Concentration camps in Puglia The map of horror in one volume

The focus of the event will be on racial laws and reception camps in Bari. The same theme was also addressed by the publication Places of memory in Puglia (Edizioni dal Sud), a volume which, edited by Anna Gervasio and Vito Antonio Leuzzi, represents the latest updated result of research on places of memory, as the curators underline. This map restores to the Apulian community the relevant aspects of the advent of fascism in the region, from the assassination of the socialist deputy Di Vagno to the detention in the Turi penitentiary of Gramsci and Pertini, up to the establishment in 1940 of the concentration camps of Alberobello, Gioia del Colle, Manfredonia and the Tremiti Islands, still visible evidence of Nazi madness. About 5 kilometers from Alberobello is the Masseria Gigante, known today as Casa Rossa. From 1887 until the outbreak of the Second World War, that place housed the Giant Foundation which ran an agricultural school. However, in June 1940 teaching activities were suspended at the behest of the Ministry of the Interior and a concentration camp was established. Here 79 foreign Jews and 8 Italians were deported.

Another monument which, rising on the eastern outskirts of Gioia del Colle, becomes a reminder that the former Pagano Mill carries with it the memory of the massacre. In the summer of 1940, the Ministry of the Interior requisitioned the premises to set up a concentration camp which, for a short time, housed just over fifty individuals, almost all of them Italian Jews. The building, until a few years ago, has kept the traces of suffering in its rooms, up to the writing Libert painted in blue on the wall of the large hall on the second floor. Moving to Capitanata, the concentration camp of Manfredonia, not far from the sea and from the railway station, it was set up in the building of the municipal slaughterhouse in June 1940. Hundreds of prisoners passed through the camp, closed in July 1943, including Jews of various nationalities. One of the peculiar aspects of the building was to perform a transit function for the Tremiti internees. Starting from the port of Manfredonia, in fact, after about 64 kilometers you arrive at the island of San Domino, the first of the Tremiti archipelago. Between 1927 and 1943 the latter were places of deportation for political opponents of the regime. During the Second World War, the border colony was used as a concentration camp for enemy subjects and a detention center for Jews, Yugoslavs, Albanians. The inmates stayed on the island of San Nicola and the internees on that of San Domino. Among them, for a short time, also Ferruccio Parri, first prime minister after the liberation, and Sandro Pertini, president of the Republic in the 1980s. These places are only a part of those present in the map that the volume traces, offering – specifies Gervasio – a tool that also gives the possibility to schools to address these issues, highlighting, in an always open research path, both the history Pugliese is the very definition of a place of memory.

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