw open its archives. And not only that, writes Morelli. It is time for the Church to stop pretending, to stop lying about how its greatest crime during the war was inadequate involvement in saving Jews, writes Morelli, it is time for the Church to stop believing that it is enough for it to launch anaemic apologies for its “inadvertent” lapses, these ecclesiastical apologies, which are becoming more and more revolting over time, truly disgusting, insipid, writes Alfonso Morelli, because, he writes, it is reasonable to deduce that this letter written to Cardinal Roncalli is not the only incriminating document hidden in the vast secret archives of the Catholic Church. We are hopeful it has become clear by now, writes Morelli, that the Church should slow things down a bit as far as the panicked, nearly hysterical race to beatify, canonize, whatever, Pius XII, who, ah, now this is something that is widely known, writes Morelli, was at the head of a Church which was openly championing anti-Semitism at a time when the Nazis and Fascists were persecuting and murdering Jews on a grand scale. He, Pius XII, led a Church in which many German priests abused church birth registers in order to help the Nazis determine who should be first to wear a yellow star — and then be killed, and some German priests kept right on doing this officially for an entire decade after the Holocaust ended, in order to convince those Jews once and for all that they were guilty of murdering Christ. Just as a reminder, writes Morelli, the “Reichskonkordat ”, a concordat signed on 20 July, 1933, between the Holy See and the Reich, is in force in Germany to this day. During that time, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, is Secretary of the Vatican, and he is the one who signs this concordat, while Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, writes Morelli, in a sermon given in Munich in 1937, says, “Now, when the leaders of the greatest world nations observe the rise of the new Germany with a dose of reservation and much scepticism, the Catholic Church, this greatest moral force on earth, is showing its trust in the new German authorities through this concordat, which is an act of vast significance, because it contributes to the strengthening of the renown of the new authorities throughout the world,” says Faulhaber, writes Morelli. Abe Foxman tells me, continues Morelli, and Foxman is director of the Anti-Defamation League, writes Morelli, that they placed him, Foxman, with a Polish family and his nanny had him secretly baptized, and later there were terrible problems, all sorts of complications, before he was returned to his parents. I believe that today there are tens of thousands of Jewish children in the world who were saved and then baptized, Abraham Foxman tells me, writes Alfonso Morelli, children who do not know to this day of their origins, nor will they ever learn of them, says Foxman, writes Morelli.

When I was young I used to go mountain climbing, Aurelia says. Mountaineering is good for breathing. And it fortifies the will, Aurelia says.

In the coordinate system the parabola may hold an interesting position, Haya says. The ordinates of a parabola may be positive, plus and negative, minus, if the sign of the derivative of the parabola is only positive or only negative in a neighbourhood, then no extreme values can exist in that neighbourhood. Don’t mention mountaineering, that mountain discipline, Haya says. I do not like disciplines. I don’t even like cycling anymore.

11

The days do not unfurl, but neither do they trip over one another. Strangely, Haya does not get ill. Haya is a hale old woman. A small dental bridge with the upper-right first and second molars, (the other teeth are hers); cataract surgery on both eyes; her gall bladder removed; mild bronchial asthma (in spite of which she continues to smoke some fifteen cigarettes a day); a fractured tibia thirty years ago — that would be it. Of course, the functions of her body are slowed, diminished and brief, and a nasty itch plagues her in the early evenings: lower arm, upper arm, the left lower arm, then the right, Haya scratches and scratches and scratches, she holds her arms under a stream of cold water and looks, aghast, at the tracks of her fingernails on her thin, dry skin. Am I disappearing? she asks. Her sleep is light, her bloodflow inaudible, the beats of her heart short, like her steps; her vision and her dreams, yes, her dreams, are melting; only Haya’s wait grows and she is frightened that this wait of hers will spill over into nothing; that it will drain away, that soon it will whisper to her I am the wait that got tired, I am your lifeless wait and I’m off now, ciao.

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

Though she has had a computer for fifteen years now, Haya uses the Internet at the city library, it costs less. It’s all so simple, this Internet, Haya says to the librarians, who are surprised; she cannot see why the librarians are surprised. And so, three times a week, from eight to ten at the city library, Haya reads the newspapers on the Internet (mostly German, Italian and Slovenian), and sends letters to the International Red Cross, the Italian Red Cross, to the state and city and tracing services at home and abroad. Slightly hunched, bent at the waist, petite, grey-haired, with spectacles perched on the tip of her nose, her lips pursed and her chin held high, she peers at the monitor as if looking for spots to wipe away with a moistened finger. But they can’t be wiped away. What she comes up with, what she sees while she writes her electronic missives to known and unknown witnesses scattered around the world, to the tracers who are like truffle-hunting dogs, like burrowers through the past, becoming one herself, a bloodhound riffling through the rubbish heap of time, are nothing but gleams of lives among which is hers, gleams reduced to embers under the ashes of which writhe small truths, no longer needed by or essential to anyone. And, while Haya taps at the keys, Gorizia whispers Crazy Haya. And Haya asks, Is it time?

In June 2006 Haya is visited (after all) by a little dream, a quiet dream, so small and so quiet that Haya barely recognizes it.

on the street, barefoot and in the dark, haya goes to a public toilet. the floor of the toilet is awash with urine and faeces, she has nowhere to go, behind her the ground is caving in. to get to the toilet seat, haya wades through the excrement and stares at her belly, which swells before her eyes. i am calm, she says, although no-one knows who the father is, she says. later, haya returns to an old abandoned flat, then a man with a camera around his neck runs in to the flat and says: i am a spy. it is alright, i am pregnant, haya says, i’ll lean on your chest, she says. light brown freckles come out on her temples and forehead. ada springs up from somewhere, all dripping in urine. haya says, mama, now we look alike, but ada only smiles and jerks her head. then ada says, here, haya, read this. on a page torn from pravda are written the words, józsef nagy: “the truth is hard to find”

On Monday, 3 July, 2006, Haya receives a letter from the International Red Cross, or rather the International Tracing Service (I.T.S.) in Bad Arolsen. This letter, as Haya realizes immediately, is not a Christmas or New Year’s card, because it is not winter but summer. The Red Cross, in fact their tracing service, in fact Mrs Helga Mathias, who signs the report, informs her that a copy has been found in Bad Arolsen of a baptism certificate which matches the one Haya sent them with a black-and-white photograph of an infant, on 2 February, 1946, asking for their help in finding her son Antonio Tedeschi, born 31 October, 1944, in Görz, then part of the Adriatisches Küstenland, within the borders of the Third Reich. Helga Mathias writes that in this letter Haya describes how her son Antonio Tedeschi disappeared on 13 April, 1945, but Haya cannot grasp why Mrs Helga Mathias is repeating what Haya wrote sixty years before, because Haya remembers every word of what she wrote to the International Tracing Service sixty years before; after all, children do not go missing every day, the disappearance of children is not such a commonplace event. The disappearance (of children) is something one remembers for a lifetime, isn’t it? Despite the fact that the baptism certificate is incomplete, writes Helga Mathias, and as the mother of the child, Haya Tedeschi, which we are assuming to be you, was not wed to the father of the child, S.S.-Untersturmführer Franz Kurt, born on 17 January, 1914, in Düsseldorf, we gave your petition serious consideration, writes Helga Mathias from the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen. Helga Mathias adds that the petition was in a misplaced box with documents, untypically preserved, about the secret Lebensborn project, with it a letter from Father Carlo Baubela from Görz, today Gorizia, who baptized the child and then handed a copy of the document about the birth of Haya’s son to an unknown person, and that with the letter from Carlo Baubela they found an official order from the Central Office of Reich Security under the supervision of the Ministry for Internal Affairs in Berlin (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or R.S.H.A.), signed by Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-S.S. and Minister, who was in charge of the Ministry at the time. Apparently, according to Heinrich Himmler’s directive, writes Helga Mathias, “a male child of Aryan descent, with the temporary name of Antonio Tedeschi is to be sent to Schloss Oberweis near the town of Gmunden, region of Traunsee, in the former Austria”. Since most of the files holding documentation from most of the Lebensborn homes throughout the former Third Reich were destroyed just before the capitulation of Germany, Helga Mathias writes, it is highly unlikely that we will find any information pertaining to Schloss Oberweis. For now we are assuming that your son was given up for adoption to a German or Austrian family, and that his name was changed at the time. For additional information, writes Helga Mathias, please contact the Red Cross of your country at CROCE ROSSA ITALIANA, Servizio Affari Internazionali, Ufficio Ricerche, Via Toscana 12, 00187 Roma.

For sixty-two years she has been waiting.

If she knew how to pray, Haya would now say to the sky:

Thou bringest all who are dispersed by war

The sheep thou bringest home, to rest:

the child thou bringest to the mother’s breast.

but Haya does not know how to pray,

O Lord Thou pluckest me out

O Lord Thou pluckest

so all she says is

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

Haya sits and rocks by a tall window in a room on the third floor of a building from the time of Austria-Hungary in the old part of Old Gorizia. The rocking chair is old and as she rocks, it whimpers.

Is that the chair whimpering or is it me? she asks the deep emptiness, while she turns over the letter from Helga Mathias, and lying around her everywhere are lives which have dropped like old L.P.s that have played what they have to play. Photographs, papers, posters, letters and little objects from which oozes a thick, sticky silence. And the sole remaining snapshot, cracked, on which the infant Antonio Tedeschi’s face is fractured, as if in a broken mirror.

Then Haya says, The red basket is empty. I have cleared out the years. I see the bottom.

Space has turned into time — Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit. Oh, daughters of the Soča, the essence of reality lies in its multiplicity. Every convergent series is limited. The number a is the limes, the border value of the function f when x tends toward a, lim (x) = A, oh yes.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Daughter of woman,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images…

Yes, a heap of broken images.

So, Don Baubela did not keep his word. He betrayed Haya’s secret; which may turn out to have been for the best in the end, which may have pointed to a trace, which may have contributed to the end of the story. For sixty-two years Haya Tedeschi has been waiting.

On Via Aprica, where until recently there was a butcher’s shop, a café bar called Joy has opened facing the building in which Haya lives. What a coincidence, Haya says, while through the window she sees the first guests nibble at their antipasti with slivers of salmon and beads of black caviar. Her stationery shop Gioia, this café Joy, the letter from Mrs Helga Mathias, as if the path is narrowing as it approaches the jumping-off point from which a person vanishes.

haya is riding a bicycle through the woods. the green leaves shine so brightly that beams bounce off them and penetrate her skin, crawl under her eyelids and pour over her ageing organs, wrap them in the fragrance of the soca. the wheels spin ever faster, her eyes fill with wind, a strange song floats in her head, a chorale soft and sunny. what a stupid song, says haya, angels don’t exist. she keeps missing the pedals, a fist in haya’s breast tightens while she clutches the handlebars, the path is white and uneven, the wheels spin quickly, quicker and quicker. haya lets go of the handlebars, haya flings her arms open in the wood, lifts her feet from the pedals, spreads her legs towards the woods, raises her head to the sky, flies, she flies through the rhomboid images of a kaleidoscope. there in the corner, squinting through this cardboard box of interwoven charms, haya sees her life as it crouches and waits, as it stares at her with dry, wide-open (lidless) eyes. commotion, in her head commotion. via aprica narrows to a glowing arrow. the arrow flies and embeds itself in Haya’s eye, turns into a tiny globe reflecting the sign: Joy

Those roads were echoes and footsteps,

women, men, agonies, resurrections,

days and nights,

half dreams and dreams,

every obscure instant of yesterday

and of the world’s yesterdays,

the firm sword of the Dane and the moon of the Persian,

the deeds of the dead,

shared love, words,

Emerson and snow and so many things.

Now I can forget them. I reach my centre,

my algebra and my key,

my mirror.

Soon I will know who I am.

I squeeze shut my lidless eyes

and wait.

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

On Friday, 30 June, 2006, I leave Salzburg for Gorizia.

It is night. The train glides along, lit from the inside and nearly empty. I move through the black silence, through the fragrance of summer, through a silence which envelops itself, which pours slowly and lazily across the earth and sky, everywhere around us.

A woman sits opposite me, smiling as she looks out the window into the dense nothing glued to the windowpane, into a breath that sways behind us, which follows us like a wind-borne shroud. Going to Gorizia? the woman asks me. Why?

I say nothing.

The woman has on heavy shoes, winter shoes, she is wearing them on bare feet with no laces. The woman has firm hands, thick hair, black, and she’s about forty. There is neglect on her face.

I have four voices I recognize, the woman says, three which are someone else’s and one which is mine.

Oh, I want to say, just don’t speak of voices, not of voices.

Now my voices are quiet, the woman says, so we can talk, she says, but I don’t feel like talking, in my lungs, like colourful ribbons, my voices are dancing mischievously, thin, wheezy and cacophonic voices, which clench my breathing, and I feel like beating myself hysterically on the chest in order to dislodge these intruders and send them fluttering off into the night. I am not in the mood to talk, I say.

Are you originally from Gorizia? continues the woman, as if she doesn’t hear what I am saying, and I tell her I don’t know. I don’t know, I say to the woman who is sitting opposite me and travelling with me to Gorizia and who irritates me, because I don’t want to talk, I don’t feel like talking, and this woman keeps asking, she keeps asking, It remains to be seen whether I am from Gorizia or not, I tell the woman, and she goes on as if I hadn’t said a word. If you are from Gorizia, she says, I may know you. Many people in Gorizia know each other, and I tell her that I doubt it, that I truly doubt our paths have ever crossed anywhere, at any time. I doubt it, I say, and she concludes philosophically, Reality is intertwined and boundless, reality is indivisible like my voices. And coincidences are rare, says that woman on the train to me. Reality is a skein that knits us in, entangles us, says this woman who is bothering me by this time, and then, thank goodness, we arrive in Gorizia and I bid her goodbye.

I stay at the Palace Hotel at Corso Italia 63, for 31 euros a night. The row of trees my window looks out on is dense and deeply green. I ask them to bring to my room a portion of gubana goriziana and a bottle of Picolit. I will lie in the half-dark and caress the golden-yellow thickness with my tongue, the fragrant heft of that discreetly chilled, discreetly dignified Picolit, which they bring me, this is what I have in mind. The taste and fragrance of dried figs, honey, vanilla, wild flowers, peaches, acacia, red and black berries, the warmth and softness of dry-sweet acidity, the tartness of the little oak barrels in which the hundred-year-old fragrance of the Gorizia forests will course through my body, slide to the tips of my toes and back into my breath, to the depth of my eye sockets in which waters of the past are sloshing like blurry mirrors with portraits of my unknown ancestors. Picolit is a miraculous wine. One shouldn’t drink it frequently. Picolit is a delicate wine, a wine of the European nobility, the exclusive nectar of meditation, always produced in small quantities. Picolit is an ancient wine born during the Roman Empire, and it preserves its history in the records of Antonio Zanoni from 1767. I know all sorts of facts about Picolit, a heap of useless details. Later, Picolit imparts serenity and a quiet joy to the already peaceful aristocracy of Germany, France and England. Picolit is an ever-changing but perfect symphony, a unique jewel, which will bring me, I believe soundlessly, painlessly now, after such a long wait, to the scarred past, mine and that of my family, so alien to me. Picolit must be imbibed in solitude, because Picolit is made by courageous vintners for refined palates. So much for Picolit.

My name is Hans Traube.

I was born in Salzburg on 1 October, 1944.

All my documents say my name is Hans Traube, and they say I was born in Salzburg on 1 October, 1944. When someone says “Hans”, I look up. That’s what I’ve always been called: Hans. Ever since I can remember people have called me Hans. People I know well and people I do not know well call me Hans, for myself I am Hans, too, who else could I be but Hans, when I botch something, I say, Oh, Hans, Hans, what a mess you’ve made.

Oh, Hans, Hans, my mother said to me on her deathbed once you were called Antonio.

Ever since then, since the moment my mother Martha Traube moaned Oh Hans, Hans, and that was on 20 April, 1998, I have been searching, looking for this Antonio who has been lost, but who isn’t lost, who was in hiding for half a century, yet he wasn’t — all the while this Antonio has been crouching inside me watching, breathing with me yet listening to me breathe, dreaming with me while stealing my dreams, and I knew nothing about it until my mother Martha Traube, as she was dying, said, Oh Hans, you were born Antonio.

In Gorizia the search is over. After eight years I think the search is over. I believe I know the essential facts of my life, and since these essential facts are now known to me, I am convinced they will no longer matter, they will soon become completely unimportant and unnecessary facts, all those details I have been researching like a lunatic for eight years, digging frantically through archives in a number of cities, in a number of countries, examining countless details, now I see — utterly pointless details, that is why I actually know that soon, just as Thomas (Bernhard) said when I last photographed him in 1988, I believe I will say, Servus, now nothing matters.

I photographed Thomas in Gmunden, where he was living at the time, and where he died soon after we took some wonderful pictures of him, Thomas, and of Gmunden with the places where Thomas often walked. I am a professional photographer. I work for magazines and exhibit all over the world. Sometimes I write. That is why I went to Gmunden. Gmunden is a little town. It has about 13,000 inhabitants and very fresh air; since 1862 Gmunden has been known as a Luftbad. Today Gmunden is a tourist town through which tourists stroll in packs, passing thus by Bernhard’s house, too, though most of them who pass by his house have no idea who Bernhard is and probably will never read what he has written. Gmunden is located in a charming spot, on the northern shore of Traunsee, surrounded by woods. Today Gmunden also has a hospital, a small theatre, an observatory and the oldest electric tram in Austria (introduced in 1894). There are several secondary vocational schools in Gmunden, two gymnasiums and a Mädchenpensionat for the Sisters of the Holy Cross. Pottery from Gmunden is valued highly, as is Gmunden porcelain. Gmunden has several baroque and Gothic churches and monasteries and an interesting cemetery.

There are many paper mills in this area, Bernhard told me, and thus a lot of cripples because of the machines, he told me, which cut off their fingers or arms, or even their ears.

We walked by Schloss Oberweis and I took several pictures of the charming building, as Thomas called it, owned at one time by a Jewish family which disappeared, and today Oberweis is once again in private hands, Bernhard said, and it is inaccessible, he stressed, though this did not upset me, because I had no inclination to go inside anyway. Unlike Schloss Oberweis, which was designed to be grandiose, Bernhard said, my farmstead here was an ordinary barn, nothing but a ruin, rotten and in a state of utter decay, but I liked that, I liked bringing such a rotten state into some sort of acceptable order, he said, so I decided to restore this ruin as much as that was possible, although it remains questionable to what degree fundamental rot can be fully salvaged. I did all this with a man whose name was Ferdl and whom we buried the day before yesterday, said Bernhard then, in 1988. Ferdl was my dearest friend here, he said. A small, gaunt old man, he said, who died the day before yesterday of stomach cancer. For two years Ferdl had been saying: “Something’s eating me up, something from inside,” said Thomas, so one day I’ll write a book called Ferdl, he said.

From a polite distance we looked at that castle, that Schloss Oberweis, a large two-storey building surrounded by a well-tended lawn, surrounded by what are actually fields of dense, impassable grass, by what is actually a park with a fish pond. Why Bernhard didn’t tell me then, in 1988, the most important fact about Schloss Oberweis, I don’t know, but I suppose everything has its time and place. He said, It became apparent long ago that what they taught us was a deception. I couldn’t penetrate before into the everyday, lethal game of existence, I didn’t have the spiritual or physical wherewithal to do that, but today the mechanism moves forward on its own, he said. This is a daily alignment, a tidying of the mind: every day every thing must be set in its place, he said. And then, ten years later, when my mother Martha Traube said, as she was dying, We took you from Oberweis, I watched that lethal game of existence begin, I saw my game of existence begin, how just as it began, this game of my existence, it started moving in a downward trajectory towards its end. I watched how the mechanism sets itself in motion and how my life, of its own volition, is sliding into a one-way current, as if willingly heading for the gallows; how before it becomes extinct it is setting itself to rights, sprucing itself up, as if closing at one moment and opening the next like a fluttering figure of origami.

I sat in my hotel room in Gorizia surrounded by papers, archival documents, letters, photocopies, photographs, books, everything I had amassed over the eight years of searching and once again I arranged and rearranged my treasures, leafed through them, read them, repeated the facts as if I were preparing for an operation after which I would see once again. But games with eyes are deceptive games. The eye is a soft organ, which sees and does not see, depending on how you look at it. The eye is a sensitive organ, it wells often with tears; when it rebels, it calms quickly, it darkens, as if to say I won’t watch; it succumbs without a struggle to external and internal pressures, moreover the eye is easily destroyed and is particularly attractive for certain animals, which like to feed on it, on the eye, who knows why. There was once a woman whose eye was operated on and she convalesced in hospital with a bandage over the operated eye. This eye that you operated itches me terribly, said the woman to the doctors, but the doctors ignored her. The woman complained so bitterly — more each day, not only of the itch, but of unbearable pain — that the doctors decided to remove the bandage and inspect her eye. When they uncovered the woman’s eye they saw that the eye had become totally dead and useless, because inside it an ant colony had made a big hole and from the hole the ants were streaming out and crawling all over the woman’s face. Another woman complained of terrible headaches for months, but doctors found no medical anomalies. In the end she went to have her eyes examined. In one of her eyes medical experts discovered a twenty-centimetre-long worm that had coiled around her eyeball and was poised to enter the eye. The doctors drew the worm out of the woman’s head slowly and cautiously, so her eye wouldn’t be damaged, but the eye was already dead. I cannot say whether it is a coincidence that the victims of predators, which are largely benevolent, tame and docile creatures, not usually ocular predators, are in harmony with their natural environment, part of Nature, close to the ground, I cannot say whether it is a coincidence that the victims were women, or rather women’s eyes. Perhaps these horrors could have happened to two men’s eyes and may well have, but this is how the stories go.

Schloss Oberweis was called Alpenland between 1943 and 1945, and children lived there, mostly small children, mostly children who had been stolen, mostly, I later learned, children stolen from Yugoslavia and the Adriatisches Küstenland. At Alpenland, at Schloss Oberweis, that is, there were also children from Poland, but these were merely a vestige of stolen Polish children, because about 250,000 stolen children had already been placed in some twenty Lebensborn homes throughout the Reich, and in the General Government, of course, in Cracow, in Otwock and in Warsaw, from where the little blonde, blue-eyed Poles were sent for brainwashing to the hell of total Germanization, for adoption with trusted Aryan families or — if these stolen children did not meet the strict selection criteria — they were shipped off to concentration camps for lethal injections by Himmler’s tried and true physicians.

I grew up the way most children do, in an ordinary, routine and relatively boring way. Of course, the details of the big Third Reich secret, of the population project designed to boost and spread the Übermensch species, of that Lebensborn plan, I learned only once I’d begun researching, and I started my research after that (then) devastating sentence from my mother, Martha Traube, I did not give birth to you. My father Jürgen Traube was already dead when Martha Traube said, Now I’ll tell you everything I know, but it turned out that she knew very little, that she actually knew nothing, or pretended to know so little about me, about Austria, about the war, about the Nazis, because the war and post-war doubts of my parents Martha and Jürgen Traube (if they entertained any) ended in 1946. I knew I had a brother named Gottfried, Jürgen and Martha Traube’s son, because there was always talk of Gottfried in the house, while almost nothing was said of the war and National Socialism, at least not by the time I was old enough to remember such conversations. Gottfried had been killed as a soldier of the Wehrmacht on 24 November, 1942, at Stalingrad, when he was not yet twenty. The album with Gottfried’s photographs, a reliquary, lay in a small niche by the living-room window and I leafed through it, especially during my childhood, and whenever I leafed through it I’d ask my mother Martha, Where am I when I was little? Mama Martha would say, We lost one of the albums when we moved here, the album with your baby pictures taken before the pictures in this album which, as you see, wasn’t misplaced, and then I looked at myself in the second album in which I was already eight months old on the first page and sitting up. The war was nearly over, Martha said on her deathbed, and the Oberweis home was about to close. At Alpenland they told us that your father had been killed somewhere in the Adriatisches Küstenland, Martha said, that your birth mother died when partisan bands bombed Casa Germanica in Trieste, she said, and that German troops found you at a nursery for German children which was reduced to rubble. You can be sure, they told us at the Salzburg Lebensborn, this is a child of German blood, they said, although we hadn’t asked. You see, they told us at Schloss Oberweis, see how blonde and blue-eyed the child is and how tall for his age, they told us, Martha said, and besides, the child was examined thoroughly at the Race and Settlement Office, R.u.S.H.A., so there could be no doubt, they said. Everything happened at lightning speed. Our petition for adoption had been waiting for six months at the Salzburg Lebensborn, but then they called from Oberweis on 21 April, 1945. Come right over, they said, we have a child. The next day we wrote to R.u.S.H.A. in Salzburg. We asked them whether they had any new information regarding your background. Herr Obersteiner answered us personally. Herr Obersteiner was the chief of police and a high-ranking S.S. official of the Salzburg R.u.S.H.A. office, Martha said. Here is the document. Look, on 27 April Herr Obersteiner writes, We still have no reliable information on the background of your child, so we ask for your patience. We are hard at work on this case, writes Herr Obersteiner. We will contact you as soon as we have relevant information regarding the child. I hope your little Hans will bring much joy to your lives. See here? Herr Obersteiner writes, Martha said. We had no word from them after that. On 4 May the Americans enter Salzburg and immediately bomb Hitler’s “nest”, Berchtesgaden, chaos erupts. Thousands and thousands of Nazis from Germany pour into town and shout, Don’t you worry, in two weeks’ time victory will be ours! Still, they strip off their uniforms and in worn Lederhosen, carrying rucksacks, they leave to yodel in the fresh mountain air. Pitiful phantoms wander the streets, Germans and Austrians dressed in weird combinations of grimy, tattered uniforms of the Hungarian, Czech, Yugoslav and Italian armies, in the hope of saving their skin. The Salzburg Nazi government slinks off into the underground, burns documents, steals supplies of food and weapons, and flees. And we didn’t care, Martha said as she was dying, we only wanted a little Gottfried and that was that, Martha said. They didn’t send us anything, any documents, because the home at Oberweis was closed soon after that and the children vanished. Where they went to I don’t know, Martha said. When they handed you to us on 21 April, 1945, at Schloss Oberweis they said, Here is a new birth certificate, an absolutely valid birth certificate, a government birth certificate, they said, and on it we will write your last name and your child’s name. Hans, you say? they asked. So that’s it, Hans, repeated Martha as she was dying. For many years, Hans, Martha also said, this unspoken truth has been eating me up. From inside, she said.

Just like Ferdl, I said.

There was always chocolate in the house. There were chocolate balls and chocolate bars even when there was no meat, because my father Jürgen Traube worked first at the Café-Konditorei Fürst in Alter Markt, at Brodgrasse 13, where Paul Fürst began making his echte Salzburger Mozartkugeln by hand, where manufacture by hand continues to this day. Later, when Mirabell splits off from Rajsigl, a famous Salzburg chocolate factory, and Fürst builds his own plant in Grödig near Salzburg, Jürgen Traube works in the sales department at Hauptstrasse 14 and still brings home Mozartkugeln, which Mirabell may not have made by hand, but they were still authentic. So, probably for lack of other stories, Mozartkugeln and their authentic production by hand became, aside from Gottfried, the foundation of our family life.

Former chocolate magnate Felix Rosenzweig propels Jürgen into the chocolate industry in the late 1950s. Felix Rosenzweig is one of the pre-war owners of Rajsigl and Hofbauer and he flees Austria in 1939, only to return in 1950 with nothing but the shirt on his back, yet nevertheless alive and with some of his connections and company shares awaiting him, confiscated, in the vaults of Swiss banks. Felix Rosenzweig brings his wife Isabella Fischer with him to Salzburg, and she opens a small photography studio with a darkroom on the ground floor of a building that had originally been owned by the Rosenzweigs, but was confiscated in 1940, and, with the approval of the regime, some suitable people had moved in during the war. These same people generously rent Felix Rosenzweig his own premises in 1950, so that he can set up the photography “salon” for his wife Isabella Fischer, and for the whole time the civil court suits are going on, dealing with the (partial) return of Felix Rosenzweig’s property to Felix Rosenzweig, these people collect rent for Isabella’s photography salon. The reinstatement of the Rosenzweig family property to its members takes an unreasonably long time, partly because the other members of the Rosenzweig family who are holders of this property never show up, because, it seems, they are no longer around, and at that point, in 1950, it is difficult to prove where and how they met their end, because then (and even later, and even, to some degree, today) the Austrians stubbornly insist that they were the first victims of Nazism and that they haven’t a clue about anything, all they know about is their own losses, their own victims, their own vast suffering. My parents Martha and Jürgen Traube offer Felix Rosenzweig and Isabella Fischer (Rosenzweig by marriage) a small flat in the attic of the building where we live, until they find their feet, and are surprised and almost offended that Felix and Isabella bring up their Jewish background. Nonsense, Jürgen Traube says, Jews are people, too.

I develop my first photographs as an elementary school student in the back room, in the makeshift darkroom of the Isabella Photo Studio, following the instructions and advice of its proprietress, Isabella, who tells me war stories, always in a whisper. While my parents seem to know nothing of the war, for Isabella the war never seems to have ended. Felix Rosenzweig dies in 1978, and Isabella leaves Austria and moves to Yugoslavia, to the little port of Rijeka. Why, for what reason, she never says, though I visit her at least once a year until 2000, when I learn that she has hanged herself in the attic of a building near the train station. My father Jürgen Traube, as set out in Felix Rosenzweig’s will, was “to send a quantity of chocolate truffles to Isabella on a regular basis, no matter where she was living, and if he, Jürgen Traube, should die before Isabella, then his son, Hans Traube, will assume responsibility for supplying the truffles”. So after my father dies in 1980 I send Isabella Fischer chocolates in numerous shapes and sizes made by the most famous chocolatiers. I send her confections from Manner, Lindt, Droste, Suchard, Nestlé, Milka, Neuhaus, Cardullos, La Patisserie, Asbach/Reber, Biffar (the only selection of candied fruit — the rest were all chocolates), Hacher, Underberg. I discover there are truffle balls called Joy of Life and Karl Marx Kugeln, so I send Isabella those, too. The most expensive chocolate truffles are, of course, the Austrian ones from Salzburg. By sending them I hope to delight Isabella. They are Strauss balls, actually praline cubes, and Constance und Amadeus balls by Reber, also previously co-owned by Felix Rosenzweig. I mention Isabella Fischer, because she is a source of key information about my possible origins.

“Lebensborn” means fount of life. As a registered society (Lebensborn Eingetragener Verein) Lebensborn grew into a secret Third Reich project for preserving the racial purity of the German nation. It was S.S.-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler who designed the project and brought it to life. A shy and sensitive, restrained and modest man, not tall, he rather resembled a subservient, pedantic bank clerk than the head of the state police. Himmler suffered from migraines and stomach cramps, and nearly fainted when they killed some one hundred Jews in his honour at the Russian front. That was when he called for the use of “more humane methods” of execution, which meant introducing gas into special chambers fitted with showers.

For many, Lebensborn ended in a nightmare; some came out of Lebensborn decapitated, cloned. Founded in 1935, the Lebensborn Project was designed at first to care for “racially and biologically quintessential” pregnant women, who would give birth to racially and biologically quintessential sons of the homeland, perfect stallions at least one metre eighty centimetres tall, blonde and blue-eyed, muscles bulging, and sleek, disciplined Spartans.

There are absolute and unquestionable principles which every S.S. man must uphold, shrieks Himmler before his companions in Poznan in 1943. One basic principle must be an absolute rule for S.S. men: we must be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest. What other nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary, by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise, this is of no interest to me. Remember, we will be unfeeling and rough only as much as this is necessary. We Germans are the only people in the world who treat animals decently, and we will treat this human animal kind courteously and humanely.

Himmler opens the first Lebensborn home in Steinhöring near Munich in August 1936. At Steinhöring certified Aryan women can give birth to their illegal children in secrecy, most of them hand their children over to the S.S. officials after shedding a few tears, or simply abandon them. The children who are ill, who are mental or physical invalids, are sent off to the paediatric ward of the Leander Institut at Brandenburg-Gorden near Berlin, where under the guidance of Dr Hans Heinz, “expert in child euthanasia”, they are first killed, and then their brains are examined.

I was born at Steinhöring, Olaf told me. I met Olaf at one of the meetings to which people go looking for their lives. First they seek themselves, then they seek forgiveness for the sins of their fathers. Confused and angry people attend these meetings. The descendants of well-known and not so well-known Nazis attend, as do the descendants of those who disappeared in concentration camps. At these meetings the Nazi descendants vomit up hatred and impotence; they excavate long years of silence, feelings of guilt and a plea for forgiveness which ends in unthinkable embraces and timid friendships. At these meetings people try to heal wounds that, like cancer, invisibly take over the body and eat it from inside. These meetings are interesting meetings. Those who do not go to such meetings write books.

I was born at Steinhöring in 1942, said Olaf, who is taller than I am, and I am quite tall, 190 centimetres. I was very good looking, he said.

I was good looking, too, I said. When we stand next to each other, it’s as if we’ve stepped down off a macho billboard, as if we were Hollywood actors, although both of us are greying.

If Hitler were alive, Olaf said, he would be pleased. I was one of the 2,800 babies born at Steinhöring, he said, at the Hitler-Himmler fertility clinic, at the breeding ground of Nazi Aryans, he said. I haven’t told anyone about this, Olaf said at the meeting. At school they didn’t teach us about Lebensborn. It was never mentioned. When I turned five my mother told me I was special, Olaf said. You are absolutely exceptional, she said. You are Hitler’s boy, and as Hitler’s boy you were born at a special clinic, my mother told me, Olaf said. I worked at the hospital, she said. I asked for a job at the hospital so I could serve the Third Reich, my mother told me, Olaf said. I was a member of the Nazi Party. I was an aide to a very powerful man and I always wore the party badge on my chest, my mother said, and to this day I am a believer, and I will remain a Nazi until the day I die, my mother said. She died in 1976, Olaf said. And my father stayed a fervent Nazi to his death, Olaf said. They were both attractive, my mother and my father, but they didn’t live together. I saw my father only a dozen times. The Nazis had guards around the hospital, my mother said, because the local people of Steinhöring threw stones at the women from the centre and called them whores, she said. But we were serving Germany and Hitler, she told me, Olaf said. My mother hit me whenever I cried. Stand up straight! she shouted. Straighten up! You are a soldier of the homeland! One day you will rule the world! she said. The more she loved Nazism, the more I despised it. It’s a lucky thing that her dreams did not come true, Olaf said. When she realized Hitler was gone and there was no new Hitler in the offing any time soon, my mother came to despise me, she rejected me. It would be better if you’d never been born! she shouted, Olaf said. Then I joined the ballet, Olaf said. Then I became a homosexual, he said, but my mother said, If Hitler were alive, you would have ended up under the gas showers. I danced for three years in Paris, Olaf said. We toured Europe, he said, then I went to Israel. There I explained to people what had happened to me. They said, Don’t worry, it’s OK. My mother hates Jews, I said to the Jews in Israel. And my father hates Jews, I told them. When he came back from the Russian front, my father hid, changed his name, changed his identity, and he never worked, he just drank and took drugs. He died at the age of sixty-three, homeless, Olaf said. The last time I saw my father he was lying drunk on the pavement, he said. Many Lebensborn children live today in Canada, England, America, Australia, Norway, Sweden. They are everywhere, Olaf said, and we correspond, now that we’re old. Now that our parents are dead it is too late to disown them, or spit in their faces, Olaf said.

Counting on the high fertility of the German woman, Himmler opens centres all over Germany, and when he decides there are enough there, he proceeds to Norway, where the women are also blue-eyed and blonde and where so many pure-blood German soldiers are stationed. They adapt hotels and villas, castles and ski resorts, some of them donated, many taken from Jews. Medical and administrative personnel are first checked, then hired. The food is good, the rooms are light and decorated with German symbols, the air is pure, the natural surroundings are beautiful and the care is first-rate. The war is going on somewhere far off and — for these select children — it is inaudible. Himmler spares no expense in equipping the Lebensborn homes, he takes as much as he needs, dipping chiefly into funds from confiscated Jewish property.

So from December 1935 to April 1945 it is lively at Heim Hochland in Steinhöring. There are 50 beds for mothers and 109 beds for children in Heim-Hochland. The building, previously the property of the Catholic Church, had been used as a hostel for retired priests. Himmler gives the Church 55,000 Reichsmarks for the building, and then invests another 540,000 in it so that the facility can house his dreams. Then, in 1937, Heim Harz is furnished in Wernigerode with 41 beds for mothers and 48 beds for children. That same year Heim Kurmak is set up in Klosterheide—23 beds for mothers, 86 for children. From 1938 to February 1945 Heim Pommern is built in Bad Polzin (today in Poland) with 60 beds for mothers and 75 beds for children. Only 217 babies are born at Heim Friesland near Bremen with its 34 beds for mothers and 45 beds for children. Heim Friesland ceases to operate in January 1941, because at the time a small allied bomb attack begins on Bremen and the surrounding areas. So the children and mothers are sent to other homes, and the head nurse comes to Norway to set up the Norwegian Lebensborn homes in which the S.S. will accommodate the sons of the homeland. Not four years later these sons become nullius filii, needed by no-one, forgotten. Heim Friesland was the most luxurious within the Lebensborn organization, having previously belonged to the Lahusens, a wealthy family, industrial magnates from Bremen and the surrounding area, but the Lahusen family declared bankruptcy before the war and sold their property, and Himmler immediately nabbed the estate for his project of the sweeping Germanization of select European peoples.

From 1939 to March 1945, Kinderheim Taunus was up and running in Wiesbaden with 44 children’s beds; Kriegsmütterheim opened at Stettin in 1940, followed by Kinderheim Sonnenwiese in 1942 in Kohren-Sahlis near Leipzig, with 170 children’s beds, where the “aunties” took the children out for walks each day to make them strong and fit for adoption, for a better life, stable, planned and set, for a life full of the love that had been stolen from them, from which they were stolen. Heim Schwarzwald opens in 1942 in Nordrach near Baden, and a little later Kinderheim Franken I and Kinderheim Franken II are adapted at Schalkhausen near Ansbach, and then the S.S. confiscates the villa belonging to the Mann family in Munich, on Poschinger Strasse, and houses newly obtained children there.

In Austria at Pernitz-Muggendorf, today a suburb of Vienna, Wienerwald House opens in 1938 with 49 beds for mothers and 83 beds for children, and in 1943 “my” house, Alpenland, opens at Schloss Oberweis near Gmunden, where they change my identity and hand me over to Martha and Jürgen, having done a superficial screening, sloppy and hasty. By then the S.S. are in a big rush, because the house is about to shut down, because Himmler will soon be biting into his cyanide capsule, because cinders are all that is left of his magnificent dream of cloning a super race, a superman of a new race. In Austria there is another Kinderheim at Neulengbach near St Polten, about which I have no information. I might have ended up in Luxembourg at Heim Moselland in Bofferding, because mainly stolen children are accommodated at Moselland. After all that searching I finally ascertain that I, too, was stolen from the Adriatisches Küstenland, not saved after my parents were killed, as Martha Traube told me on her deathbed. Isabella Fischer (Rosenzweig by marriage) tells me in 1999 that there were about a hundred, roughly one hundred high-level S.S. officials milling around the Adriatisches Küstenland, so go to the Berlin archive and search through their dossiers. By digging through all the local and central Church and city archives of Germany, Austria, Italy, Slovenia and Croatia, I discover precisely 1,532 male children with the name Antonio born in the Adriatisches Küstenland in the second half of 1944.

Let me finish with the homes.

Belgium: the Ardennen in Wegimont near Lüttich (from 1943 to September 1944) for mothers of German blood, fertilized by S.S. soldiers.

France: the Westland in Lamorlaye near Chantilly.

The Netherlands: the Gelderland in Nijmegen with 60 beds for mothers and 100 beds for children, and, finally,

Norway, where this was a flourishing activity and from whence today there is a little army, not of baby boomers, but of baby doomers, about 12,000 all told, born between 1942 and 1945:

Heim Geilo (1942), 60 beds for mothers, 20 for children.

Kinderheim Godthaab near Oslo, opened in 1942.

My name is Ester, today. I was born at Kinderheim Godthaab as Gisela. When I turned two my mother advertised in the local newspapers that she was putting me up for adoption. I had blonde curls and I was pretty. When the people who adopted me found out my father was German, they returned me to my mother and drew a large swastika on my little rucksack. Then another family came forward and my mother told them the truth. They were wonderful parents, but they never told me I was adopted. When I turned forty-three a woman called and said, For years I have been shadowed by a little girl with blonde curls and a swastika on her rucksack. I am your mother.

Twenty-seven children from Kinderheim Godthaab were declared mentally retarded and consigned to institutions for the retarded throughout Norway. Many of them spent their whole lives there. Some thirty children were secretly sent to Sweden. In Sweden their names were changed and they were put up for adoption. Those who adopted them were told they were children of members of the Resistance who had been killed, or Jewish orphans. Most of these people don’t know to this day that they are not the people they believe themselves to be. Most of them have no idea they are someone else. I only found my German relatives in 1995.

I, too, lived at Godthaab. I was assigned number 603. My mother brought me there and left right away. The discipline was rigorous. The nurses had white, starched uniforms and spoke only German. Then in 1946 they moved me to a lunatic asylum. I almost went mad with terror. Inmates were bound with chains. Some defecated in their clothes. Wherever. They screamed. I was five. When I turned twenty-three they released me. They said, You’re free, good luck. I was fortunate, however. No-one ever raped me. I completed two grades of elementary school. I worked in a factory at the hardest physical jobs. I tried to kill myself, shoving my arms into a machine for cutting waste, but I survived. My name is Hansen. I found my mother in 1970. She said, Get out of my sight. She said, Your S.S. father croaked in 1953.

I was born in 1943. My father died that same year and my mother was too ill to look after me. They sent me to Godthaab when I was six months old. At the end of the war they decided I was mentally retarded. At the age of seven I was sent to the Emma Hjorth mental hospital where they put me in a straight jacket at night. When they released me I got a job as a housecleaner. I don’t know who my mother was. I don’t know who my father was. I am a member of the society of Lebensborn children who are demanding compensation from the Norwegian government. I know Hansen. After the war they had to hate someone, so they hated us, the children of German soldiers. But there was no talk about us in public. We are a footnote to a history which Norway would like to expunge. After the war they tried to send us all to Germany, but Germany at that point was poor and devastated and couldn’t take us in.

Then the Lebensborn home in Trysil, then

the Hurdalsverk, opened in 1942, with 40 beds for mothers and 80 beds for children.

The Klekken opened in 1942.

Heim Bergen in the town of Hop near Bergen opened in 1943.

Kinderheim Stalheim opened in 1943, could accommodate one hundred children.

I lived at Stalheim. When the war ended they returned me to my mother, who didn’t want me. My mother sent me to a home. I sat in a doctor’s office with six doctors who confirmed I was mentally retarded and that I must never have children. Two staff members from the social welfare centre abused me with oral sex and told me this was obligatory therapy. I was five. I spent twelve years in the Merchant Marines. In 19961 had a nervous breakdown. My wife left me. I spent a year being treated for manic depression at a psychiatric clinic. My mother died in 1988. I found my German father in 1997 and in 1998 he, too, died. I am sixty-five. I am an empty man. My name is Karl Otto Zinken.

Stadtheim Oslo in downtown Oslo opened in 1943. That same year, another state home opened in Trondheim.

I was born at the Trondheim home. My mother was one of the 14,000 who got pregnant with an S.S. man, one of the 5,000 women who were sent to work camps after the war, and before that their hair was cut on the main square in Tro ndheim. I was one of the 12,000 children who posed a threat to Norwegian society. When I turned two they gave me to a family for care and the family kept me chained in the yard with their dog. When I turned six a man threw me into a river, shouting, Let’s see if the witch sinks! When I was ten, drunken villagers from Bursur near Trondheim branded my forehead with the shape of a swastika using bent nails, and howled, Now we will rape you! I was saved by a woman. Afterwards, I used sandpaper to rub at the swastika on my forehead to remove it. When I turned thirty I wrote a book called The German Child. Then I found my mother.

Then, Heim Os near Bergen

My mother’s name was Synni Lyngstad. My mother fell in love with Alfred Haase, a married S.S. sergeant. During World War Two, from 1940 on, once Norway had been occupied, there were about 350,000 German soldiers roaming around Norway. My mother was eighteen when she fell in love with S.S. Sergeant Alfred Haase. I was born in Ballangen, near Narvik, on 15 November, 1945, a bastard. In early 1946 my mother, grandmother and I moved to the little town of Eskilstuna in Sweden. We were safe there: no-one knew of my mother’s past. At Eskilstuna in Sweden no-one would say to my mother after the war, You are a Tyskerhor. You are a German whore, a traitor of Norway. No-one shaved my mother’s head in Sweden, nor did they send her to a work camp. They did not consign me to an orphanage or a mental hospital, nor did they ship me off to Germany or overseas to get rid of me. We were safe in Sweden. Sweden knew who we were, but kept quiet. That was the agreement between Norway and Sweden, that Sweden would keep quiet. Sweden agreed to receive several hundred children like me, several hundred half-German, traitorous children who are sixty-year-old Swedes today. My mother Synni died in 1948 of kidney disease, and for thirty years I believed that my father had been killed at the end of the war on his way back to Germany from Norway. That is what my grandmother told me, Your father is dead, she’d say whenever I asked. Then in 1977 a German magazine published a story about my background and claimed that former S.S. Sergeant Alfred Haase was alive. So I found my father, who came to Sweden to meet me. It was difficult to talk with him. He was an elderly S.S. man and a retired pastry chef. I don’t believe he was a war criminal; he was never taken to court. The two of us are physically similar and this disturbs me. My name is Anni-Frid Lyngstad. I was a singer in ABBA. The brunette.

My uncle breeds dogs, so he trained me as if I were a dog. My aunt recently said to me, I won’t leave you anything when I die, because you are an S.S. bastard. I am sixty-three.

For fifty years they were putting us down. For fifty years what happened to us had been a taboo. Nothing was said about us until 1990. We didn’t exist. But our dossiers are still open. In them crouch ruined lives. We, the children of Lebensborn, are already old. Many of us will never learn who we are. We started searching too late. They doused me with scalding water at the orphanage. This is how filthy German children are washed, they said. A teacher abused me sexually. A priest said, I recommend sterilization.

I changed orphanages twenty times. They locked me in a pantry because I “stank”. They scrubbed me with ammonia; the older boys raped me; the teacher pretended not to see what was happening. They force-fed us swill until we vomited, and then made us eat the vomit. The Ministry of Defence and the C.I.A. took some of us for experimentation with L.S.D. Four of the children died, six killed themselves. One boy was raped by nine men, and afterwards all nine of them urinated on him “to wash away the S.S. disgrace”. For sixty years they called us Tyskerbarna, German bastards. We sued the Norwegian government. Then the Norwegian government apologized in 2001 to the “German bastards”. We have barristers helping us obtain compensation, which, I hear, will be $3,000.

At all Lebensborn homes the files with information about the mothers and their children were closely guarded under lock and password, and this information is not entered into the municipal or Church records. But something somewhere fell flat. Despite Himmler’s generosity, only about 8,000 babies were born throughout the war as part of the initial Lebensborn project. New solutions had to be devised.

Apart from the German children born there, children collected by Himmler’s activists from orphanages throughout the Third Reich are also placed in Lebensborn homes where they are trained, brainwashed, fed with Nazi stories about the greatness of the German nation, about the need to bow down to Adolf the god, and once they are prepared, shaped, turned into marionettes, they are sent to ideologically acceptable adoptive families. Decades after the war had ended these children still did not know what happened to them, what Himmler’s officials did, especially the children in what was then East Germany, who also had no inkling that their parents were not their parents. There were many such children, thousands. Some learned only forty years later about Hitler’s and Himmler’s top secret pro-Aryan Kinder-swindle, while some do not know even to this day, because the Communist authorities held this little truth, meaningless to them, this piddling episode of historical reality, in such secrecy. The secret archives with information about the birth of the Lebensborn children, with information about those put up for adoption, the files listing the changed names, are shunted during the war from one centre to another, and after the war many of these files are destroyed, some intentionally, some not. When the Allies start milling around Germany in the spring of 1945, the staff burn records and abandon most of the Lebensborn homes in panic. And so it is that the identities of thousands and thousands of people disappear forever in flames, which still does not mean that these people did not exist and that they don’t have other interesting, alternative, replaceable identities, as do I. At the end of the war, registers surface in Steinhöring with detailed information on 2,000 children stolen, adopted, displaced in orphanages, while the Federal Archive in Berlin makes public in 1999 that they have come upon a set of files with information about an additional 7,000 children, which profoundly disturbs the lives of some of these former children, who decide to dig through the files and through their genes. In the information at Steinhöring there is no mention of me.

Files found in Heidelberg and information preserved (and hidden) in the former East Germany are also in Berlin, and the only ones with access to this archive, once they have overcome the numerous bureaucratic hurdles, are those who hope to find a lost piece of themselves among the boxes on shelves resembling the shelves in Bad Arolsen.

I was in Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart. At a former women’s prison in Ludwigsburg is the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes (Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung von N.S. Verbrechen). The Office opened in 1958 and to date they have investigated more than 7,000 cases with more than 100,000 suspects. Ludwigsburg is a picturesque little town on the outskirts of Stuttgart. The Dukes of Württemberg used to spend time in Ludwigsburg. Schiller was born there; in the house where he was born there is now a restaurant, one of the Wienerwald chain, and right next to the Wienerwald restaurant they sell McDonald’s hamburgers. The Duke of Württembergs financial adviser, a Jew named Süs, was hanged there in the eighteenth century, and at the entrance to the Duke’s palace stands a plaque which says, This castle shows its bright and cheery face. Its lively, liberal atmosphere is visible even today, as long as one is prepared to visit the other parts of Ludwigsburg, and not just its palaces and parks. Next to the Central Office is a seventeenth-century fortress which housed a prison until 1990; the oldest prison in Germany, now in the fortress, is a museum of crime.

I was at the museum in Ludwigsburg, Ian Buruma told me. The boy who brought me in smiled and enumerated the museums treasures, Buruma said. This is a guillotine that was in use until the late 1940s, the boy said, these are thumbscrews, here, these are the uniforms, ropes and belts they used to hang prisoners, here are the renovated death cells, here, the boy said, is the executioner’s axe, Buruma said, then he showed me lively copper etchings with torture scenes, and the menu for Sus the Jew’s last meal, Buruma said. Sus the Jew was given bouillon, stewed veal, beans and white bread. Then Buruma told me of a taxi driver who had brought him to the Central Office for Investigating Nazi Crimes, when Buruma was looking for something or someone there. He told me how the taxi driver first claimed he didn’t know where the Office was. No clue, the taxi driver said, and went on to say, that office should be scrapped; it’s high time for us to forget those old tales about the Nazis, that is exactly what the taxi driver said, those old tales, as if there aren’t more important things to be doing, as if the Communists weren’t every bit as bad, the taxi driver said, and so on and so forth, repeated the taxi driver, said Buruma.

The Office in Ludwigsburg is the brain, a paper memory, a bureaucratic memory of the Nazi past. In the Central Office, as in Bad Arolsen, lost lives huddle in steel cabinets. At the Ludwigsburg Central Office, filed tidily in alphabetical order, are more than 1,400,000 testimonies of witnesses and victims, various dossiers, Gestapo documents, archival court transcripts, not just from Germany but from everywhere — Poland, the former Soviet Union, France, Romania, Hungary and the Netherlands (Buruma is from the Netherlands), and so forth, as the taxi driver would say. Lord, it’s as if all of Germany is crisscrossed with hidden, underground waterways, subterranean conduits of lamentation, woe and oblivion, the inexhaustible Acheron, the Cocytus and the Lethe.

I was at the Berlin Federal Archive — the largest Nazi archive there is, with more than 50 million pages registered, including the originals of the personnel files of members of the National Socialist Party and S.S. officials — and there I stumbled upon a little clue that took me further. Later, when I established that my genetic father might have been S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz, I went back to the Berlin Archive and leafed through his past, which was a source of incredible distress to me, in fact, of physical revulsion, though I kept telling myself I had no tie to this man, which was not, of course, true. In Kurt Franz’s dossier there were photographs, especially from Treblinka, showing Kurt Franz riding, or in white sports shorts, running through a lovely, dense forest, Aryan and sexy, all the more nauseating. The Berlin Federal Archive, like the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, is in a dense forest. But unlike Bad Arolsen, which is completely hidden, the Berlin Archive is not far from downtown Berlin, though both buildings — the main building in Bad Arolsen and the one in Grunewald on the outskirts of Berlin — used to belong to the Gestapo, which can be quietly chilling for the visitor.

Aud Rigmor Harzendorf from Kohren-Sahlis told me that they never spoke of the past in East Germany before 1989, and I told her that in West Germany they didn’t speak of it either, nor did they in Austria, though, of course, they talked a lot about the more distant past, they spoke of several distant pasts, the more distant the pasts were, the greater the detail in which they spoke of them, but there was very little talk, only quiet and secretive talk, about the recent past, on the basis of which one might conclude that the recent past was quite a dirty past. Then I learned that in East Germany there was a major secret scam perpetrated with the names of the Lebensborn children, which was why the whole story had been unknown there until recently. The Stasi needed new names for its spies, so they stole the original identities of the Lebensborn children who had been given up for adoption, meaning their real names, and if these children decided to poke around the archives later, they would come upon a whole heap of alarming political and police hurdles. My adoptive mother told me I have no parents, that I was left with no parents. You were left without both parents, my adoptive mother said, Aud told us. And that is why they gave you to me, said my adoptive mother, whom I loved as if she were my own, and that is absolutely all she said, said Aud, but we lived five hundred metres from the former Lebensborn home in Koren-Sahlis, and I had no idea what kind of a home it was, what went on there, I didn’t know I was born inside. Today there is a children’s nursery school in the building, it is very cheery, but I still don’t know who gave birth to me or what her name was, Aud told me when I met her at a gathering of other children who are searching for themselves, frantically, and who are no longer children, of course, some have children of their own, grown children, some even have grandchildren, like me, for example. I am sixty-two and I will have to tell my children, my grandchildren, everything I have discovered in the course of my eight years of searching, which will confuse them, because everything I have come across since 1998, when my mother Martha Traube told me You are not Hans Traube as she was dying, until today, 3 July, 2006, all of this sounds incredible, and I will have to speak with them about it, and they will have to drag this shit around with them for years, decades, like a punishment, a curse, and they will forever be wondering What is hidden in my genes? and I will tell them and I’ll say it over and over: Your genes contain the genes of a member of the S.S. and a war criminal and the genes of a Jewish woman. I will have to tell them, and they will have to find a way of dealing with it. History, history which we Germans (and Austrians) have repeatedly mucked up, as Grass says, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps coming up.

Then Aud showed me this photograph, which her adopted mother had been hiding for fifty years, a picture from the Lebensborn home at Kohren-Sahlis, and in it is Aud, of course, and then Aud told me, Look, that’s us, Hitler’s children.

There were various ways of bringing children to the Lebensborn homes. Other than the German children, there were children who had been stolen from the occupied countries of the Reich. Little Poles were the largest number to stay at the Lebensborn homes, about 250,000 little Poles, but there were children stolen from Ukraine (about 50,000), the Baltic countries (about 50,000) and Yugoslavia (600 children are known to have been taken from Slovenia alone). There were many children from different places, much like the little fair-skinned, blue-eyed German children of pure German blood. Even French children weren’t spared, and Norwegian children. Today only 50,000 of these children know of their origins and who their parents were or are.

Himmler adored Lebensborn homes, over which special Lebensborn banners flew, in which they used special Lebensborn dishes and special Lebensborn cutlery on which there was a special Lebensborn stamp (today the cutlery goes for a lot of money at auction). The bedding and tablecloths and towels had Lebensborn monograms, and the staff wore a special Lebensborn pin on their chest, so that everyone would know.

Every single object at the Lebensborn homes was marked with little runes resembling a hissing stroke of lightning: S.S. Himmler loved making the rounds of “his homes”, so that he could be sure the Germanization of the right sort of children was progressing at a desired pace, and sometimes he would be present at the ceremonial rite of pseudo-Christian baptism under the Nazi flag, during which the newborn would be given candlesticks made by camp inmates from Dachau.

Himmler’s favourite child, Gudrun, her father’s “Puppi”, who grieves even today for her fanatically Catholic and equally fanatically racist father, had the opportunity to ascertain personally how creative the Dachau prisoners were when, at the age of twelve, she wrote in her diary after a visit to the camp in 1941: Today we visited Dachau S.S. concentration camp. We saw everything there was to be seen. We saw the tended gardens, we saw orchards, we saw beautiful paintings made by the prisoners. And after all that, we had a lot to eat… it was wonderful.

During a baptism, an altar would be draped with a cloth embroidered with a swastika, the baby would be laid on a pillow in front of the altar, and then a Nazi would read excerpts from Mein Kampf, then Haydn’s Variations on the German National Anthem would reverberate throughout the room, a uniformed S.S. man would bless the (male) child by holding an S.S. “honour dagger” to its brow, a second S.S. officer would give a brief speech, the child would be given a name, and they all would sing.

Himmler gave the children born on his birthday (7 October) special gifts. I think it entirely right that we are taking little children from Polish families, writes Himmler in 1941. We are placing these children in special homes and schooling them, writes Himmler, because these are children with particularly robust racial characteristics. I order that after six months every child who has proved to be acceptable be furnished with a new family tree with valid accompanying documents, orders Himmler, and that after one year of observance, those children be given for adoption to racially authenticated parents with no children. Because among so many people there will obviously be some persons of high racial quality, writes Himmler. Hence our task is to remove these children from their environments, if necessary by violence and theft, because, Himmler writes, either we will keep all the good blood for ourselves… or we will destroy that blood.

Racial selection of stolen children was stringent, entailing medical examinations and tests: they measured the head, its size and shape, the limbs, their length and girth, the structure of the female’s pubis, the coordination of movement, the intelligence, the shape of the nose, fingernails, mouth, eyes, all of it was regulated and explicit. Top-category children went off to famous, wealthy S.S. families; second-category children qualified to receive social and financial aid; the less valuable children were sent to orphanages. It was known exactly what perfect German babies should look like.

Photographs of perfect German babies began cropping up everywhere. They were used in advertisements and on propaganda posters, on food labels, in school textbooks. Thanks to Himmler’s obsession with the need to produce as many perfect Aryan children as possible, competitions for the most beautiful, perfect Baby of the Month, Year and Nazi Eternity were regularly announced, just like similar ghastly competitions the world over today, filling the pages of cheap newspapers with their ads. It so happened in 1935 that the title of Most Beautiful Aryan Baby of Berlin was won by Hessy Levinsons, whose parents had brought her to a prominent Berlin photographer to have her picture taken. Several months later, this photograph of Hessy Levinsons appeared on the front page of the magazine Sonne ins Haus. Jacob and Pauline Levinsons, who were both famous opera singers, originally from Latvia, froze when they saw the front page. They went to the photographer to ask how it had happened, and the photographer confessed he had known Hessy was a little Jewish girl, but he had deliberately submitted her photograph in order to prove that the racist Nazi theory of blood and soil was plain nonsense, confirmed by the fact that Hessy had been chosen in fierce competition with pure-bred German babies. The picture was printed on postcards. Hessy was sent out as a birthday greeting to travel all over Germany, and perhaps beyond as well. In 1939 the Levinsons decided to flee the Third Reich, first to France, then over the ocean to Cuba, and finally on to New York.

Nazi family pasts are hard to expunge. Now, as the next generation is already ageing and on its way out, Nazi family stories are winging their way into the homes of the third generation and wreaking havoc there. Compared to me, Sam Thacker is a mere kid at thirty, living in England. Pasts are free-thinking, pasts like to roam, pasts traverse borders, glittering gaily, pasts are bold travellers, sliding through their own molehill-like labyrinths. Recently, among mislaid, discarded family documents, Sam Thacker’s mother comes upon several undeveloped rolls of film, which her father, Sam’s grandfather, a member of an elite unit of the Waffen-S.S., the Leibstandarte S.S. Adolf Hitler, and decorated with the Iron Cross for his merits, brought back from the front at some point. In these pictures life is so lovely and so ordinary. In special combat gear the young S.S. men tour the sites of Paris, they swim, attend football matches, visit the military cemetery at Verdun, sit in bistros in the company of three lively French women; nothing inhumane, nothing monstrous on the faces of the young men who are serving their leader and their homeland. But Sam Thacker is disturbed. Photographs testify. The Nazis cultivated a special weakness for the amateur photographer snapping shots with expensive photographic equipment. Photographs, of course, can be burned, but that doesn’t often happen. When photographs are burned, crumbs of memory remain from which sprout fear and shame, the sins of the fathers and grandfathers are difficult to eradicate. The children of these fathers and grandfathers are still tiptoeing through their own minefields today. And once they step into the field of anger and condemnation, once they cross it, a heavy cloak of pain settles upon them. And small, though dangerous, geysers of the past continue to erupt unexpectedly under their noses, until these descendants, and they are many, these descendants of big and little Nazis rub their family excrement deep into the pores of their own bodies, after which they will at last be able to rinse themselves clean. History, an ornate lady who does not die easily, dresses again and again in new costumes, but keeps telling the same story. History as Dracula, History as the Vampire, the vampiric fate of history, History the Bloodsucker, that great mistress of humanity.

Whenever the quota of children at homes and orphanages got low, the Nazis kidnapped children from streets, playgrounds, parks; they tore children from their mothers’ arms, which is what happened with me. A week before I left for Gorizia on Monday, 26 June, 2006 I received a letter from the International Red Cross, or rather from the I.T.S. (International Tracing Service) in Bad Arolsen, in which that organization — or rather a Mrs Helga Mathias — informs me that they have found a copy in Bad Arolsen of a baptism certificate which matches one sent to them on 2 February, 1946, with a black-and-white photograph of a three-month-old infant by a Haya Tedeschi of Gorizia, asking for their help in finding her son Antonio Tedeschi, born 31 October, 1944, in Görz, then part of the Adriatisches Küstenland. The baptism certificate, writes Mrs Mathias, says that the father of child Antonio Tedeschi is S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz, born on 17 January, 1914, in Düsseldorf, where he died in 1998. Helga Mathias adds that they compared the photograph, which I, Hans Traube, born in Salzburg on 1 October, 1944, sent them on 23 January, 1999. We compared the picture on which you are, as you say, about eight months old, writes Helga Mathias, with the picture of the three-month-old infant sent to us by Mrs Haya Tedeschi of Gorizia, writes Helga Mathias, and we ascertained that the similarity is striking. In a displaced box, among the rare documents preserved about the secret Lebensborn project, Mrs Mathias writes further, we found a letter from Father Carlo Baubela of Görz, now Gorizia, who baptized the child and then handed over to an unknown party a copy of the document about the birth of Mrs Haya Tedeschi's son, being Antonio Tedeschi, who could be you. With the letter from Carlo Baubela, writes Helga Mathias, we found an official order from the Central Office of Reich Security, signed by Reichsführer-S.S. and Minister Heinrich Himmler, who was in charge of that ministry at the time, an order to send the male child of Aryan descent with the temporary name of Antonio Tedeschi to the Alpenland Lebensborn home, to Schloss Oberweis near the town of Gmunden, region of Traunsee, in Austria. Since the registers with documentation of almost all the Lebensborn homes throughout the Third Reich were destroyed just before Germany surrendered, writes Helga Mathias, we are unlikely to find any information pertaining to Schloss Oberweis. I had a week to learn the details of the life of S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz, though he was already in my private archive, among the officials who were stationed then, between 1943 and 1945, in the Adriatisches Küstenland.

Before I left on my trip, I got in touch with several acquaintances, I can call them friends and fellow sufferers, who have gone through or are still going through the hell I had been going through for eight years, people I met at various gatherings and workshops at which one practises breathing in the truth and at which there is a lot of weeping. Aloizy Twardecki (the Nazis kidnapped him too and changed his name to Alfred Hartmann, then gave him up for adoption to a German family) told me, Come on, perhaps this is the end, though I doubt it. After the war Aloizy was repatriated to Poland and today he teaches at the University of Warsaw. I got in touch with Don Alexander Michelowski, who was ten in 1942 when he was kidnapped from his home and his name changed to Alexander Peters. He knocked around orphanges for years because he was too old for adoption, and later, as a Catholic priest, served the Polish Diaspora in Newcastle. Alexander said, Even God didn’t help me. Helena was adopted by a German policeman and his wife, a seamstress, but after the war she was returned to Poland, and today she is a judge in Warsaw. Helena told me, Write a book, maybe it will heal you. It was hardest to talk with Ingrid von Oelhalfen. Ingrid was stolen as an eight-month-old baby from Slovenia. They kidnapped me in Celje, she said. She was taken to Germany and never returned, and she never found any of her family; she only found this small and useless fact stating that she is not Ingrid von Oelhafen.

My name is Ana Johnson. I was born on 3 March, 1946, in Reutlingen, Germany. Because of an illness of the joints and bones I took my first steps only at the age of two. When my mother Mary Božić tried to board a ship for Australia in 1946 they stopped her. You cannot leave Germany without your child, they said. So Mary waited for me to walk. We arrived in Australia in 1948 and Mary immediately left me at St Therese’s Orphanage in Essendon. On 16 December, 1984, I was found by the Federal Police. Mary Božić has less than a month to live, said the men from the Federal Police. Mary Božić has cancer of the large intenstine and she wants to see you, repeated the Federal Police. We will take you to Mary Božić, they said three times. Then I saw my mother after thirty-six years and I had no recollection of her, so I thought right away that maybe she wasn’t my mother. I nursed Mary Božić and she told me the story of her life as she was dying. On her left arm Mary Božić had a tattoo of a swastika and the number LB 0097. I was a Lebensborn slave, she told me. I worked at the munitions factory in Reutlingen. We produced rockets and rounds for the German Army, she said. There were many S.S. men there. I was beautiful. The S.S. men raped me whenever they felt like it. There were many S.S. men. They raped me often. I was beautiful, she said. Luckily you were born on 3 March, 1946, she said, because had you been born on 3 March, 1945 you would not be alive today. They would have killed you, because Hitler wanted as many male children as possible. I spent my whole life in fear, my mother Mary Božić said, as she lay there dying in Australia, and I told her that I had constantly felt guilty, but didn’t know why. They moved me from orphanage to orphanage, I told my newly discovered mother, Mary Božić, then they sent me to reform school. To this day I don’t know why, because I never had any reason to reform. I was quiet and obedient, I told her. My mother, Mary Božić, died on 2 February, 1985. We talked for a month, for a month we were together. This was a great joy for me. I got in touch with the Red Cross. I hoped the Red Cross would help me find out my grandparents’ names. I might have relatives. I might have nephews. My mother had six brothers. My grandmother was a Gypsy from Hungary and my grandfather was from Yugoslavia. I believe I have hundreds of brothers and sisters. Who knows how many women he slept with, the man who got my mother pregnant? Mother never told me my grandmother’s name. I am German property, because I was made in Germany at the behest of Heinrich Himmler. I was born in Germany, but when the war ended they forced Mary Božić to take me with her, because they wanted to forget I existed. They did not want to see me. They wanted to forget I had ever lived, but I’m not giving up. Germany owes me an apology. It owes me compensation. Me and my mother Mary Božić. I must find out who my family are and where my grandfather and grandmother are buried. Thank you for hearing me out.

At Nuremberg, for crimes against humanity, for the theft of children, for Lebensborn manipulations, the following people were brought before the court, and sentenced or released:

Ulrich Greifelt: life imprisonment

Rudolf Creutz: 15 years

Dr Konrad Meyer: released

Otto Schwarzenberger: released

Herbert Hübner: 15 years

Werner Lorenz: 15 years

Heinz Brückner: 15 years

Otto Hofmann: 25 years

Richard Hildebrandt: 25 years

Fritz Schwalm: 10 years

Gregor Ebner: two of the charges dismissed, convicted of the third charge, but released on account of time served

Max Sollmann: released

Gunther Tesch: released

Inge Viermetz: released

My situation is complicated many times over. I was stolen. I am a Lebensborn “child”. I was raised by former supporters of Nazism, Jürgen Traube (who never, thank God, sullied his hands) and housekeeper Martha Traube, who also, thank God, renounced her “support”. I still consider Jürgen and Martha Traube to be my parents. I would like to disown them, but I cannot, because they were good and tender parents, they were permissive parents, though they were Catholics, I mean they were not fanatic Catholics, because fanatic Catholics are the worst Catholics, just as all fanatics are horrible and dangerous people. As tolerant parents, Martha and Jürgen Traube took my pronounced anti-fascism in their stride, my anti-Nazi photographs and exhibitions, my often uncontrolled outpourings of fury and, for me, not the least bit benign ressentiment of Austria’s part in the war. They put up with my disgust at Austrian silence, at Austrian blindness bound to Austrian Nazi history. They listened to what I told them and when I married Rebecca they said, Rebecca, you are ours as much as Hans is. But then into my life crept that murderer, S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz and that Jewish woman who spread her legs for him, for the blonde angel of death, the admirer of music and nature, the bad amateur fanatic photographer, the baby-faced executioner, she spread her legs while trains rumbled past, right there in front of her nose, on their way to killing grounds all over the Reich. At first I was sorry that S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz was dead, I wanted to shake him up, though his story didn’t interest me, I didn’t want to hear it, because the story was clear to me and for me the story has no inside or outside, it is a monstrous story, full stop. Maybe I would have killed him, S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz, believing that I was thereby destroying, expunging, exterminating all the dirty genes that are planted inside me. Today nothing matters. I wanted to hear out the woman who gave birth to me, I wanted to forgive her, because she might be able to bring to life the little man, the stunted midget, Antonio Tedeschi, who has been waiting inside me for sixty-two years to grow up, to obtain some kind of a biography, no matter how dull and defective. This Haya Tedeschi could inscribe a history onto my minuscule, half-dead double, this foetus inside me, after which he, Antonio Tedeschi, would open his glued-shut eyelids, straighten up and maybe go his way, leaving me in peace.

I know, there are more stories like mine.

Ah, said my wife Rebecca, relax. The world is full of horrors and life is unpredictable. Look what happened to Beate Niemann, the protagonist of that documentary My Father the Murderer.

I know the story.

Beate Niemann was born in 1942, but it was only in 1997 that she set out to search for her father, which seems both comprehensible and incomprehensible, reasonable and unreasonable, courageous and cowardly. But who am I to judge?

Beate Niemann looked for a father she could be proud of, but she found a murderer. She found S.S.-Major Bruno Sattler up to his elbows in blood. She traced a life shadowed by her mother’s lies, by lies never renounced or denied. Only a few weeks before Beate Niemann was born, Bruno Sattler grouped gassing trucks around SajmiŜte concentration camp on the outskirts of Belgrade, he assembled lorries for the gassing of women and their children. Bruno Sattler was killing women and children at SajmiŜte concentration camp and sending his pregnant wife little love letters, photographs from the field, photographs of nature. Beate Niemann’s father, S.S.-Major Bruno Sattler, had ordered the shooting of several tens of thousands of Jews in Smolensk and near Moscow. They say that Beate Niemann’s father, S.S.-Major Bruno Sattler, took part in the liquidation of 500,000 Yugoslav partisans, Jews, Gypsies and others.

Poor Beate Niemann. Born in Nazi Germany which after the war has for decades publicly, persistently, even courageously, been uncovering the dangerous refuse of its past, Beate Niemann, fifty and something years later decides to start digging through the secrets of her own family, utterly shaken with and surprised by what she finds. Where had the loads of logical doubts been hidden? Which waters did they flow into? Where were her parents’ monstrous truths stored? In tightly packed bundles of hatred which will, covered by layers of mould, of deposited dirt, spontaneously dissolve?

Thus, when in her sixties, when body, but also spirit, become weaker, Beate Niemann, as if stepping on a land mine, faces the truth that additionally crushes her.

After World War One, during the 1920s, Bruno Sattler sells jewellery at the Wertheim department store in Berlin. The proprietors of the store were members of the Wertheim Jewish family, Sattler knows that, so he quickly joins the Nazi Party and becomes a policeman, then advances further and further, until he finally arrives at the Gestapo. Then he moves to the secret service of the S.S., then to the Einsatzgruppen who kill more than a million and a half civilians in the Soviet Union before the butchers and slaughterers of Auschwitz and Treblinka even appear on the scene in Poland.

Beate Niemann’s mother dies in 1984, and that is when Beate Niemann starts searching for her father. She makes the rounds of more than a hundred archives in three countries, but the first traces of truth she finds among her mother’s belongings and in the urban planning office in Berlin, right under her nose. She comes across a document that confirms how already in 1942 Bruno Sattler buys a house from a Gertrud Leon for the miserable sum of 21,000 Reichsmarks. To the purchase and sale agreement which Beate Niemann finds, there is attached a guarantee from Bruno Sattler in which he declares that he will spare Gertrud Leon from any possible transport, that he will guard her life, and that he will not allow anyone to move her anywhere or take her out of Berlin. Two weeks later Gertrud Leon goes off first to Theresienstadt, then from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz to breathe her fill of gas.

Beate Niemann then visits Belgrade. In Belgrade she meets Ljiljana Ȉorđević, who says, Oh, yes, I remember S.S.-Major Bruno Sattler. S.S.-Major Bruno Sattler killed my father at the camp in Sajmište.

So, how does S.S.-Major Bruno Sattler come to his end? In 1947 Russian agents pick him up in broad daylight on a Berlin street and take him off to an East German prison. Many years later, Beate Niemann goes to Leipzig, to the former Stasi prison then already abandoned, in order to peep into the cell her father had occupied. It is a small cell, in it twenty people slept on boards, they tell her, in that cell one could not walk, one could only lie. The walls were still filthy, ghostly, stained with various histories. Finally Beate Niemann learns that her father, S.S.-Major Bruno Sattler, died on 15 October, 1972, they say he was shot in the back of the neck. After that agonizing but greatly belated revelation, Beate Niemann begins her homage to Eastern Europe, seeking out surviving Jews, those who lived through the camps and all the torture and all the humiliation, and when she couldn’t find them, because not many remained, she looked for their children, and to everybody she would say, to those who prevailed, to the leftover people, Beate Niemann would say, Forgive me, forgive me, please forgive me.

Then there’s Monika Göth, the daughter of Amon Göth, the commander of Plaszow camp, the one from Schindler’s List who loved shooting inmates from the balcony of his villa, and people wouldn’t have known about him, they would have had no idea who he was, most people wouldn’t have known who Amon Goth was had they not watched Schindler’s List, but many did not see Schindler’s List, they didn’t want to see Schindler’s List, because the theme of Schindler’s List makes them nauseous, that’s what they say, We don’t want to get upset, they say, all that is in the past now, they say, and Monika Göth, who was one year old when in 1946 her father was hanged as a war criminal, Monika Göth, many years after, forty, fifty years after, also searches for surviving camp inmates tortured by her father and seeks their forgiveness, she roams the world and asks for forgiveness and to everyone she says, I am not like him. Every year Monika Göth goes to Auschwitz and in Auschwitz she pays her respects to the victims of her father, Amon Göth.

Then Peter Sichrovski, a journalist from Vienna, born in Vienna, who grew up in Vienna and who after the war played with the children of former Nazis, and who then, many years later, goes looking for them, for his street pals, in order to ask them, What did your fathers do during the war? and then records their answers.

Some of my kind ask me, What does the child of a murderer look like? Is it obvious, is it evident that we are the children of murderers? Oscar tells me that until their death his parents regretted that today no-one can force him to wear a pink triangle. We are all trapped, we, the children of Nazis. The prisoners of history. Those who grieve for their “tender” fathers who brought them souvenirs from Polish concentration camps and dandled them on their knees, and we who are trying to face our family truths. The woman who begs Sichrovski to take her paralysed father living in an old people’s home for a short “walk”, that pathetic, demented old man who still feeds on his Nazi faith, even if through a feeding tube, literally through a tube, she, too, is fucked up. No matter what he was, says this woman to Peter Sichrovski, he is still my father, he loved me, I know he loved me, says the woman in whose bosom a tornado must be raging. That frightens me. When in people who are monsters, butchers, slaughterers, perverse sadists we discover scraps of gentleness and frailty, I freeze in horror.

Hans, what do the children of murderers look like? some of my kind ask me.

Like us, I tell them, they look like us.

Helga Schneider I remember from Salzburg, then we met again at the promotion of her book in Bologna. Many of us write books, make films, hold photographic and video installations, paint the horrors we excavate from our own innards, monstrous worlds that remain mostly unintelligible and inaccessible. We are a lot unto ourselves, an ilk that has unhooked itself from Earth and now wanders through space. We are little Helnweins and Bellmers in search of stars and meteors, of straggling heavenly bodies on which we could land, just to feel the ground beneath our feet, even if that ground is very far away. We do not believe in any gods, especially not in supernatural gods. In fact, we have no faith, because it is faith we do not believe in. Least of all do we believe in the Catholic faith, it has sullied itself the most, it has defiled itself.

Helga Schneider comes to Salzburg at the age of seventeen. I am ten at the time and I am already hanging out at Isabella Fischer-Rosenzweig’s photography studio. Helga drops in during the afternoon, because she cleans Isabella’s darkroom and mops the floors for pocket money. Helga takes me out for an ice cream.

By the time Helga Schneider tells me her story in 2001 I am already in frantic search of myself, I seek the dwarf who has resided in me from the time I was born, who breathes with me as I take each breath, who has been crouching for fifty-seven years in the dark, in the dark of my skull, in the gloom of my gut, who touches my bones and squeezes my heart with his little hands. Then I arrive at Helga’s book launch in Bologna in 2001.

I was four in 1941, Helga said. It was a cold autumn evening. She said, I am leaving. She said, So, auf Wiedersehen, meine Kleine. She picked up her suitcase and left, Helga said. She didn’t kiss me. She didn’t say where she was going, why she was leaving, when she would be back. My brother was still an infant, and he was asleep. We were left alone, Helga said. Then we cried, we howled, because our father was off fighting, I don’t know where, all I know is that he was fighting for the Führer and the Fatherland. Then my father’s mother came from Poland, Grandma Emma, whom we loved, but father remarried soon and he sent Grandma Emma back to Poland, and mama’s name, Traudi, was never mentioned again in our household, Helga said. Traudi is dead, father said, dead, remember that, he said. His new wife didn’t like me. She loved my brother. I got on her nerves, Helga said, so she dumped me in a reformatory, and afterwards sent me to a school for problem children, although I don’t know why. I asked them, my father and my stepmother, Why am I a problem? What have I done? and they said, You’re untidy. You’re messy all over, especially in your head. I would see my mother again only thirty years later, in 1971, Helga said. But I did see Hitler. In December 1944 I was seven and still living at home and someone organized a visit to Hitler’s bunker for children of high-ranking parents. It was festive. We were supposed to shake hands with the Führer. Special children of tried-and-true Nazis went, not just anyone, Helga said. So we, my brother and I, went. The food was decorated beautifully. There was a lot set out to eat and plenty of colours. We could hardly wait for the handshaking to be over, Helga said, so we could eat. Then the Führer arrived, and he walked terribly slowly, dragged his feet, his footsteps slid as if snakes were slithering over the stone floor and hissing. Hitler walked hissing his feet, Helga said, all hunched over and grey, and while he was walking towards us, his head shook and his left arm hung there, swinging like a long, dead fish, Helga said, as if it were made of modelling clay, she said. He extended to me the other hand, the one that wasn’t dangling and looked me straight in the eyes and I froze. I saw his pupils dancing, Helga said, and I waited for some evil little man to come leaping out of his eyes and drag me away with him. Hitler’s handshake was soft, limp, Helga said, and the palm of his hand was moist. This is like holding a frog, I thought. And his cheeks sagged. Everything on him sagged. He had bags under his eyes. He was all flab. Only his moustache stood firm. Then he asked me, What’s your name, dear? and I told him, Helga. I said only Helga, but forgot to add “mein Führer”, which was a serious omission, Helga said, but my brother did not forget to say “mein Führer”, my brother said it at least two, possibly three times, “mein Führer”, “mein Führer”. Then the hostess came and gave us each a bar of marzipan. We didn’t get any of the lovely food, just a little marzipan bar each. Then the war ended, Helga said, but the hunger did not, and the great chaos became even greater. Father came back from the front. He decided in 1948 to take up residence once more in his homeland, Austria, which had reinstated its name and borders, which once again belonged only to itself. So we left Germany forever, Helga said. Things at home turned from bad to worse because of my stepmother, so one night, Helga said, I ran away and never went back. That’s when I got work at Isabella’s, she said, and I also washed glasses at a Salzburg beer hall where it wasn’t too bad. I could have lunch there, mostly sausages, and all the beer I wanted to drink. Then I finished secondary school, Helga said, and played little supporting roles in an experimental basement theatre, a Kellertheater, she said, and then I went to Vienna, and in Vienna I posed at the Kunstakademie for students and met Oskar Kokoschka. I rented two machines in Vienna: one for sewing, a hand-driven Singer (today that Singer is probably a museum piece), and one for writing, because I wanted to write about my life. I used the sewing machine to alter second-hand clothes I bought at the flea market for practically nothing, and on the typewriter I wrote a novel about my life that nobody was eager to publish. A publisher finally did offer me a small advance, however, and with it, Helga said, my friend and I went to Italy for a break, and in Italy I met a wonderful young man, Helga said, my future husband, and, to keep the story short, she said, we had a son. His name is Renzo. I worked as a foreign correspondent, I learned Italian, after many years everything was good, life in general, my schöne Zeiten have come, she said. When my son was born, my mother-in-law called him il piccolo Austriaco and those words stirred memories of my mother, and I thought to myself, Say, Helga, now you are a mother, but whatever happened to your mother? so I decided to look for her, maybe retrieve the mother I never had, my son would have another grandmother, that would be nice, ah, yes. I wrote to my father, Helga said, and asked if he knew anything about my mother, where she was, what she was up to, and he answered, I have no idea and I don’t care, it would be best to forget her, he said, Helga said. Nevertheless I went looking for my mother, though I knew nothing about her. The only thing I knew for sure, Helga said, was that both of them, my mother and my father, were born in Vienna, she said, so my reasoning was that if she’d survived the war, she must have gone back to her city. I asked a Viennese friend, Susanna, to check the register of births, marriages and deaths, to search the phone books for everybody with the surname of Schneider, then I wrote to five women and one of them wrote back to say, It’s me, that’s me, Helga said. Then I told my husband, I’ve found my mother and now I’m going to Vienna and taking Renzo with me, so he can meet his grandmother. In Vienna I found a vigorous, good-looking, sixty-year-old woman who took me straight to her bedroom, showing no interest in Renzo, she just gave him a glass of milk and some biscuits, she took me to her bedroom, Helga said, opened the wardrobe, pulled out some sort of uniform and said, Here, try this on, I want to see how it fits. I didn’t understand, Helga said, I thought, that must be a theatre costume, I was totally ignorant, because at that point I knew nothing about my mother’s life, Helga said. Then I asked her, Why? and she said, Just put it on, for years I’ve been wanting to see you in that uniform, and again I asked, Why, and she said, Because I wore this uniform at Birkenau. So, Helga Schneider said, after thirty years I had in front of me not a mother, but a monster. And this monster, this woman who gave birth to me, was standing there smiling and saying over and over, Es war so schön, so schön! I will not put on this uniform; it’s soaked with blood, I told her, Helga said, at which point Traudi Schneider pulled out a handful of jewellery she had looted from the victims of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück and said, Here, take this. I grabbed Renzo and flew out into the street and realized that I have no mother, that I’ve never had a mother and that I will somehow have to get along without a mother, said Helga. Life went on. Renzo grew up, my husband died of cancer, and I dug around in the archives and dossiers and got to know the life story of this S.S. camp guard, this fanatical-unto-death Nazi, Traudi Schneider. Then in 1998 a letter in an ugly pink envelope arrived from Vienna. Your mother is in a nursing home, wrote a “close friend of Traudi Schneider”, Helga said. Your mother is nearly ninety, wrote the friend. At times she loses her grip and she may die soon, she wrote, why wouldn’t the two of you meet once more, she wrote, After all, she is your mother. I say to myself, she may be feeling remorse, Helga said, so I go to Vienna, I buy flowers and visit the nursing home. I find a thin old woman, weighing less than forty-five kilos, frail and neglected, and I feel sorry for her. I am your daughter, I tell her, Helga said, and Traudi Schneider shrieks, You are not my daughter, my daughter is dead, if you are my daughter, call me Mutti, children call their mothers Mutti, shouted Traudi Schneider, and then pinched me on the cheek, and I couldn’t say Mutti, I couldn’t utter that word Mutti, and then Traudi Schneider said, Just so you know, I was the strictest guard there, she said, I beat the inmates and they spat blood, she said. Then she straightened up, Helga said, and started describing the horrors of the medical experiments, and she said, Of course I was in favour of the Final Solution, why do you think I went there, for a holiday? And then she said, in those chambers, not everyone died at the same rate, she said, babies took only a few minutes, we’d pull out some who were stiff and bright blue, and sometimes there wasn’t room in the crematoria, so we shot people in the head. We would line the Jews up along the edge of a huge pit and shoot, and they’d fall into the pit, all of them, men and women and children in the arms of their mothers, and I shot, of course I shot, I was a crack shot, said Traudi Schneider, smiling, O, schöne Zeiten, she said, Helga said, and once, Traudi said, two Jewish whores got into a fight over a crust of stolen bread and we saw it, we saw everything, those whores, and we took them off to be shot, naked, naked, of course, and torn up, with open gashes all over, because before that they had been lying in the punishment cell for fourteen days in the dark, with rats as fat as cats feeding on them, nearly eating them alive. That’s why they were covered in wounds, and when we pulled them out, they were already mad from the horror and they could hardly wait to get a bullet in the head. I hated those damned Jews, ugh! A horrible race, a terrible race, believe me, revolting. And then I screamed, said Helga, I screamed, Enough, stop, I’ve read all your files, I already know all that, enough’s enough, and I left, I went back to Bologna. I had terrible nightmares and my heart pounded as if Traudi Schneider were jumping inside it with a pistol in her hand and howling, Let me out! I’ll shoot if you don’t let me out, I’ll kill you! And then the doctors gave me some pills and now my heart is as quiet as if it had died.

Karl-Otto Saur Junior is still wearing his hair long to hide the bull neck he inherited from his father, the sturdy Karl-Otto Saur Senior, the last head of the technical office at the Armaments Ministry of the Third Reich, whom Hitler, in his crazy will of 1945, named as Speer’s successor. Karl-Otto Saur comes through the Nuremberg trial with no conviction, because he agrees to testify against Krupp in the Krupp Affair. Karl-Otto Saur embarks on a better life in 1946, released from charges and guilt, even from the guilt of employing hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews in the production of weapons for exterminating the selfsame Hungarian Jews he “employed”, which was evident, later, at the Wehrmacht exhibition in Berlin and cities throughout Germany, at which point I see many events much clearer, and because of this monstrous clarity I sleep less and nauseatingly badly. This same Karl-Otto Saur Senior, the one who opens up an engineering office after the war and then starts a publishing firm, which thrives today under the guidance of his elder son Klaus-Gerhard Saur, has descendants whose hair is unusually shaggy, reaching down to their shoulders, as if with their long hair his descendants will cover the possibility of history repeating itself, but they won’t, with their long hair they’ll cover nothing but their necks, so reminiscent of the neck of their father. We should probably be able to learn something from the repetition of history, repetitio est mater studiorum, but despite the fact that history stubbornly repeats itself, we are bad learners, and History, brazen and stubborn, does not desist, it goes right on repeating and repeating itself, I will repeat myself until I faint, it says, I will repeat myself to spite you, it says, until finally you come to your senses, it says, yet we do not come to our senses, we just grow our hair, hide and lie and feign innocence. Besides, for some of us, those of us who like Santa Claus lug sacks on our backs, sacks brimming with the sins of our ancestors, History has no need to return, History is in our marrow, and here, in our bones, it drills rheumatically and no medicine can cure that. History is in our blood and in our blood it flows quietly and destructively, while on the outside there’s nothing, on the outside all is calm and ordinary, until one day, History, our History, the History in our blood, in our bones, goes mad and starts eroding the miserable, crumbling ramparts of our immunity, which we have been cautiously raising for decades.

At this point I, Hans Traube, do some research, and I learn that Hermine Braunsteiner was born in Vienna in 1919, that she was raised in a strict Catholic family, that she joined the S.S. in 1939, and from then on worked as a guard at the concentration camps in Poland. I learn that the Austrian Court for War Crimes sentences Hermine Braunsteiner to three years in prison in 1948 and that she is released nine months later by that same court. I learn that until 1957 Hermine Braunsteiner works as a saleswoman in picturesque tourist towns in Austria, then meets her future husband, an American called Russell Ryan, and goes with him first to Halifax, Canada, then to the United States. I learn that Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan lives in peace until 1968, when she is discovered by Simon Wiesenthal, and thanks to Wiesenthal is extradited to Germany and tried in Düsseldorf for the murder of “at least 1,181 camp inmates” and for being a co-perpetrator in the murder of another 705 persons. She is sentenced in 1981 when she is sixty-one and has many lovely memories, when she remembers her happy days, when she has grown children, American, who might cherish an affection for whips and high boots. Of course, these little histories that I research surface only after 1998, because until 1998, until Martha Traube informs me of the agonizing truth of my birth, I dig into nothing, into no past, just as many others never do, why should they, life goes on, look to the future, people tell themselves, tell them, tell us, everybody says so, at home, at school, on stage, parents say so, friends say so, and politicians, priests say so, and the Church. Then, when I least expected it, the Past jumped out at me in a flash, hop! like a carcass, like some rotten corpse, it draped itself around my neck, plunged its claws into my artery and it still isn’t letting go. I’d like to shake it off, this Past, but it won’t let me, it swings on me as I walk, it lies on me while I sleep, it looks me in the eyes and leers, See, I’m still with you. Like Hermine Braunsteiner’s boots, the Past, my Past, our Past, presses up against my face, which, beneath it, contorts in a grimace like the grimace of a crazed detainee whose innocence or guilt has yet to be determined.

Listen, my colleague says to me, Tipura said, this Stille Hilfe is a fairly repulsive organization and it is run by Frau Gudrun Burwitz, who is actually Frau Gudrun Himmler, says my colleague, Tipura told me. So off we went to see what’s what. Time has stopped for Gudrun, but on the other hand it hasn’t. Gudrun’s name is no longer Himmler but Burwitz, yet she behaves like a Himmler and dreams Himmlerian dreams, said Tipura. Gudrun Himmler Burwitz’s daughter is neither a Himmler nor a Burwitz, women have it easier, they can always take their husband’s name, right? said Tipura, though men can change their names too, when necessary, why not? There, in Gudrun Himmler Burwitz’s house, we met her daughter, who was very upset by our visit, Tipura said. Gudrun Himmler Burwitz’s adult daughter was completely beside herself when we came. She leapt at us, don’t you dare air my mother’s name in public, she threatened, Tipura said. None of my friends know who my mother is, cried Gudrun Himmler’s daughter, even my husband doesn’t know, she said, Tipura told me, which was remarkable information for me, Tipura said. What about Himmler’s children born out of wedlock, the two Himmler had with his secretary Hedwig Potthast, who he moved into a newly furnished villa near the rest of Hitler’s cronies so that everything would be as she wished? What about Helge Potthast Himmler, born in 1942, and his sister Nanette Dorothea Potthast Himmler, born two years later? wondered Walter Tipura. If they are alive, what do they tell their children and grandchildren? Do any former Nazis and their descendants suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder? Do they ever manifest symptoms of P.T.S.D., little hints suggesting that their soul is attacking their body and their body is burrowing through their soul? Katrin Himmler, the daughter of Heinrich’s nephew, a 37-year-old scientist, married to a Jew (I no longer see this as coincidence), a Jew whose relatives disappeared in the Polish death camps, is beside herself: I dread the day I will have to tell my son that one half of his family exterminated the other half, says Katrin Himmler, Tipura told me. She dreads it so much that she started writing books about it, about Heinrich Himmler’s brothers, about their children, who are her uncles, Tipura said.

I know that coincidences are rare, perhaps there are no coincidences, there is only our stupid and superstitious need to duck behind our own carnival life which prances by us. Our coincidences, which are actually our pasts, we bury under our family trees on which grow berries full of sweet poison. It is no coincidence that my friend Wolfgang, who works at the Austrian Documentation Centre for the Reparation of Victims of the War, pursuing the dirty past of the by now already senile murderers condemned to a quiet demise, and searching for stolen artworks in the well-concealed safes of their descendants, remembers how, after the war, the cronies and fellow fighters of his Nazi grandfather went to the Berlin Opera in a long line of black limousines, seeking respite from their memories. I know it is no coincidence that Wolfgang’s mother, the daughter of a militant Nazi who after the war sat serenely in his loge at the Berlin Opera in blessed oblivion, focusing totally on the music that nourished his soul, that Wolfgang’s mother married the son of a rebellious anarchist who met his end (by secret order of Stalin) in a Siberian backwater. It is no coincidence that Serge Klarsfeld, born in 1935 in Bucharest, whose father dies in Auschwitz, falls in love with Beate Künzel, born in 1939 in Berlin, the daughter of a member of the Wehrmacht, who learns more about the horrors of the Holocaust when she is in Paris in 1963. It is no coincidence that Beate and Serge become Nazi hunters and manage to drag the “butcher of Lyons”, Klaus Barbie, from Bolivia to his Paris trial. It is no coincidence that there are so few random coincidences and there is so much repressed ressentiment. People wash themselves any way they know, heal themselves as best they can, find straits through which they navigate quietly, on tiptoe, to avoid, at all costs, meeting themselves. Who can keep track of all these branchings? No-one, because all those branches proliferate and proliferate, because families grow and spread, because families have a name (and behind every name there is a story). Unless those family branches interlace once and for all, just as that worm coiled itself around the eye of that frantic, unfortunate woman from a civilized European country, and unless, thus entangled, those branches penetrate into the centre of the pustule which becomes the axis of their silenced past, unless they reach the roots of their trees, their axis steeped in putrid pus, there can be no salvation for those who remain and those to come. The story lasts as long as the past, forever. Ah yes, that hurts, I know.

My father, said Tipura, was born in 1929, and he grew up with a foster family, because his mother entrusted him to a foster family because his mother was only fifteen when she agreed, on 31 December, 1928, to go to the flat of a waiter who worked at a café at the hippodrome, a great aficionado of horse races, a fanatic gambler, who would, nine months later, become the biological father of my father, Norbert, said Tipura. As an adult, my father, too, became a fanatic gambler, a fixture at the horse races, I don’t know how that happened, said Tipura, but now I, too, love horses and horse racing. My father, said Tipura, became head of the Munich branch of the Hitlerjugend, at home he had a large world map hanging on the kitchen wall and he pinned flags on it whenever the German troops, the Wehrmacht troops, captured a town, a region, a country, which then lost its name and became Germany. When the war ended, my father saw 1945 as a year of crushing defeat, rather than a year of victory. I was young, my father would later say, Tipura told me, and he often repeated, Lord, what would I have become had Nazism prevailed. But he did not dig deep, he never dug into the family shit, he only poked at it, smeared it around, said Tipura. His portraits of the children of Nazis are almost nostalgic flashes of the past, tender portrayals of helpless victims. And so, when I found my father’s notebook, I set out on my own exculpatory journey, I looked for the same “children”, for the ones my father spoke to forty years earlier, and I found elderly people clutching well-worn bundles of family history, bundles they baulk at unpacking, and when they do, everything inside is greyness.

Martin Bormann Junior (a.k.a. Kronzi) was born in 1930, the first of ten children of S.S.-Obergruppenführer Martin Bormann, head of the National Socialist Party Chancellery and Hitler’s private secretary, a stocky, muscular watchdog at the entrance to the Machiavellian Third Reich Hades, a hater of Christian churches, the fiercest anti-cleric among the Nazi officials, the man who sparked the Kirchenkampf, who committed cowardly suicide in 1945, biting into a cyanide capsule after he had been wounded while fleeing Adolf’s bunker. There is no help for Martin Bormann Junior, a dedicated young Nazi from 1940 to 1945, attending the Party Academy in Bavaria, who after the war embraces the Catholic faith and becomes a priest, so that he can repent the sins of his father, sins which spun around his body everlasting fibres, leaving him, Martin Bormann Junior, languishing for years like a squished caterpillar in a dark cocoon. Martin Bormann Junior is not helped by God or the Church or the fucking Our Father or “our trespasses, our trespasses”, which he mutters into his beard. So after several wasted decades he bids the Church auf Wiedersehen! and marries a former nun who has also told the Church addio, bye bye, and the two of them start making the rounds of German and Austrian schools, where they tell children of the horrors of the Holocaust and the Third Reich. Then they go to Israel and bow to the victims of Martin Bormann Senior, and in so doing, coexist with the ghosts who sit at their table and crawl into their bed. Martin Bormann Junior told me he remembers the furniture and decorative lamps made of human bones and skin in the home of Himmler’s mistress Hedwig Potthast, Tipura said. Bormann Junior does what he can to cure himself, Tipura said, but his sister Irmgard burns in her own hell, blinded by the flames of her diseased love for her “good and tender father, whom she would love and respect to her death”, Tipura said.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s father was a Nazi, Tipura said. Gustav Schwarzenegger asked to join the National Socialist Party as early as 1938, before the annexation of Austria, but it was only in 1941 that the National Socialist Party drew him to its bosom. In his medical records from the time, one can read, Tipura told me, that Gustav Schwarzenegger was a quiet and reliable person, a person of average intelligence, not remarkable for anything in particular. From 1947 until he retires, Schwarzenegger works as a policeman — since, they say, he committed no war crimes. Arnold, however, during a time of peace and blessed Austrian forgetfulness, develops his physique by lifting weights, and in 1967, when he is twenty and before he becomes the Terminator, he wins the title of Mister Universe and looks like this:

Today Schwarzenegger, who did not consent to speak with me, Tipura told me, today Schwarzenegger says, My father was an ordinary soldier in the army of his country. My father fought in Belgium and in France and in Russia, and it is known, Schwarzenegger says, that my father did not commit a single crime, because the soldiers of the Wehrmacht did not kill, the soldiers of the Wehrmacht merely waged war, says Schwarzenegger who probably did not attend the Wehrmacht exhibition, said Tipura, because had he attended the Wehrmacht exhibition he would have seen that even the ordinary German soldiers of the Third Reich committed appalling crimes, which was an insight that stunned the German public then, at that Wehrmacht exhibition, and perhaps that insight would have stunned him, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as well, said Tipura.

I didn’t need Tipura. I could have done without his stories and his discoveries. By 2000 I had amassed my own file of the “case histories” of Nazi descendants, the descendants of the first, second and third generation of Nazis, big and little, known and anonymous, regardless, the symptoms are more or less the same, and my file kept growing, getting fatter like a goose I was ruthlessly fattening until it keeled over. In nearly every case I studied there was a similar pattern: the children and grandchildren of Nazis rarely faced the history of their families and their own story. Nazis, many of them with bloodstained hands, some condemned to death, some sentenced to years in prison, a sentence they often didn’t serve out, many who were never brought to justice, who went on working as physicians and judges, engineers and architects, living “distinguished” lives, these Nazis colluded in conspiratorial silence as weighty as a millstone under which life lies crushed beyond recognition and under which, by some inexplicable or, in fact, explicable miracle like Emperor Trojan’s goat’s ears, a grain of fragile truth would sprout here and there, truth that had a destructive, devastating power. It is incomprehensible that the children, the grandchildren, mostly asked no questions, that they still do not ask. But old photographs, unfinished manuscripts, hidden diaries surface; archives open, movies are made, books are written; the pebbles of history roll underfoot and in time our step grows less steady. Nazi, Fascist, Ustaša, Chetnik, regardless. Their germ has not been eradicated. Norman Frank understood this when he said, I will have no children, I want the vile Frank germ to disappear, then starts pouring milk down his throat, he drinks thirteen litres of milk per day, then dies. Norman’s brother Niklas, however, is alive. A defiant and tireless demystifier, Niklas Frank writes and shouts, and at his unambiguous, defiant declarations, articles, books and projects, not to say performances (such as when, for a couple of years in his childhood, he used to masturbate to the point of orgasm on the anniversary of Hans Frank’s execution), at every warning from him, the hypocritical and cowardly German public has been shocked for the last few decades, snarling at Niklas’ uncomprising stand, wanting to sleep easy, as if a father were a sacrosanct being. But he is not. There are no sacrosanct beings. Even God is not sacrosanct, perhaps He least of all.

The truth is absolutely simple. Our fathers were criminals and murderers, so screw those platitudes about the banality of evil. There are no justifications, there is no valid relativization, there is no excuse. There is no mercy for the pathological debris of humanity, those tainted minds shouldn’t have even been brought to trial, what miserable justice, what defence of which dignity, whose dignity, which pathetic Nurembergs, Stuttgarts, Dusseldorfs, Frankfurts, Munichs, Hagues, money wasted, time wasted, only dark, farcical performances after which not a single diseased mind has learned nor will learn a thing, all of them should have been executed after a summary trial the way the Russians and East Germans did in ’46, ’47 and ’48, their germ should have been sent to seed so the new ones don’t come along who keep coming and coming, they, too, should be swiftly done away with before they die in comfortable prisons playing chess or, worst of all, free, as heroes to whom monstrous monuments are raised, whose names bedeck city squares and airports, that scum ought to be eliminated so that the story wouldn’t continue, elegantly and brazenly, inserting itself into reality and so that the malevolent Phoenix would once and for all stop hovering over our heads. That eternal and infinite Herumgeschmuse of the children of the murderers and criminals is becoming pathetic. Their “They were little Nazis” holds no water. There are no little Nazis. To begin (or end) with, to the children and grandchildren of the murderers and criminals I propose a verbal Exerzier and exercitationes of self-denazification, a mea culpa in the name of the second generation and the third. The fact that the descendants of the Nazis, Fascists, Ustašas, homeguard fighters, Chetniks, and so on and so forth, prefer not to recognize the crimes of their fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, diminishes the overall crimes of the Germans and others, which were committed during the Third Reich. And this holds true, as well, for the descendants of former satellite Nazi-Fascist fabrications, formerly fascist countries. It applies across the board. And it applies to the Israelis today. I’m still waiting now for the Americans to bump off Morales, the silence has poured into a gigantic block of reinforced concrete, and the Catholic Church, this caricatured parade and more than revolting fabrication, this costumed theatre of transparent lies and empty promises should be done away with right now, once and for all, because the gatherings of the zealously blinded masses who bow down to the divine emissary are reminiscent of the ominous gatherings at which people shouted Sieg Heil!

Listen, says Bernhard, definitely Bernhard, I was confirmed in my suspicion that our relations with Jesus Christ were in reality no different from those we had had with Adolf Hitler. When I went back to school after the war, says Bernhard, the school was called the Johanneum and it became a Catholic institution with a new name for the old building, which had been a National Socialist institution. The day-room, where we had formerly been instructed in National Socialism, had been turned into a chapel. In the place which had been occupied by the lectern, at which Grunkranz had stood before the end of the war and held forth about the Greater Germany, there now stood an altar; where Hitler’s portrait had once hung on the wall, there was now a large cross, and in place of the piano at which Grunkranz had accompanied our singing of National Socialist songs like Die Fahne hoch or Es zittern die morschen Knochen, there now stood a harmonium. The room had not even been repainted. So, after the war, the colour of the ruling party was no longer Nazi brown, but once more the Catholic black it had been before the war. The gymnasium had always been and remained a strictly Catholic school, although after the war it was turned into a state gymnasium. After being subjected to the Nazi lie about history, I was now subjected to the Catholic lie. Both National Socialism and Catholicism are infectious diseases, diseases of the mind, but I succumbed to neither, since my grandfather had taken care to immunize me against them. Nevetheless I suffered under them, though not from them. Look at the Salzburg Summer Festival, which makes a hypocritcal pretension to universality, when so-called universal art is pressed into service to disguise this peverted denial of the spirit; and indeed, everything that goes on there in the summer is merely deceit and hypocrisy set to music and performed for all it is worth by various combinations of instruments. And all of it, the whole festival, was founded to temporarily mask the diseased, perverse and polluted being of that city, which does not greatly differ from numerous European Catholic cities that boasted of their National Socialism, or whatever it was then called.

When in 2005 I said to my colleague Ian Buruma, I must go to Sonnenstein, that’s where my biological father, S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz, began his career as executioner, Ian said, You won’t find anything there, all traces have been removed. Several years ago I was in Pirna, at the time a neglected but unusual little town with beautiful nineteenth-century villas, said Buruma, and with some examples of late Gothic architecture, he said. I wanted to see the building in which the first gassings of mentally ill patients took place, I knew the building existed, I had seen photographs of that building, at the time the “original” extermination house for the “useless”, in which more than 10,000 people were gassed with Zyklon B, but none of the tourist brochures offered any information about it. I had trouble finding the place, Buruma said. An old woman cheerfully sent me uphill, but I got lost, so I asked an elderly gentleman, Where did the Sonnenstein Institute use to be? and he said, Pardon? Where did what use to be? Again I said, the former euthanasia institute, and he asked, When was that? And I said, In Hitler’s day, and he said, Sorry, I wouldn’t know anything about that. Nonetheless, I finally found it, this former “institute”, Buruma said. I went over to a yellow-walled villa where there was a plaque that read, SAUNA FOR THE ILL AND ELDERLY. A young woman asked me what I was after. When I told her, she gave a start: Oh, no, that wasn’t here. Here we work only with patients who require specialist therapy. You’re looking for a different building, that one over there, where there used to be a factory of turbines, the young woman said, Buruma told me. The building over there was surrounded by a rusty wire fence, and the building itself looked quite forbidding. On it was a plaque commemorating an Albert Barthel, OUR PARTY COMRADE WHO WAS KILLED BY THE NAZIS IN 1942. So, I concluded, Buruma said, that the institute had not been in that building either. All the same I went into one of the rooms and watched some young men having lunch. It turned out that they were deacons who cared for mentally ill children. The former euthanasia institute? Oh, no, no, thank God, they said, that institute was not here, no, it was in the building next to this one, said the deacons, Buruma told me. I peered into the cellar of the neighbouring building, an elegant French-style villa. On it there were no plaques. Wild grass and weeds had grown around the door, latched shut. I heard birds chirping and the rustling of leaves in the mild breeze and thought about the pile of plush teddy bears I had seen in the hall of the deacons’ building. Then I remembered Oskar Matzerath and his jazz music with Klepp at the elegant Zwiebelkeller in Dusseldorf and how the guests chopped onions and wept without restraint, how at last they were crying, how the tears gushed, even if they were artificial tears provoked by stinging onions, yet still they were tears that stung. Don’t go to Sonnenstein, Buruma said. Sonnenstein is nothing but weeds.

I met Niklas Frank at Thomas Bernhard’s. I was taking pictures, Niklas was interviewing Thomas for Stern. That was when Bernhard said, We don’t exist, we get existed. Never in my life have I freed myself from anything by writing. If I had, nothing would be left, there would be nothing to write about, said Bernhard. And what would I do with that freedom seeping into all the nooks and crannies of my life? he asked. I’m not in favour of liberation, of relief. The cemetery, maybe that’s it, Bernhard said, but, no, I don’t believe in the cemetery either, he said, because then there would be nothing left.

Niklas’ father, Hans Frank, was the King of Poland, the main man in the General Government, a lawyer with a doctoral degree, a tall, dashing dandy with a penchant for white suits and hats, for travelling to towns with old historical centres, for invaluable artworks displayed with finesse in the fancy villas where he stayed, a priggish bon vivant, a philanderer and closet homosexual whose pedantically detailed war diary in forty-three volumes became the most powerful evidence against him when he was finally tried at Nuremberg. On 2 June, 1943, Hans Frank notes in his journal, Here we began with three and a half million Jews; of those three and a half million only a few that work in camps are left, the rest have — let us say — emigrated.

Born in 1900 in Karlsruhe, Hans Frank enters the German Army at the age of seventeen, and later joins the extreme right-wing units of the Freikorps, which extorts politicians and frightens and kills people. Hans Frank is Reichsminister without Portfolio, leader of the National Socialist Association of Barristers, a member of the Reichstag, and, from 1941 to 1942, President of the International Chamber of Jurists. While he is serving as the Governor-General of Poland, his administration introduces death camps as a part of the design of the Final Solution. Millions of Jews, Roma and other “undesirables” disappear. Under Hans Frank’s administration, the S.S. and Gestapo commit terrible crimes against Polish civilians, treating them as members of the resistance movement; they rape, torch towns, mutilate women and children and organize mass deportations to concentration camps.

Hans Frank, condemned for war crimes and crimes against humanity, is hanged in Nuremberg on 16 October, 1946. While in detention he returns to the Catholic faith, and sees his execution as a partial expiation for his sins, although he does not confess to all charges in the indictment. Hans Frank leaves the courtroom in the company of an Irish Franciscan, Father Sixtus O’Connor, and two weeks later enters the place of his execution with a smile.

Oh happy day

Oh happy day

When Jesus washed

When Jesus washed

Jesus washed

Washed my sins away

Oh happy day

La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la

La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la

La, la, la, la, la

La, la, la, la, la

Oh happy day

In 1946 Hans Frank is survived by five children and his wife Brigitte. Today, all except Niklas are dead. Niklas Frank was seven years old in 1946. His life until 1945 in the Wawel Royal Castle overlooking Cracow seems like a dream. While the “King of Poland” works to stamp out the Polish elite, claiming that Poland must become a land of workers and peasants, stripped of an educated class, while throughout the General Government he shuts down theatres, schools and universities, while he bans radio broadcasts, destroys libraries, proscribes the printing of books, and works towards eradicating the Polish language, while he sets the rationing of foodstuffs at less than starvation levels, the Frank family want for nothing, from provisions to servants to stolen artworks. Hans Frank hosts high-ranking S.S. officials, including Himmler, and while nibbling at caviar and sipping champagne he tickles the ivories, playing for them — oh, happy days — Chopin. Writing and talking about that time, Niklas mentions an outing with his nanny Hilde Albert to a place where a jolly man was persuading very thin people to mount a donkey, which bucked, throwing the thin people to the ground, and the very thin people struggled to get to their feet. I watched the performance and laughed as if I were at a circus, Niklas said. But I was at a sub-camp of some nearby concentration camp, he said. Niklas becomes a disreputable teenager and an avid hitchhiker, he roams throughout the western part of his divided country of Germany and takes its pulse. As soon as I’d say that I was the son of a famous Nazi executed at Nuremberg, the driver would take me to lunch. During my many years of hitchhiking only one driver stopped, opened the door and said, Out! says Niklas. At the Berlin Archive Niklas Frank studies his father’s dossier. He makes the rounds of archives, pores over Hans Frank’s diary entries, visits doddering Nazis, who at one time had been in touch with Hans Frank and his close associates, servants who worked for the Frank family in Berlin and Cracow, he goes to America to talk with Father Sixtus O’Connor, from whom Hans Frank sought the mercy of Jesus before his execution. Did the noose over the black hood squeeze his neck enough? perhaps Niklas Frank asks himself. What was the snap like when they kicked away the chair? Was it loud enough? he wonders. I imagine myself biting into Hans Frank’s heart while he screams violently, I thrust my teeth deeper and his howls grow louder and the blood spurts horribly and then his heart stops, empty and dead, he says.

For a long time after the war, Germany was awash in collective denial of individual responsibility for the war, Niklas Frank says. My father was a coward and a scoundrel and he is responsible for the deaths of two million people. What Niklas Frank discovers in the course of his many years of research is transformed in 1987 into lifelong, obsessive loathing, a mission laced with fury because of the deafness which presses upon the earth, turning it into a Beckettian landscape in which, at the end of the game, the players are left with a few pieces and a limited number of moves. In the book entitled Der Vater — not Mein Va ter, but Der Va ter—Niklas Frank embarks on a dangerous duel, the outcome of which even Freud cannot decipher, and for which Greek tragedy has no response.

I was completely absorbed by my own investigation, obsessed by searching for information to confirm whether I am or am not what I believe myself to be, yet may not be at all, when Niklas’ new book Meine deutsche Mutter came out in 2005. Niklas Frank is unrelenting. Niklas Frank is not giving up, so I won’t either. The “Queen of Poland”, Maria Brigitte Frank, unscrupulous, greedy, calculating and promiscuous, and dead for a very long time, passes muster no better than her “king”. Niklas Frank continues to howl in a cosmos of deaf and dead silence. A small consolation which I keep, which I hold onto, so that it won’t drop like overripe fruit onto muddy earth and rot.

12

I have arranged a multitude of lives, a pile of the past, into an inscrutable, incoherent series of occurrences. I have spent eight years probing these lives, these pasts, at the same time drilling into myself. I have dug up all the graves of imagination and longing I have come to. I have rummaged through a stored series of certainties without finding a trace of logic. Now I am standing at the door of the hotel room in Gorizia, watching the terrible mess I leave behind. A pile of dead witnesses with eyes that gleam like cold marbles, empty and weightless like dry, mummified heads impaled on two rows of stakes along the path that leads to my lair. On the bed, the chairs and shelves, on the floor are strewn letters and documents, books, testimonies, photographs, heaps of photographs, some of them mine, some of them taken by others, tepid loves, grey passions. All this lies before me in a deep swoon like tired, aged time that has descended from the sky to rest or pollute the atmosphere, either way. But it will suffice to blow a puff of air, open the window, and all these pasts will leap, fly, sucked up by a mighty whirlwind, a tromba marina, a tromba d’aria filled with the cacophonic voices of the crazed dead, and if I don’t elude it — this vortex may sweep me up as well. The mess I have created can no longer be put back into order, nor can it be hung on a sturdy Kleiderbügel, a contemporary Aufhänger, to air.

I walk through Gorizia and I watch how a spent melody breaks off from its streets and the façades of its buildings. This melody drops onto my face like a mask, like a flattened sticky kiss that I do not wipe away. We know each other, this melody and I, so as I walk the two of us are silent and breathe shallowly. It is Monday, 3 July, 2006. At the Trattoria Piccola Grado on Via Morelli I order Kaiserfleisch, or rather costata di maiale affumicato cosparsa di cren fresco e accompagnata da gnocchi, then I set off for Via Aprica 47. The door will be opened by a woman with strong hands and thick hair, about forty years old, wearing winter shoes without laces on bare feet. The woman will smile and say, I told you, reality is boundless and indivisible. The woman will introduce herself as Ada Tedeschi-Urban, Haya Tedeschi’s niece, daughter of Haya’s sister Paula. She will be the woman I met on the train, and in whose features I shall seek traces of my own, just as I still look with horror at the photographs of S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz, from whose boyish grin a fist leaps and squeezes my face into a rigid grimace, into fear that his grin might settle on my lips. In the room, by a tall window, an old woman will be sitting in a rocking chair. By her feet there will be a big red basket, and around the basket letters, documents, photographs, newspaper clippings will be strewn, a heap of lifeless paper, just like the one I left behind me. The old woman will rise and turn to me. We will stand there like that, I, tall and greyhaired, she, petite and greyhaired. I will think, This is good, I’m not bald like him and my eyes resemble hers. I will think, Did I become a photographer by chance? and then immediately I will think, My photographs are powerful, his are rubbish, and I will think, He is dead, I am alive. I don’t like boxing, I’ll think, I don’t ride horses, I cycle. This will not console me.

When I write about the role of my mother in the universal history of infamy, I will not know who strolled around the San Sabba rice mill, who snapped pictures of San Sabba, my mother or I, who searched through the files of the officials of the Adriatisches Küstenland, she or I, who studied the details from the life of S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz, Haya Tedeschi or I, Hans Traube Antonio Tedeschi, who was it that visited Treblinka. Together, we will drape ourselves in the histories of others, believing that those pasts are our pasts and we shall sit and we shall wait for those pasts to fall into our lap like a fat, dead cat.

We shall wend our way through a Waste Land and I will say to her

I think we are in rats’ alley

Where the dead men lost their bones,

and she will ask

What shall I do now? What shall I do?

I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street

With my hair down, so.

What shall we ever do?

I will say

We shall play a game of chess.

There will be more withered stumps of time upon the walls. Staring forms will lean out, and leaning out they will hush the room enclosed. Footsteps will shuffle on the stair. And I will ask her

Do

You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember

Nothing?

And she will say

I remember

Those are the pearls that were his eyes.

At my back in a cold blast I hear

The rattle of the bones, and a chuckle spreads from ear to ear.

The awful daring of a moment’s surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

And I will ask her

What is that sound high in the air?

Murmur of maternal lamentation, she will say.

What is that city over the mountains? I will ask her.

Unreal City, Od’ und leer das Meer, a deserted and vacant sea.

Shall I at least set my lands in order? I will ask her.

Yes. You shall set your lands in order, she will say.

Ere the worm pierce your winding-sheet, ere the spider

Make a thin curtain for your epitaphs.

Then I will say

thank you

and servus,

now nothing matters.

Author’s Note and Permissions

For this book I have been researching the historical archives in several countries, in a number of languages, for two years. In the spirit an established tradition of documentary fiction, I have incorporated the voices of many figures and the words of many distinguished writers. I have made grateful use of these published works and acknowledged as many of them as I could. If there is any writer whose work I have not acknowledged, I will make due reference in any future edition in whatever language.

The first part, the early life of Haya Tedeschi, is based on an account by Frank Gent of the life of Fulvia Schiff and her family (“My Mother’s Story" 1996). In my book, the affair with an S.S. officer, and subsequent birth of a son, are fiction. In reality the Schiffs fled from Sicily to Albania in 1938 after the Nuremberg Race Laws, and lived there for six years until their return to Italy via Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Austria. Fulvia Schiff met a British soldier, Frank Dennis Gent, in Milan in 1945. She returned with him to England — where they still live — married, and had six children.

“To Whoever Is Reading Me” translated by Alastair Reid, from Selected Poems by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Alexander Coleman, copyright © 1999 by Maria Kodama. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. All rights reserved.

“To Whoever Is Reading Me” translated by Alastair Reid. Copyright © 1999 by Alastair Reid. From Selected Poems by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Alexander Coleman (New York: Viking, 1999), p. 221. By permission of the Colchie Agency, New York. All rights reserved.

“In Praise of Darkness,” translated by Hoyt Rogers, copyright © 1999 by Maria Kodama; translation copyright © 1999 by Hoyt Rogers, from Selected Poems by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Alexander Coleman. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. All rights reserved.

“Elogio de la Sombra” from Elogio de la sombra by Jorge Luis Borges. Copyright © 1996 by Maria Kodama. “A quien esta leyendome” from El otro, el mismo by Jorge Luis Borges. Copyright © 1996 by Maria Kodama. Used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC. All rights reserved.

From Selected Poems by Jorge Luis Borges. Copyright © Maria Kodama, 1998. Translation and notes copyright © Penguin Putnam Inc., 1998. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Group (Canada), a Division of Pearson Canada Inc. All rights reserved.

Adapted excerpts from Let Me Go by Helga Schneider. Copyright © Helga Schneider, 2001. Reprinted by permission of Walker Books, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc. All rights reserved.

Adapted excerpts from Let Me Go by Helga Schneider. Published by William Heinemann. Copyright © Helga Schneider, 2001. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited. All rights reserved.

“Les seules verities” by Jean Giono. Reprinted courtesy of Sylvie Giono. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kis, translated by William J. Hannher. English translation copyright © 1975 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kis, translated by William J. Hannher. Reprinted with the permission of Editions Fayard. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from The Waste Land from Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T.S. Eliot. Copyright 1936 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright © renewed 1964 by Thomas Stearns Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from The Waste Land from The Waste Land and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot © renewed 2002. Reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “Stazione” by Umberto Saba, taken from Tutte le poesie © 1998. Reprinted with the permission of Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A., Milano. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “Quest’anno” by Umberto Saba, taken from Tutte le poesie © 1998. Reprinted with the permission of Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A., Milano. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “Preludio” by Umberto Saba, taken from Tutte le poesie © 1998. Reprinted with the permission of Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A., Milano. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “Persuasion and Rhetoric” by Umberto Saba, taken from Tutte le poesie © 1998. Reprinted with the permission of Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A., Milano. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “I Fiumi” by Giuseppe Ungaretti, taken from Vita di un uomo. © 1969. Reprinted with the permission of Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A., Milano. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “Solitude” by Giuseppe Ungaretti, taken from Vita di un uomo. © 1969. Reprinted with the permission of Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A., Milano. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “Three Streets” by Christopher Millis. From The Dark of the Sun. Copyright 1994 by Christopher Millis. Reprinted by permission of University Press of America. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka by Yitzhak Arad. Copyright 1987 by Yitzhak Arad. Reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “The Hitler Spring” from Collected Poems 1920–1954 by Eugenio Montale, translated and edited by Jonathan Galassi. Translation copyright © 1998 by Jonathan Galassi. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

“La primavera hitleriana” by Eugenio Montale, from Tutte le poesie. Copyright © 1979. Reprinted with the permission of Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A., Milano, and the estate of Eugenio Montale.

Excerpt from Jean Le Bleu by Jean Giono © 1932. Reprinted with the permission of Grasset & Fasquelle, Paris. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “Death Fugue” by Paul Celan. From Mohn und Gedächtnis. Copyright © 1952 by Paul Celan. Reprinted with the permission of Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, München, in der Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Pesmi by France Bevk. Reprinted by permission of Avtorska agencija za Slovenijo, on behalf of the estate of France Bevk. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Contemporary Italian Poetry by Carlo Golino. Copyright © 1962 by the Regents of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Souvenir obscurs d’un juif polonais ne én france by Pierre Goldman. Copyright © Editions du Seuil, 1975. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “The Return” by Ezra Pound, from Personae, copyright © 1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “Canto XIX” by Ezra Pound, from The Cantos of Ezra Pound, copyright © 1934 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright © 1929 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright renewed 1957 by Ernest Hemingway. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Into That Darkness by Gitta Sereny, © 1974, reproduced by kind permission of the estate of Gitta Sereny and The Sayle Literary Agency. All rights reserved.

Adapted text from an interview with Thomas Bernhard by Niklas Frank, originally published in Stern magazine. Reprinted by permission of Niklas Frank.

Adapted excerpt of In the Shadow of the Reich by Niklas Frank. Reprinted by permission of Niklas Frank.

Adapted excerpt from A Different Sea by Claudio Magris. Copyright © 1995 by The Harvill Press. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

I make grateful acknowledgment to the following websites and organizations, from which I have taken and adapted text:

www.axishistory.com, by permission of “Schmauser”

www.xoxol.org/eichmann/eichmann.html

www.deportati.it/english-risiera_survivors.html

www.nizkor.org

www.deathcamps.org

avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-27-46.asp

My source for the list of transports and for some trial texts was www.holocaustresearchproject.org, and they are reprinted with permission of the Holocaust Research Project. I have also made extensive use of the Harvard Law School Library’s Nuremberg Trials Project and the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

D. D.

About the Author

DAŠA DRNDIĆ is a distinguished Croatian novelist, playwright, and literary critic, born in Zagreb in 1946. She spent some years teaching in Canada and gained an MA in theatre and communications as part of the Fulbright Program, and a PhD on protofeminism. She is now an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Rijeka.

About the Translator

ELLEN ELIAS-BURSAĆ is the leading translator of Croatian into English and a South Slavic scholar who has taught at Harvard. Her translation of David Albahari’s novel Gotz and Meyer was awarded the National Translation Award by the American Literary Translator’s Association.

Footnotes

* Ugo Ojetti (1871–1946), a writer and art historian. Founder and editor of the journals Dedalo (1920–33), Pegaso (1929–33), Pan (1933–5); occasional editor of the paper Corriere della Sera and their art and literary critic of many years. He wrote short stories, novels, humourist commentary, and compiled anthologies. A traditionalist. A member of the Fascist Party since its inception. Fascism attracts a number of Italian intellectuals. Later they say they saw the light and left the Party. Luigi Pirandello joins in 1923, receives the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934; Curzio Malaparte joins in 1921, quits in 1931. Malaparte’s real name is Kurt Erich Suckert. In March 1925 at the Congress of Fascist Intellectuals held in Bologna, their Manifesto is signed by Luigi Barzini, Antonio Beltramelli, Francesco Coppola, Enrico Corradini, Carlo Foà, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Curzio Malaparte, Ugo Ojetti, Massimo Bontempelli, Salvatore Di Giacomo, C. E. Opo, Serbio Panunzio, Alberto Panzini, Camillo Pellizi, Ildebrando Pizzetti, Enrico Prampolini, Ardengo Soffici, Ugo Spirito, Gioacchino Volpe and others. The Italian Academy is founded in 1926. The President is Guglielmo Marconi, who from 1930 on, three years before Hitler comes into power and eight years before Mussolini’s racial laws are adopted, systematically prevents Jewish candidates from being accepted into the Italian Academy, marking their names with the capital letter “E” (Ebreo: Jew).

Among the members of the Academy are composers Pietro Mascagni, Ottorino Respighi and Umberto Giordano, scientist Enrico Fermi, writers Giovanni Papini, Antonio Beltramelli, Alfredo Panzini, Luigi Pirandello, Ugo Ojetti and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, painters Achile Funi and Giulio Aristide Sartorio, historian Gioacchino Volpe and religious historian Raffaele Pettazzoni, sculptor Adolfo Wildt, art critic Emilio Cecchi, and musician Ildebrando Pizzetti. All of them enjoy a sizeable monthly stipend. They travel first class on trains for free. People address them as “Your Excellency”.

They appear at public ceremonies in the robes of the Academy, and carry ornamental swords.

A law is passed in 1926 banning Italian women from teaching philosophy, history, Italian language and literature, and Greek and Latin in secondary schools.

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* Elsa Finzi, born in Genoa on 14 May, 1891. Arrested in the spring of 1942 with an anti-fascist group, including Ferruccio Parri. Accused of founding an anti-fascist association and of fomenting anti-fascist propaganda. After the trial, released on 24 November, 1942. Ferruccio Parri, Italian politician born in Pinerolo in 1890. Under fascism, persecuted and arrested. From 1926–33 held in internal exile. With Carlo Rosselli starts an organization which helps victims of fascism flee the country. From 1943 to 1945 a leader of the Italian partisan movement; a founder of the Giustizia e libertà partisan brigades. President of the coalition government in 1945, and until 1948 a deputy, then a senator. President of the League of Veterans of the Italian Resistance Movement. Dies in 1981 in Rome.

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* Born in Naples on 20 January, 1904; dies in Naples on 8 May, 1959.

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* Mathematician, born in Naples on 15 August, 1912; dies on 28 May, 1982.

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* Mathematician, born in Naples on 12 March, 1908; dies in Bologna, 30 May, 1989.

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* Anti-fascist. Born on 29 March, 1873, in Padua; dies on 29 December, 1941, in Rome.

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* Anti-fascist. Born in Ancona on 3 May, 1860; dies in Rome on 11 October, 1940.

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* Born in Venice on 19 January, 1879, leaves Italy in 1938, teaches at Princeton, dies in New York on 6 May, 1943.

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* Born on 16 February, 1903, in Turin. Flees in 1938 to Great Britain, and returns in 1946 to Bologna. Dies on 2 October, 1977, in Frascati.

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* Born in Rome on 20 October, 1901; dies in Chicago on 28 November, 1954.

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* Pasquale Isidoro Simonelli (1878–1960), Commendatore of the Order of the Italian Royal Crown, a Catholic, born in Naples, where he is educated and works as a bank clerk. Goes to the United States in 1897. He first gives Italian language lessons in New York, and in 1898 he gets a job as a librarian in a secondary school. With the help of a certain Joseph Francolini, Simonelli starts his banking career at the Italian Savings Bank of New York City, first as a clerk, then a secretary, and then as a member of the board. He becomes an American citizen in 1902 and joins the Republican Party. Simonelli is Enrico Caruso’s personal banker and handles all his business related to the New York Metropolitan Opera. He spends his whole life bringing Italian opera singers to New York and does much to fuel their popularity. Among these are Riccardo Stracciari, Titta Ruffo and Beniamino Gigli. In 1936 he returns to Naples, to Villa Simonelli, to his palace, where he lives until his death. He is buried there in 1960 in his family mausoleum at the Sant’ Erasmo cemetery.

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* In one moment

The roses have faded

The petals fallen

Because I could not forget the roses

We searched for them together

We found roses

That were her roses, my roses

This journey we called love

Out of our blood and tears we made roses

That shone but a moment in the morning sun

Under the sun among the briars we withered the roses

That were not our roses

Roses that were not ours, not mine, not hers.

P.S. And thus we forgot the roses.

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* Friedrich Rainer, born on 28 July, 1903, in Carinthia (St Veit an der Glan). Attends law school. As of 1930 a member of the German National Socialist Workers Party; from 1936 works in the Party administration in Austria; 1938–41 made Gauleiter, district governor and governor of the Reich in Salzburg; 1941–5 he is in Carinthia and the neighbouring parts of Styria; in 1943 he is appointed defence commissar of the Adriatic Littoral. On 8 May, 1945, hands over his administration to the representatives of the democratic parties, and the British Army extradites him to Yugoslavia. He is tried at Nuremberg. He is put to death as a war criminal on 13 March, 1947, in Ljubljana.

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* Odilo Lotario Globočnik, born in 1904 in Trieste to a Slovenian father (a Habsburg cavalry lieutenant who goes on to work as a postal clerk after the war) and a Hungarian mother. In 1923 his family moves from Trieste to Klagenfurt. In Austria in 1931, Odilo Globočnik becomes a member of the Nazi Party and in 1934 he joins the S.S. He takes an active part in forming Nazi cells throughout Austria before its annexation to Germany in 1938, and in 1936 becomes head of the Party for Carinthia. Before he comes to Trieste, he is one of the key people in an operation of vast proportions in which about two and a half million Polish Jews are murdered (Aktion Reinhard). Globočnik arrives in Trieste with a large team of “professionals”, with a death squad that has already proved itself in exterminating the populations of Russia, Poland and Germany, as well as in the death camps — Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. In 1943, ninety-two members of the Einsatzkommando Reinhard are stationed in Trieste, including a large number of Ukrainian S.S.-troops, both men and women. The Einsatzgruppen or Einsatzkommandos were special squads with the task of “fighting the enemies of the Reich and aiding the troops in combat”, in other words, of occupying the territories that had been conquered, to squelch all rebellion and exterminate the non-Aryan population.

The Einsatzgruppen came under the administration of R.u.S.H.A., the Central Department for Security of the Reich (the Reichssicherheitshauptamt), which came, in turn, under the supervision of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, with the Reichsführer of the S.S. and Ministry, Heinrich Himmler, at its head. While in Lublin, in Poland, Globoĉnik lives in a luxurious villa quite lavishly. He is remembered not only for his monstrous murders of unfathomable proportions but also for his campaign to amass astonishing quantities of stolen and confiscated property from the “undesirable” population living in the occupied territories. Their property is then catalogued and listed in detail, ranging from items such as fountain pens, rings and women’s opera glasses, to apartment buildings and factories, the value of which reaches 178 million Reichsmarks. All the stolen goods on the road to Berlin pass through Lublin, and some are warehoused at Trieste harbour. In late 1943, 667 containers, each holding between five and eight cubic metres, wait in Trieste for detailed cataloguing and listing at precisely the time Globočnik is staying at Via Nizza. On 31 May, 1945, near Weisensee in Carinthia, Globočnik is arrested by the British Army. Two hours later he commits suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule.

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* I am restless like murmuring water,

Shattered like a waterfall spraying chasmward its force,

And numbers to itself droplets of pain,

That drip every day, every day.

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*Josef Oberhauser, S.S.-Oberscharführer, born in 1915 in Munich. Seventh-grade education, farm worker. Joins S.S. troops in 1935, joins the T4 programme in 1939. Works as cremator at Bernburg, later at Grafeneck, Brandenburg and Sonnenstein. In 1941 goes to Lublin, becomes Globočnik’s officer for communication and Wirth’s faithful escort during tours of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Transferred to Trieste in autumn 1943, where after Wirth’s death he is in command at the San Sabba camp. Sentenced to fifteen years in prison in Magdeburg in 1948, but amnestied in 1956. Nine years later on trial in Munich, sentenced to four and a half years in prison and released after two. For crimes committed in Belzec, where 600,000 Jews were murdered, only Josef Oberhauser is convicted. Most of the S.S. men stationed at the death camps in Aktion Reinhard were never brought to trial.

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Content

Daša Drndić
Trieste

Map

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Behind Every Name There is a Story

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Author’s Note and Permissions

About the Author

About the Translator

Footnotes