April 25th in Manfredonia, victims and memory of the Pertini partisan
Manfredonia – WHEN he arrived, the country bore the shadow of the skyless internment campManfredonia was sick of piss and wind and had difficulty digesting the leftovers of lead.
The angels on the electric poles of the railway watched the train that went along the sixth southern section track, slowly grinding the cumbersome engine, with old carriages lined up one after the other and meandering in front of the dawn of war.
The smelly red and brown carriages were stopped suddenly by a screeching braking that made the group of deportees jump against the pieces of metal and wood in the compartments.
I got out two, three at a time, it was September 1940dressed in a very modest manner with large bundles on their shoulders, were transported to the center of the concentration camp of the municipal slaughterhouse, better known as the area of the “Tratturo del Carmine” road to Siponto.
The structure was newly built as a village slaughterhouse… but the fascists intervened on command of the Germans with the precise order to take possession of the large and spacious building with courtyard, already used as a concentration camp, with kitchens, dormitories, windows with gates closed in such a way detail of padlocks.
The place was full of Jews and Slovenians including Italians, among the prisoners there were various prominent figures. But what Dad remembered and talked about was Sandro Pertinithe Ligurian partisan born in San Giovanni di Stella in the province of Savona, born in 1896, with a stubborn, tenacious and strong character, then later it seems he was transferred to the Tremiti Islands.
The duration of this internment lasted until 1943. Father recalls that the large rooms contained around 300 inmates, in that camp of modest dimensions compared to other larger and monstrously brutal camps. When they closed that internment after the war, the municipal slaughterhouse resumed its true origin, but the
structures remained the same as the Germans had left them.
When the April 25, 1945 – day of liberation – the partisans chased away the fascists, the traitor brothers, who had shamefully humiliated them and deprived them of all human and Christian dignity, erasing every sort of physical and mental semblance to every being existing on earth in those years.
(Edited by Claudio Castriotta)
