Puglia has always been a welcoming land. As the son of Fiume exiles, raised in a community of Julian-Dalmatian exiles, I know how many of my fellow countrymen, who fled from Tito’s Yugoslavia after the passage, with the Paris Peace Treaty of 10 February 1947, of Istria, Fiume and from Zara to that country, they found shelter in the refugee camps of Bari, Brindisi and Lecce.
Just as I remind those who don’t know that, before the 109 refugee camps that were set up for us by the Italian government of the time, the idea of establishing a city built specifically for us in Puglia had been mooted. The idea was soon abandoned due to the risk of creating a sort of explosive bomb in finding ourselves all together, 300 thousand exiles with spirits exacerbated by the occupation of their own land and the definitive abandonment of “everything is loved more dearly; and this is that arrow that the bow of exile first shoots. You will experience how other people’s bread tastes like salt, and how hard it is to go up and down other people’s stairs.”, to quote Dante.
But Puglia, in those years, did not only welcome a few refugee camps for Julian and Dalmatian exiles. The Displaced Persons Camp was also very important, one of which was reserved for Jews who escaped the extermination camps and headed to Israel. Precisely the DP Camp 34 created, under the aegis of UNRRA, in Santa Maria al Bagno, a hamlet of the municipality of Nardò, in the province of Lecce, against which Cosimo Buccarella, from Salento, wrote a compelling novel. It’s about “The Outsiders”, published by Corbaccio, which has four protagonists vugnunithat is, boys who, in the immediate post-war period, had fun, at the seaside, in the countryside, in the streets of Sannicola, where they lived, trying – between petty thefts, bartering and so on – to survive the black hunger of those years.
“It was about small things: you stole the eggs from the neighbor who had lots of chickens, and he stole the potatoes from the neighbor who had a piece of land. You fixed the farmer’s hoe and he rewarded you with two pieces of bread, which he had obtained under the table from the baker in exchange for the tobacco stolen from the smuggler, who in turn had looted the factory warehouse…” tells one of the four boys, Tommaso, who is the narrator of the story and who bears the name of the author’s father, despite having no connection with the character of the same name in the novel.
Things change when the boys find the body of a murdered man half hidden in the woods and it was then, after a moment of disorientation and fear, of the police and English soldiers questioning them, that they discover another reality. It is, in fact, the Displaced Persons Camp, complete with a synagogue. Upon entering the camp the boys find all sorts of goodies, not only food, which they are invited to eat, but also clothing. However, they discover that there are also medicines.
Hence the idea of finding a way to secretly enter the camp (to allow the boys access, Buccarella invents an opening near the bush which wasn’t there in reality) to steal the medicines. An emergency for Tommaso himself who has a sister suffering from typhoid. From here the adventure that the boys will experience will take on an acceleration that will get to the heart of the history of the camp and of those who occupy it, with its relationships, its different characters, mostly invented, but some of whom really existed, such as the beautiful and helpful Hannah, affectionately called Hannale, paid in cigarettes and whiskey.
In all this there is no lack of an insight into the era and a descriptive reconstruction of the same, which today no longer exists, given that, in the final note, the author underlines how the idea of making DP Camp 34 a Garden of Memory, in memory of that structure so important not only for that area but for the whole of Puglia, has ended up being erased forever under concrete and bulldozers. Even in spite of the gold medal for Civil Valor which, for this reason, President Ciampi awarded to Nardò in 2005.
Diego Zandel
