My research hinges on the interplay between history and
memory. At a public event in Milan a few years ago, Silvio Berlusconi took
advantage of an impromptu press conference to tell reporters that Benito
Mussolini had done well as Italy’s ruler. Although he acknowledged the deeply
antisemitic racial laws as Mussolini’s greatest fault, he softened the blow by
insisting that this legislation had only emerged within the context of the Nazi
alliance. Had it not been for those meddling – and considerably more powerful –
Germans, Italy’s Fascist period would have been spared its antisemitic and
racist taint. How is it that the most towering political figure in Italy of the
past quarter-century could still openly invoke myths that academics, activists,
and even some politicians had done so much to dispel? Inspired by questions
like this, my research centers on the relationship between historical events
and the ways that they are collectively remembered, forgotten, or obscured.
My dissertation magnifies one node in the vast, complex
architecture of the Final Solution to help us better understand the legacy of
the Holocaust in Italy. My method is to diachronically pair a historical record
of collaborationism with the suppression of this activity in postwar collective
memory. Doing so reveals the misrepresentation behind the many self-acquitting
myths that emerged in Italy after the war, myths that
ranged from national resistance, to collective victimhood, to moral
superiority vis-à-vis Nazi Germany, to italiani brava
gente (the conviction that Italians are innately good people). Milan’s
central railway station is a fitting site for such a study because that is
where the history and memory of the Holocaust in Milan reached their climaxes.
From December 1943 until January 1945, after central and northern Italy were
absorbed into Hitler’s empire, the Nazis and Italian collaborators deported
approximately 1,000 Jews, Italian and foreign, from Milano Centrale station. A
microcosm of the Holocaust in Italy, the majority of the victims perished at
Auschwitz-Birkenau. To keep these operations hidden from public view, the
perpetrators staged the deportations in a space unknown to most Italians, a
subterranean chamber built for mail shipments. After the war, like elsewhere in
Europe, sanitizing master narratives overpowered nuanced historical realities.
Knowledge of Italian participation in the Final Solution was suppressed
accordingly, even though collaborators had been present at every stage until
the deportation convoys crossed Italy’s border. Remaining unknown to most
Italians, Milano Centrale’s subterranean space quickly resumed its former
function, keeping its secret hidden even from the Milanese who frequented the
station. It was not until the turn of the 21st century, after this area had
been abandoned, that local Jewish and Catholic groups excavated the memory of
the deportations from the buried remains and exposed them to the
public. Today, the culmination of this effort, the Shoah Memorial of
Milan, sits on the precise track where the Nazis and Italian collaborators
assembled the deportations. When Berlusconi made his apology for il Duce, he was speaking from the sidelines at the memorial’s
inauguration.
Along with contributing to the
small body of non-Italian scholarship that assesses Italy’s role in the Final
Solution, my research aids our knowledge of the relationship between the
Holocaust and Italy in a number of ways. By bringing to light an important but
little-known or forgotten episode in Holocaust and Italian history, my
dissertation illuminates how the Nazis and their Italian accomplices carried
out the Final Solution in Italy. Used for continuous genocidal operations
throughout most of the Nazi occupation, Milano Centrale lends itself especially
well to such a study. By drawing extensively on diaries, memoirs, and oral
testimonies, I restore the voices of Italy’s Jewish victims, whether they spoke
before, during, or after the Holocaust. Victim accounts corroborate Italian
collaboration, while survivors discuss the obstacles that they overcame to bear
witness, obstacles political, social, cultural, economic, and personal. By
extending my analysis into the postwar period and concluding in the present
day, I show how the postwar history of Milano Centrale reveals larger patterns
in Italy’s reckoning with the Holocaust. From the rapid suppression of the
deportations in the early postwar period, to a long and sustained silence over
the Holocaust and the question of collaboration, to the creation of a Holocaust
memorial that remains off the radar for most ordinary Italians, the history of
Holocaust remembrance at Milano Centrale station reflects the history of
Holocaust remembrance in Italy. This leads me to conclude that Milano Centrale
is not just a site of memory in Italy, but a site of memory contestation. Although
the Nazis brought the Final Solution to Italy, the Shoah Memorial of Milan
highlights Italian culpability by articulating a narrative of indifference. The
product of survivor testimony, this collective counter-memory challenges the
hegemonic narratives of the Holocaust that have long held sway in the Bel paese.