Fossoli

Fossoli Camp
The Fossoli camp, near Carpi, 12.5 miles (20 km) north of Modena and 37 miles from Bologna, was instituted by the Italians in 1942 as a camp for British prisoners of war. It was handed over to the Germans in September 1943 and singled out as an ideal location for a fascist concentration camp because of its recently constructed stone walls and its strategic position on the northway railroad system. It was known as "War Prison Camp No. 73" and used for the transfer of deportees and earmarked to receive Jews, political prisoners, Italian soldiers and allied non-commissioned officers.
Immediately after the Germans took over, work began on enlarging the camp. When the first 827 Jews arrived the new buildings had still to be completed, and therefore some of the deportees had to be housed in the barracks of the ex-military camp. Since the beginning of 1944, the new camp was rectangular in shape and surrounded by three rows of barbed wire netting. The deportees’ barracks inside the camp were made of wood and stone.
In Fossoli, families lived together, the inmates wore civilian clothes, and their possessions were not confiscated. Yet they also suffered from starvation and callousness. The camp was operative for about seven months. Between November 1943 and the end of 1944, at least 3,198 Jews plus political opponents of the regime passed through Fossoli, the vast majority en-route to the extermination camps in Germany and Poland. Transports with primarily Jews were sent chiefly to Auschwitz. Of the eight train convoys, five of them were destined for Auschwitz alone. One transport with many Jews from neutral countries was sent to Bergen-Belsen. Those with mostly political prisoners were sent mainly to Mauthausen.

The first major shipment was composed almost exclusively of Jews and left Fossoli on 22 January 1944. It included Primo Levi who survived Auschwitz only to many years later take his own life. A review of his book which recounted his experiences, Se questo e' un'uomo, describes him and his seven week stay in Fossoli this way:
In 1943 Primo Levi, a young Jewish chemist from Turin, helped to form a partisan band which he and his comrades hoped would eventually be affiliated with the Resistance movement. But at the end of the year he was captured by the Fascist militia and deported to a detention camp at Fossoli. He stayed there a few weeks. On 24 February 1944, it was announced that all the Jews in the camp would be leaving the following day for an unknown destination. [He was one of 95 men.] Along with 650 other Jewish ‘pieces’ he was sent to the gigantic death-machine of Auschwitz, whose name was ‘without significance for us at that time’ but where 24,000 people could be gassed on a single day.
The children, old men and most of the women who had been crammed into the 12 goods wagons on the train were ‘swallowed by the night’; of the remaining 125 who entered the concentration camps, only three made the return journey to Italy after Liberation. Primo Levi was one of them. He escaped because as a chemist he was useful to the Nazis and because in 1945, when the Germans fled from Auschwitz taking all the healthy prisoners with them, Levi was ill with scarlet fever.


Primo Levi later describes the terrors of the long sleepless nights at Camp Fossoli in a poem (translated to English by Franco G. Aitala):

Il tramonto di Fossoli
Io so cosa vuol dire non tornare.
A traverso il filo spinato
ho visto il sole scendere e morire;
ho sentito lacerarmi la carne
le parole del vecchio poeta:
"Possono i soli cadere e tornare:
a noi, quando la breve luce è spenta,
una notte infinita è da dormire."
The sunset at Fossoli
I know what it means not to return.