February Theme day: paths and passages

Today the series of photos about the Risiera di San Sabba has come to an end.
If you haven't paid a visit to this blog recently and want to see the rest you can walk through the 11-metre high concrete walls arranged to form a disquieting entrance and go back in time to 27th of January, Remembrance Day.

The passage was designed by Romano Boico, the architect who, in 1966, won the competition to convert the Risiera into a museum (opened in 1975).

The Risiera - explained Boico - half destroyed by the fleeing Nazis, was squalid, like its surroundings. So he thought that the total squalor could rise as a symbol and itself become a monument. He decided to remove and restore rather than add. After removing the ruined buildings, he demarcated the context with high concrete walls, like those in the photo. The walled courtyard is intended as an open-air non-denominational basilica. The building where prisoners were kept was completely emptied and the load-bearing wooden structures pared down as much as seemed necessary. The seventeen cells and the death cell are unchanged.

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Click here to view thumbnails for all participants

The club

Human bones and ashes were found among the rubble of the crematorium dynamited by the fleeing Germans, in three paper sacks of the sort used for cement. The club was also found amid the rubble.
It was used to torture and kill many prisoners and is made up of a wooden handle, woven metal cables and a metal prism.

What adds horror to horror is the little note informing visitors that the club was stolen in February 1981 by a group of people calling themselves "SAH - Squadre Adolf Hitler" (Adolf Hitler's squad). The club on display today is a replica of this object, made and donated in 2000.

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Blue

I don't think it's a good idea to link this post to the Skywatch community this week, nevertheless we all need a bit of fresh air and blue sky.

This is the upper part of the building seen yesterday, above where the furnace once lay.

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The furnace

Though Remembrance Day is over, I still linger in this terrible place, trying to give my modest contribution to revealing the local scenes of this appalling tragedy.
So I'll keep on posting images of the Risiera di San Sabba until the first of February, our theme day. Forewarned is forearmed.

This is the inner courtyard, opposite the cells. On the site now marked on the ground by a metal plate, was the building housing the furnace in which bodies were cremated - its outline is still visible on the main building.

On the night of 29th April 1945 the building housing the crematorium and the chimney stack connected to it were dynamited by the fleeing Germans to remove the evidence of their crimes, as was their practice.

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Confiscated

One of the articles pillaged by the Nazis from Jewish houses in Trieste and on display in the museum of the Risiera di San Sabba.
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27011945-27012009

On January 27th 1945, Soviet troups reached the Polish city of Oświęcim (better known by its German name Auschwitz), where they discovered its sadly famous concentration camp and freed the few remaining survivors. Since 2001 in Italy, Remembrance day is celebrated each year on January 27th to commemorate the victims of Nazism and Fascism, of the holocaust and in honour of those who risked their own lives to protect the persecuted.

This rose mounted on barbed wire stands outside one of the cells of the Risiera di San Sabba, a former rice-husking facility that was built in 1913.

After September 8, 1943, the Nazi occupation forces used the San Sabba premises as prison camp, headquarters where deported prisoners were sorted out to be sent to Germany and Poland, raided goods depot, prison and extermination camp for hostages, partisans, political and Jewish prisoners. On April 4, 1944 a crematory plant was installed and made operative.

(...to be continued)