What is Trieste?
And how is Trieste relevant to my story?
Fellow writers, upon reading an early version of my book, challenged me with a question: “You’ve written about your own experience and your experience with your children, but you’ve hardly mentioned your father. You didn’t show up to the challenges fatherhood a blank slate. How did he shape you?”
My initial response was “He had nothing to do with it.” A lot of eyebrows went up. “There’s a lot of charge in that statement,” someone said. And I knew what that meant. I would have to look. I would have to look at my history with my father.
And to understand his history, I had to learn a few things about Trieste.
My father was born in Trieste in 1925. Trieste is a provincial capital in the northeast corner of Italy, on the border with Slovenia, about an hour and a half by car east of Venice. It sits on the Adriatic Sea, just below the southern edge of a massive karst formation that rises 1,500 feet from the sea and extends north into Slovenia.
When my father was 13, in 1938, he served in a youth honor guard for Benito Mussolini when he came to Trieste to make a speech. In that speech, he told the city with the largest Jewish population in Italy about the new racial policies he was imposing, policies similar to those in Germany that had already prompted a steady flow of Jewish refugees through Trieste’s port. My father doesn’t remember a word, but we both wonder what thoughts ran through the minds of many of the men sharing the dais with Mussolini that day: The mayor, who was Jewish. Many prominent business leaders, who were Jewish. Many business owners and professionals and government officials in the audience, who were Jewish.
Trieste was a cosmopolitan city with a long history of international commerce, multi-culturalism and religious tolerance. Long the primary port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — and before World War I, the largest port by tonnage in Europe — it had declined somewhat when the Empire collapsed and Trieste was ceded to Italy, which focused its resources on developing other ports like Genoa and Naples.
Now, with Jews banned from owning businesses — along with many other restrictions, including having their names removed from the telephone directories — Trieste’s economy suffered another blow. Soon after Mussolini’s talk, the cost of his international adventures in Spain and Ethiopia became a drag on the economy, and Italy’s entry into World War II imposed even greater restrictions. My father and his family were relatively well off, but a piece of fresh meat, coffee, even milk were often hard to come by during the worst times.
And then it got even worse. Shortly after Italy surrendered in September, 1943, German troops took control of Trieste because of the strategic importance of the port, an essential lifeline for Hitler’s war effort. When Slovenian partisans seeking to disrupt this flow set off a bomb in downtown Trieste, killing five German soliders, the Nazi’s seized and hung 50 civilians as a reprisal. These men, women, and teenage boys and girls were strung up from the eaves of a building in downtown Trieste. That building was on my father’s regular walk to school.
Unbeknownst to Trieste, the Nazis also established the only extermination facility in Italy in a converted rice processing plant near the port. Over the next two years, they proceeded to wipe out what was left of Trieste’s Jewish community, along with thousands of Gypsies, political prisoners, resistance fighters and other suspicious persons thrown in.
As the war drew to an end, my father, a college student exempted from military service due to an ulcer but otherwise okay, faced increasing danger of being conscripted by the Germans as they prepared to leave Trieste. My grandfather’s relationship with a German banker in town helped my father escape, sitting on a box in the back of a truck driven by two German couriers from Trieste to Milan. Because all the bridges across the rivers were out, a trip that today would take five hours took two days. Lucky for my father, the weather was cloudy, so Allied war planes, which were strafing anything that moved, couldn’t operate. Lucky for my father, the truck wasn’t stopped by Partisans, or he would have been executed as a suspected Nazi.
When the war ended, my father saw Mussolini’s body hanging from a gas station awning in Piazzale Loretto. In another piazza nearby, he saw dozens of bodies, killed in battles between two political factions vying for control of the city.
When he returned to Trieste, he found it occupied by British and New Zealand soldiers, considered saviors compared to the alternative: the Yugoslavian Army and associated Partisans who had justifiable enmity for all things Italian. The city was divided and became the southern terminus of the Iron Curtain. The economy nearly collapsed, the city cut off from its historical trading areas. And while the city’s status was debated at the highest levels of global politics, it took nine years to get a final settlement that left the city partitioned.
That was 1954. My father was 29. He escaped thanks to winning an American scholarship to business school, earning his MBA at Syracuse, soon joining Sperry Univac, one of the pioneers of the early computer industry. While attending a training program in Philadelphia, he met my mother.
Those 29 years shaped my father in a way that would lead him to shape me in turn. It took a while to dig all those influences out, but the process resulted in a reconciliation of sorts. My father left us in California when I was 15 and moved back to Europe, where he lives to this day (in Switzerland now, after long stays in Vienna and Trieste). Until I began this investigation, I hardly knew him.
I didn’t always like what I learned, but I came to understand him, forgive him and even appreciate some of his good points.
During the three years I did this research, I spent four months in Trieste. One outcome was that two women, longtime friends of my father’s, appointed themselves my second and third mothers, respectively. Yes, I was thrilled. My father was an only child and had only one cousin. These women provided me with the big extended family that my mother dreamed she would find in Milan. I feel lucky.
One footnote: Trieste’s status as a border city created an interesting experience for my grandfather Umberto: He had lived his entire life in Trieste yet had been a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Kingdom of Italy, the Germany Reich, Yugoslavia (for 45 days), the Allied Protectorate of Trieste (under a military government run by Americans and Brits) and finally the Republic of Italy.