Yesterday, Angela, Jay and I took the students on a field trip to one of Italy's few concentration camps, the location we visited three years ago and that provided the inspiration for the course I'm teaching on the Holocaust in European film.
I can't actually remember who recommended that we visit the site, but the four of us (Jay and I along with Shannon and Stephen Dobranski) were all moved by the experience. Not only is the site a very informative museum of the times, but it is also a compelling memorial to the people who were kept there.
Since I ran off without a camera, you will once again need to go to the Internet for visual information. For some historical background, go to Risiera di San Sabba and Holocaust Education .
Nothing really does justice, however, to the fact that the site has been turned into a memorial, which one enters through this narrow and looming portal through which one can see the original rice husking factory. The addition is the result of a design competition that turned the original factory into a memorial space and gallery for a remarkable collection of art works, including the sculpture on the upper left and drawings by an artist from Gorizia, Zoran Music, a Slovene painter who was sent to Dachau and which he documented in a series of haunting paintings. Go to Music to read about him. Then Google Zoran Music to look at his art.
The one thing that doesn't appear clearly in any of the photos is that the present space simply provides an outline of where the crematorium had been. The Nazis had bombed it to eliminate all traces of what had happened there, but the architect, Romano Boico, chose not to rebuild it but to present it as absence.
The others aspects of the space that interested the students was an excellent documentary film (in English) of what had taken place between 1913 and 1975. Obviously the buildings were used as a rice husking factory between 1913 and the 1940s, were turned into a holding area and forced labor camp during the 1940s, became a public monument in 1966, and finally opened as a museum in 1975.
We returned to Gorizia, where we watched Holland's Europa, Europa which elicited probably the best discussion we've had yet, probably because the film is, despite some pretty harrowing moments, a comedy based on a real person's experience. Solomon Perel, whom we see at the end of the film, was a Jew who escaped persecution by hiding in plain sight, first in a Soviet orphanage and ultimately in a school for Hitler Youth. I'm definitely not doing it justice (but no summary would do justice to its episodic or to the twists and turns by which Solly manages to save both his life and his identity).
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