“The defence of human rights can’t be left solely to those who’ve experienced violations firsthand”. The sons and daughters of Sesto San Giovanni – a place synonymous with resistance, from which hundreds of political opponents were deported – are fighting for the memory of the victims of Nazism and Fascism. An exclusive reportage from Italy.
Hundreds of small faces form a black-and-white mosaic encased in an oak frame, which covers an entire wall. Almost all the faces are young, many belonging to people at the start of their adult life. These are the deportees who worked in the industrial area of Sesto San Giovanni, on the outskirts of Milan – one of the largest in Italy. These political prisoners were captured because they took part in strikes between 1943 and 1944, during WWII, against Benito Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi occupation. On average, they were 33 years old. Along the staircase at the local chapter of the National Association of Former Deportees (ANED, Associazione Nazionale Ex Deportati), one can’t help but stop to look at the faces peering from behind the glass, often smiling. They could easily be posing for a passport photo. There’s a simple elegance to the men, almost all of whom are wearing a shirt and jacket. All the women wear their hair up, except for one whose wavy locks fall almost to her shoulders. Her lively eyes and smile are those of a teenager.
“Right after the war, the antifascists came to our house to ask for a picture of my father. They wanted to re-establish order in the chaos that the conflict had wrought. There he is. He was a labourer and a violinist, you know? He even spoke German because he’d worked in Germany”. These are the words of a man in his eighties, the president of what’s commonly known as Deportee House (“Casa dei deportati”) in Sesto. His name is Giuseppe Valota; his father Guido died in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Like most people from the area who died in the camps, he’d taken part in strikes in 1943 and 1944 in which political opponents were repressed by the fascist regime. Guido worked for Breda, a group of companies operating in steel-making, engineering, shipbuilding and the military. Striking meant halting the production of firearms and military vehicles.
A faint light shines into the basement in which ANED Sesto has held its meetings since the late 1970s. Nearby Villa Zorn was used before then. In 1946, war widows convinced survivors – scarred and traumatised, both mentally and physically – to create a place in which to meet. Together, they worked through their pain and kept the memories of their loved ones alive. Giuseppe’s own mother, Melania Gervasoni, probably passed this desire onto her son at a young age.
Starting in 1995, Valota embarked upon an extraordinary investigation. The retired electrical engineer began interviewing all the survivors of political deportation in Sesto San Giovanni’s industrial district, as well as their families, on his own, without remuneration or formal training. In his two-room flat in Via Giardini at number 14, he interviewed about 50 former deportees and 99 of their relatives. Finally, after half a century, a better understanding of what had happened began to take shape and an archive was born. This led to more precise estimates of the number of political opponents – the so-called “red triangles” – who were sent to the camps: 577 deportees, 233 of which lost their lives, leaving 344 survivors. Of the 13 women who were deported, every single one survived and returned home after the war.
“I started coming to ANED in the early 1990s because I had more free time,” Valota recounts. These days he’s cataloguing information about six more deportees. “I wasn’t a historian, but I wanted to know more. Many of the survivors were still alive and – not without a certain embarrassment – I started asking them questions: How many deportees came from Breda? How many from Falck? How many died? How many came back? But no one was able to tell me. I was shocked. How can this not be known? So I told myself: I’ll do the research”.
With the verve of a journalist and persistence of an academic, over the past 25 years Valota has published two books, Dalla fabbrica ai lager (“from the factory to the camps”) and Streikertransport. He has also given lessons in schools and accompanied students to former concentration camps. His work has sparked other collaborations. Other ANED members, several associations, teachers and volunteers have all given a helping hand. Director Renato Sarti created a theatre piece inspired by his research that has been staged in various theatres, including Milan’s prestigious Piccolo Teatro. Giuseppe has given the 577 deportees their voices back. And there’s more: “First of all I interviewed my mother, Melania. Family members left behind represent another aspect of deportation: the waiting, loneliness, pain; the decades without answers. No one had ever thought about the wives or the children like me”.
It’s almost midday, but we haven’t yet addressed the reason why we first met at a press conference a few months ago. Last June, Sesto San Giovanni’s council put some buildings up for sale without warning. Many of these housed spaces rented by various organisations and charities, including ANED, Ventimila Leghe, Auser, AVIS, Anmil, Maestri del Lavoro, Freecamera and CAI. The Council appealed to financial reasons to justify this decision, which followed the election in 2017 of the first centre-right administration in Sesto in 72 years. In fact, the council – led by Forza Italia’s Roberto Di Stefano with a majority that also includes members of parties further to the right, such as The League, Brothers of Italy-National Alliance and the Italian Liberal Party – is threatening to clear out buildings that citizens go to for important services and that have become symbols of community gathering, rights campaigning, solidarity and antifascism.
“After the first eviction hit Ventimila Leghe, an association that helped us organise the Viaggi della memoria (‘remembrance journeys’), I was expecting this to happen to us too,” Giuseppe comments. “The Sword of Damocles is undoubtedly hanging above our heads, however, we can stay here for two more years. If no prior warning is given, the contract will be renewed even if it’s almost expired. We live in hope and meanwhile, I keep working”.
We hear a “hello” coming from the stairs. As promised, Raffaella Lorenzi has joined us. This 84-year-old former primary school teacher is the daughter of a deportee, Cesare, whose name was given to one of the streets in the old Falck metalworks district. Her voice is low because she has just spoken at a memorial event. Nevertheless, Raffaella wants to speak her mind with all the strength she has: “When I learned this place was being put up for sale, I was overcome by anguish and rage. I wrote to the mayor that ANED is our family. We reconstructed our fathers’ stories here. I asked him: ‘Why are you doing this? For your own interests or to erase the memory? Let us know either way’. I never heard back”.
In 2018, the municipal council cut funds for school trips to former concentration camps by 70 per cent. In 2019, Ventimila Leghe and ANED were forced to resort to crowdfunding to raise enough money. “We made it thanks to donations from civil society,” Raffaella continues. Every year, she meets an average of 500 students. “I tell them my father’s story,” she explains.
Cesare Lorenzi worked at Falck Concordia as a specialised mechanic. He came to Sesto from Piombino, in the province of Livorno, in Tuscany, and had been a socialist and antifascist from a young age. In 1922, the year Mussolini took power and began to establish the fascist regime, Cesare was tortured and unjustly imprisoned in the Tuscan town of Volterra. Subsequently, in Sesto he became the treasurer of the clandestine group Soccorso Rosso (“red rescue”), which supplied food and money to the families of prisoners, exiles and deportees. The fascists arrested him after the 1944 strikes, together with Guido Valota, Giuseppe’s father.
At that point, Raffaella was only nine years old and was forced into a desperate and daring search together with her mother: “Having been displaced in Brianza (the area north of Milan, ed.) my mother took her bike and the tram to the police precinct in Sesto, but they didn’t have any information. Someone told her Cesare was at the barracks in Palazzo Marino in Milan, where the fascists held their prisoners. They told her she could take something to eat and a change of clothes. So we left together to try and find him. We ended up in a basement below what is now Milan’s city hall. The room was dark, I remember only a faint light. There were three chairs and a soldier with his rifle slung over his shoulder. When my father came in, I saw his black hair had turned white. After many years, I learnt that his jailers had staged his (fake) execution by firing squad”.
Raffaella looks at the picture of her father. Like him, she has big, clear eyes, and strong facial features. “Afterwards, we returned to Brianza. The journeys were risky because of bombings, broken or derailed trams and sirens. Then, one day my mother went back to Milan and he was no longer there. They told her to go to Hotel Regina, near Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, where the Nazi SS forces were based. She was kicked out. She tried in San Vittore prison but he wasn’t there either. A man found a note with our address on it: ‘They’re taking us to the Umberto I barracks in Bergamo’. We got on a women’s bike, me crouching on the frame. But he wasn’t in Bergamo. A relative told us that a freight train was leaving from Brescia. We went there, crossed the tracks. The train had come to a standstill in the countryside. Women were carrying bags in which bottles and bread were visible. My mum started knocking on every carriage, shouting ‘Lorenzi’, until my father looked out. A young German soldier let him off the train”.
“He tried to reassure us: ‘They’re taking us to Germany to work. It’s better this way, San Vittore is more dangerous. They kill ten Italians for every German that is taken in the city’. I kissed him and hugged him. ‘Soon the war will be over and I’ll come back to you’, he said”.
“Then he got back on the train; smiling, with a glass in his hand, he shouted: ‘Viva l’Italia’ (long live Italy). I saw similar scenes in Life Is Beautiful (La vita è bella), Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning film,” Raffaella concludes. Her father, the 41-year-old of unwavering ideals, died in Mauthausen on the 22nd of May 1945, succumbing to tuberculosis and malnutrition.
Sesto San Giovanni is a symbolic city in Italian history, one of great industry and a stronghold of antifascist opposition, many of whose inhabitants fell victim to deportation. Subsequently, in the postwar era it became a place of reconstruction in which the political left was deeply rooted. A symbol of popular organising. It’s no coincidence that Sesto San Giovanni was awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valour in the fight for the liberation from Fascism. Deportee House isn’t far from city hall. All over the city there are monuments commemorating war victims, deportees and the partisans (“partigiani”) of the Italian resistance movement. However, not only has the new centre-right mayor never visited ANED or its archive and has allowed its headquarters to be put up for sale, but he also refused to grant honorary citizenship to Liliana Segre, senator for life, who was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau as a child because she was Jewish.
Di Stefano declared that “Segre isn’t part of Sesto’s history”, even though she lives in neighbouring Milan and has often visited Sesto to tell her story. She is even a member of ANED, like all other deportees, Jewish people and political opponents; people of all ideologies, beliefs and ethnic backgrounds. The mayor, instead, has made headlines for promoting initiatives of a different nature. Last January his council gave CasaPound (an Italian neo-fascist group) a hall in which to hold a convention. The opposition’s protests and a demonstration organised by the Antifascist Committee and National Association of Italian Partisans (ANPI, Associazione Nazionale Partigiani Italiani) weren’t able to stop the event from taking place. ANPI, however, was successful in blocking another far-right conference planned to take place in a hotel last November.
“I called the hotel’s director and said to him: ‘Do you know who they are?’ That was all it took,” Lina Calvi, president of ANPI Sesto, recounts. Wrapped in a purple scarf, her white hair tied in a bun, she smiles as she walks towards us in Villa Zorn’s garden. “We lost them,” she adds, pointing to an Art Nouveau-style dance floor and a restaurant where ANPI members held their meetings until 2017. “The new administration chose to rent them out to privates. We’re left with two rooms, but the clubhouse was the soul of our organisation and with the profits from the bar we were able