Fossoli Camp

The Fossoli camp, near Carpi, 12.5 miles (20 km) north of Modena and 37 miles from Bologna, was instituted by the Italians in 1942 as a camp for British prisoners of war. It was handed over to the Germans in September 1943 and singled out as an ideal location for a fascist concentration camp because of its recently constructed stone walls and its strategic position on the northway railroad system. It was known as "War Prison Camp No. 73" and used for the transfer of deportees and earmarked to receive Jews, political prisoners, Italian soldiers and allied non-commissioned officers. 

Immediately after the Germans took over, work began on enlarging the camp. When the first 827 Jews arrived the new buildings had still to be completed, and therefore some of the deportees had to be housed in the barracks of the ex-military camp. Since the beginning of 1944, the new camp was rectangular in shape and surrounded by three rows of barbed wire netting. The deportees’ barracks inside the camp were made of wood and stone.

In Fossoli, families lived together, the inmates wore civilian clothes, and their possessions were not confiscated. Yet they also suffered from starvation and callousness. The camp was operative for about seven months. Between November 1943 and the end of 1944, at least 3,198 Jews plus political opponents of the regime passed through Fossoli, the vast majority en-route to the extermination camps in Germany and Poland. Transports with primarily Jews were sent chiefly to Auschwitz (https://motlc.wiesenthal.com/text/x10/pages/t003/t00315.html). Of the eight train convoys, five of them were destined for Auschwitz alone. One transport with many Jews from neutral countries was sent to Bergen-Belsen (https://motlc.wiesenthal.com/text/x10/pages/t007/t00752.html). Those with mostly political prisoners were sent mainly to Mauthausen (https://motlc.wiesenthal.com/text/x10/pages/t049/t04929.html). 

The first major shipment was composed almost exclusively of Jews and left Fossoli on 22 January 1944. It included Primo Levi who survived Auschwitz only to many years later take his own life. A review of his book which recounted his experiences, Se questo e' un'uomo, describes him and his seven week stay in Fossoli this way:

In 1943 Primo Levi, a young Jewish chemist from Turin, helped to form a partisan band which he and his comrades hoped would eventually be affiliated with the Resistance movement. But at the end of the year he was captured by the Fascist militia and deported to a detention camp at Fossoli. He stayed there a few weeks. On 24 February 1944, it was announced that all the Jews in the camp would be leaving the following day for an unknown destination. [He was one of 95 men.] Along with 650 other Jewish ‘pieces’ he was sent to the gigantic death-machine of Auschwitz, whose name was ‘without significance for us at that time’ but where 24,000 people could be gassed on a single day.

The children, old men and most of the women who had been crammed into the 12 goods wagons on the train were ‘swallowed by the night’; of the remaining 125 who entered the concentration camps, only three made the return journey to Italy after Liberation. Primo Levi was one of them. He escaped because as a chemist he was useful to the Nazis and because in 1945, when the Germans fled from Auschwitz taking all the healthy prisoners with them, Levi was ill with scarlet fever.

Primo Levi later describes the terrors of the long sleepless nights at Camp Fossoli in a poem (translated to English by Franco G. Aitala):

   

Il tramonto di Fossoli

Io so cosa vuol dire non tornare.

A traverso il filo spinato 
ho visto il sole scendere e morire; 
ho sentito lacerarmi la carne 
le parole del vecchio poeta: 
"Possono i soli cadere e tornare: 
a noi, quando la breve luce è spenta, 
una notte infinita è da dormire."

The sunset at Fossoli

I know what it means not to return.

Through the barbed wire
I saw the sun descend and die,
I felt tearing my flesh
the words of the old poet:
"The suns can fall and return:
for us, when the brief light is out,
there is an infinite night to be slept."

Of the 835 Jews that were deported from Fossoli to Auschwitz on April 5, 1944, 692 were gassed on arrival. Among the victims were 71-year-old Sara Klein and 5-year-old Rosetta Scaramella. 

By the beginning of August, the camp had been almost completely cleared and the remaining deportees transferred to Bolzano, where Haage and Titho, the SS Commanders were also transferred. August 2, 1944 is the official date the camp was abandoned - a camp that had been used as a transfer point for approximately 5,000 deportees, one half of which were Jewish.

The German SS committed a number of horrendous crimes at Fossoli, the most serious of which was the execution by firing squad of 68 deportees (https://www.deportati.it/campi/fossoli/fucilati.htm, and anti-fascists) on 12th July (see a testimony by Alba Valech Capozzi (https://www.deportati.it/campi/fossoli/valech70_1.htm), who was present at Fossoli in the days of the massacre). Ten days later, (22nd July), the partisan Resistance hero and leading figure of the ‘Party of Action’ Leopoldo Gasparotto, was slaughtered.

After the war, the ex-concentration camp was converted to housing facilities. From 1947 to 1952 it was occupied by the Catholic community of Nomadelfia, and from 1953 until the end of the 1960s it was a refugee camp for Julians and Dalmatians and called "Villaggio San Marco". 

The new inhabitants intentionally gave the camp a totally different appearance. They sought to give that place of death a new face by heavily modifying the existing structures and tearing down the dramatic indications of what had been its most tragic use. Therefore, it is believed that only the stonework of the barracks and the position of the surviving structures are original. Some of the camp’s buildings, although in appalling conditions, still exist today.

In 1973, a museum was inaugurated in the Castle of Pio in Carpi as a memorial to the political and racial deportees of the Nazi extermination camps ("Museo monumento al deportato politico e razziale nei campi di sterminio nazisti"). Questo convinced the Municipality to request the Taxation Police Office to purchase the area of the form Camp Fossili which was then awarded "at no charge" in 1984, thanks to a special law. The Municipality of Carpi assumed the difficult task related to the methodology of the camp's reconstruction. 

An international competition among European and Israeli architects allowed a wide and diversified contribution of ideas. The Italian architect Roberto Maestro submitted the successful proposal that was selected.

The Foundation of ex camp Fossoli

The Foundation of ex camp Fossoli (La Fondazione ex campo Fossoli = the "Foundation"), established in 1996 by the Municipality of Carpi by the Friends of "Museo Monumento at Deportato" has as objectives the restoration and the enhancement of the historic memory of the former concentration camp of Fossoli. The Center commits itself to collecting documents and witness accounts, also to the historic research of the Fossoli camp, and ot facilitate pedagogical activities on pacifist themes and conflicts resolution. 

Since 1998, the Foundation is under the control and supervision of the of the "Ministero dei Beni Culturali ed Ambientali". From January 1, 2001, the Foundation administers the "Museo Monumento al Deportato e del Campo di Fossoli", an activity previously administered directly by the Municipality of Carpi.

Sources:

  • Associazione Nazionale ex Deportati Politici nei Campi Nazisti (ANED) - I campi - Fossoli - https://www.deportati.it/campi/fossoli/fossoli.htm
  • New International Magazine online, Reviews - If this is a man / The truce - https://www.newint.org/issue184/reviews.htm
  • The Holocaust Chronicle PROLOGUE - Roots of the Holocaust, pg. 520 (excerpt from 1944 Timeline) - https://www.holocaustchronicle.org/StaticPages/520.html
  • Scuola Media San Carlo - Storia del '900 - Fossoli - https://www.comune.modena.it/scuole/smscarlo/WarNotOver/lager.htm
  • ITSOS "Albe Steiner", Storia - Fossoli - https://www.itsos.gpa.it/storia/steiner/steiner/fossoli.htm

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This page compliments of Marisa Ciceran and Franco G. Aitala 

Created: Thursday, August 30, 2001; Updated Wednesday, August 31, 2022
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