“Erfahrungsbericht” from Italy on the theme How Far Were Churches Affected by Flight and Deportation after World War Two? at the 4 th European Symposion “War, Migration, Reconciliation – Lessons of Church History – Challenges for the Future” (Szczecin, Poland, November 7-9, 2012)

You may not believe me, dear brothers and sisters, but my first reaction after reading our theme of today was: “Good grief, we Italians will have nothing to report about that!” Actually I needed some time to realize that what I was asked to speak about in front of an audience - indeed for the first time in my life! - was something very familiar to me, even literally familiar: the story of the so called “Exodus” of Italians from Istria and (Fiume and Zara) facing the Yugoslav conquest of those regions and towns by the end of Second World War. Even in Italy itself it is a piece of history which definitely does not count as one of the best known and widely recognized tragedies of recent European history, to the point that my father, Tullio Gabrielli, who had experienced it all through, never wanted to tell anything about it to me, my mother and my older brother until 45 and more years after.

Well, that flight did not involve millions people als elsewhere in Europe, but nonetheless hundreds of thousands (revisionists say about 200,000, nationalists 350,000), i.e. 50 to 90% of the whole population living in those territories, from 1943 – starting with the armistice of September 8 between the Allied and the Italian armed forces – to February 10, 1947, when the Paris Peace Treaties assigned all Dalmatian and most Istrian formerly Italian territories to Yugoslavia, and Triest and Northwestern Istria were divided into two “zones”, A and B, temporarily under Allied administration. That “Exodus” was still to continue up to and shortly after the London Memorandum of October 5, 1954, when Triest was finally assigned to Italy and Northwestern Istria to Yugoslavia, and which was fully fulfilled by the Italian and the Yugoslav governments only in 1975 (Treaty of Osimo).

For longer than 1,000 years both regions, Istria and Dalmatia, had been inhabited by different peoples (Venetians, Croatians, Slovenians, Austrians, Hungarians, Romanians, etc.) the large majority of whom spoke Italian, a cultural (far more than ethnical) heritage of the ancient Roman Empire and of the rule of the upon the Adriatic coastlines. For centuries the Southeastern borderline of the Holy Roman Empire, finally dominated by the House of Hapsburg, had been the Eneo river (Rje čina in Croatian, Recsina in Hungarian) and the harbor town built on its delta, called Fiume in Italian, Sankt Veit am Flaum (oder Pflaum) in German, Szentvit in Hungarian, Reka in Slovenian and Rijeka in Croatian. So it went until 1919, when after the end of World War One the Austrian-Hungarian Empire collapsed and whole Istria, later including the Dalmatian towns of Zara and Fiume itself (1924), were annexed to the Kingdom of Italy, officially until 1947. 1947 to 1991 both regions were ruled by Yugoslavia. In 1992, as a consequence of the split of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Istria was divided between the two new nations of Slovenia and Croatia. Why an “Exodus” of nearly all Italians from Istria and Dalmatia by the end of World War Two? Not only because most Italians from those regions did not want to live under the new Yugoslav communist regime and definitely not because they all were fascists - even if many of them were (mis)treated as such in refugees’ camps where they were hosted, in some cases for years, in postwar Italy - but also (mainly) because of the very hard hostility performed against them by Yugoslav partizans, also in retaliation for the brutalities that the Italian fascist army had committed during their occupation of Yugoslav territories from 1941 to 1943. Between 1943 and 1945 4,000 to 10,000 Italians were persecuted to death through deportation, concentration camps and (the most impressive “final solution”) “foibe” or “fojba”, the most horrible death of probably less than 1,000 (others say many more) who were thrown into the deep and narrow Karst clefts with that name.

My father and grandfather – the last, Giuseppe Gabrijel čić, a beloved primary school teacher, had just been proclaimed mayor of Pisino-Mitterburg-Pazin, in central Istria, by fellow citizens of all ethnic groups just after the fascist “podestà” had flown - stand in the middle of the following scene of later September 1943, where coffins with the poor remains of people taken out of “foibe” rest in front of the façade of the main Roman Catholic Church of the town.

This pic is one of the first you will find searching for “foibe images” on the Internet. Dead people in those coffins were then buried together outside the cemetery, and until today only a single small wooden cross with nothing written on it has been allowed by former Yugoslav or current Croatian authorities to remind them. In the same days my father’s family, together with many other Croatian and Italian Pisinoti, also had to escape atrocities from the other side, i.e. retaliating nazis: probably enough, all together, to explain why my father never wanted to speak about it before Italian media started to do it after the beginning of intestine war in former Yugoslavia. Actually such a not only personal, but national and international memory removal – from which Italy finally recovered establishing a “Memory Day” for that tragedy on every February 10 since 2005 - was not simply due to the horrors that Istrian people directly had to suffer and many of them did not want to remember, but much more to political reasons: postwar Italy had the largest communist party of Western Europe, and as soon as 1948 the Yugoslav communist party began to distance itself from stalinism, making of Yugoslavia an “untouchable” buffer state between the future NATO and Warsaw Pact allied forces as well as the leader country of the worldwide non- alligned countries movement.

Istrian-Dalmatian Churches, mostly Roman Catholic with only very little Protestant (Waldensian or Methodist, formerly Lutheran and/or Reformed) congregations in Fiume, Abbazia (Opatija) and Pola (Pula) simply were swept away by Second World War and the following Exodus as far as their Italian speaking majority was concerned, while Croation Catholics had to face for decades an atheist regime not particularly brutal against religious faith, but very suspicious in front of any alternative “sense of belonging”. Protestant church buildings in Fiume and Pola were totally destroyed by war bombings. The beautiful church of Abbazia (see picture above), entrusted from the last Waldensian Pastor Carlo Gay to the Evangelical Lutheran Senior of Zagreb Rev. Edgar Popp, was since then used only as a summer chapel for Protestant tourists from Germany, the Netherlands, Britain, etc. Just in the 90s, after the split of Yugoslavia, new mission projects started with the support of the Lutheran World Federation. When young Rev. Lino Lubiana, a child of Italian speaking Istrians living in Norway and already at work in Fiume, discovered and informed the Waldensian Board that church premises in Abbazia officially still belonged to the Waldensian Church, we hoped to use such premises particularly for youth international meetings and reconciliation projects, but that did not succeed due to the rivalry among Croatian Protestant Churches leaders and the pretences of some of them on a full property. Nonetheless Italian Protestant Churches, together with others, were able to use old and new church premises in Abbazia, Fiume, Pola and Rovigno (Rovinj) to welcome and support refugees and other people in need during the war in former Yugoslavia. We still find particularly inspiring, even though not easily welcome by our Istrian exiles, the following excerpts from an open letter addressed to them on February 15, 1947, by Rev. Valdo Vinay, 1932 to 1940 Pastor in Fiume and Abbazia and later Professor of Church History at the Waldensian Theological Faculty in Rome: “Do you remember the unjust aggression to Yugoslavia in the Holy Week of 1941? I came from Rome to console you with the Gospel... and we were the aggressors of Croatian neighbours, who in time of peace brought us to town milk for our children, fruits and bread. But you, evangelical brothers, had some spiritual sensitivity for the iniquities which were perpetrated during that Passion Week (...) Do you remember the following years (...) when, during summer holidays, we quietly bathed along Abbazia cliffs and every day we should see the sad show of villages around burning for the unjust action of our army, forced to a dishonouring war? Do you remember the trucks with even pregnant women, old people and children loaded like beasts to be transported far from their burned homes to the sad concentration camps? Today we are maybe tempted to object that in our heart we disapproved the policy and the war of the government of that time, but this does not make us pure, because we belong to the people who has made that policy and that war, because we have fought in that army, because we have supported that government by our means or at least by our inactivity. We are guilty like all our people. We partake of a collective national guilt. We may not refuse such a solidarity to our people. They are guilty not because they have been defeated, but because their war policy was a crime. But one thing I regret, that you, more than the rest of our people, must taste the bitterness of atonement, because not by everyone the solidarity in the sorrow is felt as it is actual in the guilt. Yet it is convenient for us to confess the guilt, because just if we do this the old problem of your history of frontier people could be readdressed in a promising and new way (...) Mediterranean christianity is not all christianity, faith in the Gospel does not end at the borders of homeland or Latin civilization. too have welcome Jesus Christ, and precisely in Christ you should seek the spirit and love to overcome the current difficulties and to solve the thousand-year- old problem of your history of neighbourhood and cohabitation with Croatian people. If you can, remain in the country where you have been living so long; but I do not know each one’s situation and the difficulties which can be done to you by the other side. We live in a time of iron. But if you leave, don’t destroy the city, not only because it can longer “witness of Roman civilization in the centuries” as stated by certain press, but also because its homes, your homes, will be able to host Croatian families and because... Slav children feel the cold like our children. The Gospel tells us not only not to hate, but to love. Do like Finnish protestants who in 1940, when they had to give up some of their lands to the Russians, left the Bible and toys in their homes for the children of the invaders. Protestants of Finnland did not think that the Kingdom of Christ ended at the Russian border. Their problem was similar to yours, it was the problem of all frontier peoples. Politicians will never solve it because it is already solved in Christ. Paul, the apostle of the peoples, has taught so by saying: “Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all”.

[Published on the Waldensian weekly “La Luce” no. 3/1947 and quoted in: Sauro Gottardi, “L’Evangelo tra le frontiere. Note sugli evangelici di Fiume, Abbazia e Pola”, Ed. by Centro Culturale Valdese, Torre Pellice, 1993].

Bruno Gabrielli Waldensian Pastor in Villar Pellice (Province of Turin)