EIGHT
One Night at the Risiera
But of course it was Jews that the passage of those trains along the waterfront always brought to my mind. Even now, when I see in memory’s eye a last dingy wagon of the 19£os, trundling away towards the old fish market, I see too the lights of more dreadful trains disappearing into the eastern forests on their way to Auschwitz. In my mind Jews and Trieste go together, and the long and fruitful association of the two has made the city what it is—or at least, what it seems to me to be in those moments, ten minutes before the hour, when the idea of it bewitches me. In Habsburg times people in Vienna considered Trieste a Jewish city, and in a way I still do.
They say that you can take a Jew out of exile, but you can never take exile out of a Jew. Actually, for a hundred and fifty years the Jewish diaspora in Trieste was for the most part happy and successful. In many ways Jews did set the style of the place. They were encouraged to settle here from the first years of its Habsburgian expansion, under Maria Theresa. They had already proved their cosmopolitan value in the development of other European ports—Livorno, London, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Bordeaux: in this brand-new mercantile enterprise, on the edge of a continental empire, they would be especially useful. Generous privilege induced them to come: freedom from restrictions imposed upon Jews elsewhere in the empire, exemption from military service, guaranteed freedom of worship and investment. Rich and educated Jews were undoubtedly preferred.
The Trieste Jews formed an imperial category of their own, and they flourished mightily. If Italians, Germans, Englishmen, Slovenes and Croats provided maritime skills, and Greeks commercial know-how, it was above all Jews who built the financial structure of the new Trieste. They very soon became prominent in the Chamber of Commerce, and they dominated the insurance business, which was to be a main source of Trieste’s wealth and influence. Jewish families formed part of the social elite—at the foot of the Old City there was a small walled ghetto with schools and synagogues, but most members of the community lived outside it, and fashionable Jewish houses were fashionable indeed.
Jews were prominent here as nowhere else in the empire. An extraordinary proportion of Trieste’s artists and intellectuals were Jews or part Jews, often from business backgrounds—as early as 1797 Pope’s Essay on Man was translated into Hebrew by Joseph Morpurgo, an insurance tycoon whose family name was to become a synonym for wealth in Trieste. Joyce had many Jewish friends in the city, and when he came to write Ulysses, which was inspired by Trieste almost as profoundly as it was by Dublin, he called it “an epic of two races.” So powerful and prosperous did the Jewish community become, over the generations, that in 1912 it built for itself one of the biggest and most opulent synagogues in all Europe, magnificently positioned in the very heart of the city, around the corner from the Caffe San Marco—where many of its congregation were familiar customers, and which served kosher food for them.
This was the first synagogue I ever entered in my life. It was a splendid building, built so the guide-books say in the Syrian-Babylonian style, but more convincingly neo-Byzantine. It had a high central dome, castellated towers and a huge rose window in the form of David’s star, and it was richly endowed with holy objects. Unlike so many other synagogues in Europe, it did not hide itself away unobtrusively, or try to look more or less like a private house. It was majestic and unmistakeable, and every passer-by knew it to be the proud temple of the Hebrews.
It was still very splendid when I diffidently strayed into it in 1946, still suggestively oriental beneath its high echoing dome. The occupying German army had closed it for a time and used it as a bullion deposit, but it was undamaged, and a chaplain of the Jewish Brigade of my own army had helped to officiate at its re-opening. Yet I sensed that it had lost its magic. Its fabric was decayed, its treasures were nowhere to be seen, and even its holiness seemed subdued. Presently I realized that there was a good reason for this. It was because almost all the Jews of Trieste, almost every one, had been driven away or murdered.
WHEN the bad times came in the 1930s, Trieste played an honourable role in helping the Jews of central Europe to escape their fate. There were then about five thousand Jews in the city. Zionism was strong here already, and the community (secretary, Carlo Morpurgo) formed a Committee of Assistance chiefly to get Jewish emigrants to Palestine. Train after train brought them in their thousands to the quays, where in the ships of Lloyd Triestino they sailed to the Promised Land in British-ruled Palestine, or at least to the Americas. Trieste acquired a further cognomen—the Port of Zion. A new little synagogue was established especially for transients, in the Via del Monte on the flank of San Giusto hill, and some of them went no further after all, but decided to stay in the city. Many more spent a few days or weeks here, awaiting a passage, and among them was Albert Einstein.
Most of Trieste’s own Jews did not board the ships. Until 1938 they had not much reason to. The Fascist government in Rome did not trouble them, and all their institutions functioned: the hospital, the charitable societies, the infant schools, the rest home, the summer camp up at Opicina, the Fascist Youth Group . . . After 1938, when the Italians brought in racial laws of their own and the British clamped down on immigration into Palestine, the Trieste Jews could not leave even if they wanted to, and so it was that in 1943 history caught up with them. It was the fourth year of the second world war, and the Italians then turned against their German allies and signed an armistice with the western Powers. Instantly, the very next day, the Nazis took over Trieste. Several hundred Jews escaped into Italy, or to Switzerland. A few hid in Trieste for the rest of the war. Some seven hundred were called to death or deportation.
At San Sabba, where Joyce watched the scullers race, there is a former rice treatment plant, a bland enough place among the jumbled installations of the industrial port, wound about by elevated freeways. Trucks forever rumble by it, on their way to and from the piers. This banal group of buildings is where the Nazis committed the ultimate evil of Trieste. They used it as a police barracks, and then converted it into their only extermination camp in Italian soil—except that they did not regard Trieste as Italian territory, but declared it an integral part of the Reich. When I was first in Trieste the Risiera of San Sabba must have been far less obscured by industrial developments, but I never noticed it there and nobody ever mentioned it to me; yet in the previous two years hundreds of Jews had been exterminated there, and many more selected for deportation from which they never returned.
I hate to go there now. It is one place in Trieste that speaks of the tragic rather than the poignant. Although it is now an Italian national memorial and a tourist site, with its bare walls and shadows, its death chamber, its vile cells and the site of its crematorium, it still feels menacingly terrible to me. As it happens it stands not far from the city’s Jewish cemetery, where in happier times Jews had passed to a more proper end. Going there in 1911 to the funeral of a friend, Joyce had seen its graves and tombstones with prophetic vision. “Corpses of Jews lie around me rotting in the mould of their holy field . . . black stone, silence without hope . . .”
THERE was a time when I used to say that if I were a Jew, I would certainly be a Zionist. I had soldiered in Palestine under the British Mandate, and had thought it was the Arabs, not the Jews, who were getting the raw deal there; but watching the young Israeli army storming through Sinai in the first of its wars fired me with romantic sympathy for the little State. Later I changed my mind again, and realized that the Jews I most admired were those Jews of the diaspora who had not abandoned their pride of origin, who were closely bound together by history and culture, by a love of words and music and debate, but who were essentially supra-national, extraterritorial citizens of the world. It is their spirit, diffused but inherent, like a gene in the chromosome, that makes me think of Trieste as a Jewish city still.
Jews are still around here, too. Their old ghetto, in the area behind the Piazza Unità, has mostly been destroyed in civic development, but what remains of it, as in many another former ghetto of Europe, has become rather trendy. Excellent bookstores, antiques shops, art dealers and picture restorers abound, and there is a Sunday flea market. On Via del Monte the transients’ synagogue houses a Jewish museum, presided over by a rabbi from the Great Synagogue, and there is a Jewish school next door. Here and there, though, abandoned medieval lanes survive, awaiting demolition, and their tall shuttered empty houses, their lamps, chains, padlocks and stray cats, are reminders of more cruel times. Only the other day in the old ghetto area I saw three raggety buskers sent packing by the police, and as they packed up their cases, humped their instruments under their arms and trailed away towards the waterfront, I thought they looked very like poor Jews of long ago, being herded off to railway trucks.
I used to know a woman in this city who, by some accident of ill-fortune, had spent a single night in the Risiera at San Sabba. She told me that in retrospect that one night seemed as long as all the rest of her life put together, just as what happened to the Jews of Trieste in 1943 may well last longer in the collective memory than all their years of successful exile.