Trieste
Dasa Drndic
Language: English
Pages: 368
ISBN: 0547725140
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Haya Tedeschi sits alone in Gorizia, in northeastern Italy, surrounded by a basket of photographs and newspaper clippings. Now an old woman, she waits to be reunited after sixty-two years with her son, fathered by an SS officer and stolen from her by the German authorities as part of Himmler’s clandestine Lebensborn project.
Haya reflects on her Catholicized Jewish family’s experiences, dealing unsparingly with the massacre of Italian Jews in the concentration camps of Trieste. Her obsessive search for her son leads her to photographs, maps, and fragments of verse, to testimonies from the Nuremberg trials and interviews with second-generation Jews, and to eyewitness accounts of atrocities that took place on her doorstep. From this broad collage of material and memory arises the staggering chronicle of Nazi occupation in northern Italy.
Written in immensely powerful language and employing a range of astonishing conceptual devices, Trieste is a novel like no other. Daša Drndić has produced a shattering contribution to the literature of twentieth-century history.
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Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial
Duxford and the Big Wings 1940-45
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.