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 zeaclass="underline" 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.