From Verona to Dachau [extracts from the memoirs of Giovanni Domaschi]

Giovanni Domaschi was born in Verona in 1891. He became an anarchist while employed in the railway yard in Verona as a mechanic. Staunchly opposed to the First World War, he threw himself into the subversive movement in the city and especially into the activities of the Camera del Lavoro (Chamber of Labour) which was affiliated to the USI (Italian Syndicalist Union) from late February 1919 on. He set up a small workshop of his own Veronetta and in 1920 set up a workers’ anarchist group in the district. In April 1921 he was arrested following a shoot-out with a fascist squad. He was freed from prison in July 1922. After fascism came to power he carried on with his political and trade union activity: and as a result was arrested and interned in November 1926. This signaled the start of an odyssey that would see him live in or pass through numerous detention centres throughout the twenty years of fascist rule as he kept faith with his anarchist ideals and led many escape attempts. In 1928 he was sentenced to a 15 year prison term by the Special Court. From 1929 onwards he was listed as a category 1 inmate, the category of “highly dangerous” subversives. After the downfall of the Mussolini government he and other anarchists were moved from the island of Ventotene to the Renicci D’Anghiari (Arezzo) concentration camp. He managed to make his way home to Verona where he was involved with the Resistance, joining the city National Liberation Committee (CLN). In early July 1944 he was captured by the fascist Black Brigades. He was tortured and handed over to the SS before being deported, with other CLN members, to the death camps in Germany. He perished in Dachau in 1945.

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Recently, under my editorship, an autobiography by Giovanni Domaschi, an exemplary labour militant, anarchist, antifascist, internee and partisan who perished in a death camp, has seen publication. 

“It would take a whole book to recount our comrade’s feats”, Randolfo Vella wrote in Il Libertario as long ago as 25 April 1955. Now that book exists: written by Domaschi himself, before he ended his days in a concentration camp. It has been published by the Cierre publishing house (www.cierrenet.it) under my editorship as Le mie prigioni e le mie evasioni, memorie di un anarchico veronese dal carcere e dal confino fascista (My Prisons and My Escapes, A Verona Anarchist’s Memories of Prison and Fascist Internment). Two lucky discoveries, the first dating back a number of years and down to Adriana Dada, and the second abetted by a brainwave from Maurizio Zangarini, the director of the Verona Institute for Resistance and Contemporary History, brought to light two books of memoirs by the Verona anarchist, the incomplete manuscripts of which are today preserved in the Ugo Fedeli archive at the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam and in the archives of the Verona Historical Institute.

Giovanni Domaschi’s memoirs represent documentary evidence at once rare and important. Rare because, contrary to the case with other political persuasions, a sort of shyness on the part of its activists has ensured that memoir-writing has been a genre rather out of favour in the anarchist movement. And important because, besides representing a fresh piece in the rich jigsaw of antifascist memoir materials regarding imprisonment and internment during the fascist era, they highlight the mentality, beliefs and life of an anarchist worker from the first half of the 20th century. An interweaving of the shared history of a “rank and file militant” and an extraordinary biography (like many other life stories from those times) that helps to add to our knowledge of the social history of Italian anarchism.

Andrea Dilemmi

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Extracts

Origins

I am a mechanic, the son of poor peasants who did not earn enough to feed all eight of their children, so maybe it was a stroke of luck that three of my siblings perished at an early age since the times in which they would have been fated to live out their lives would have held out the prospects of discomfort. I was born out yonder on the side of a small hill in the Verona region and at the age of ten I entered the workshop of a blacksmith, quitting it quite soon afterwards for the trade of mechanic which I found far more preferable: after contact with clanking machinery, and the usual din from hundreds of gears, rubbing shoulders with men filthy from toil and poverty, my mind began to get some inkling of basic social injustices and started to split the world into two camps: poor and rich, the ones that produce wealth and the ones who usurp it. By the age of sixteen I was a member of the local “Socialist Youth Circle”, dedicating myself entirely to its activities; on second thoughts, I became an Anarchist and took part in all of the ventures I reckoned useful in terms of the moral and material improvement of my class. As an anarchist I was against the European war and was reluctant to serve as a soldier, but for several months I  wore an army uniform, albeit only in order to tear it to shreds on the bunks of the regimental glasshouse. I knew and still face years of sadness, as indeed are all who were reluctant or who refused to bow before the fascist cudgel and legislation.  

Against the fascists

O the evening of 21 April 1921 the fascists did all in their power to force entry into the S. Stefano working class district and the fighting centres especially on the “Ponte Pietra” (Stone Bridge), with the two opposing factions positioned at opposite ends of the bridge, with the occasional report of gunfire. The local Anarchist Group was on the spot offering encouragement and advice, but could see that in the face of overwhelming enemy strength backed, as usual, by intervention by the police who had the most up to date equipment, we would be bested. So what were we to do? Might we not be better advised, perhaps, to lie in wait in small groups in hiding places until the enemy had crossed the bridge and then swoop at the opportune moment and rain on their heads what little explosives we had? Actually, we stationed ourselves in threes facing the bridge, on the tumble-down street leading to the Castello S. Felice […] shortly before midnight, the shops and house windows were all shuttered from early evening onwards and a tomb-like silence reigned as if everything were perfectly normal. I decided to venture out, unarmed, from my hiding place to see how things stood and found myself facing a mass of Royal Guards, fascists and all manner of policemen […] : who called upon me to “Stop right where you are!” I heard a noise like pebble thrown from overhead on the paving stones: it was an SIPE bomb that Boresi had hurled at the officials when he saw them striding quietly towards us with all their men […] The bomb landed at my feet, which is to say very close to the officials up ahead of me: I faced two dangers: perishing in the explosion or being arrested: how I managed to break free of the grip of the surrounding thugs I have no idea; I made a dash for the bridge, my intention being to dive into the Adige river and swim to safety […] I could hear the officers’ voices screeching: “Stop, Domaschi! Stop, Domaschi!”  I actually did stop, for the street was hiving with enemy personnel who promptly handcuffed me.

Interned: Favignano

It was in the newspapers that we political internees received a 10 lire a day allowance, a pathetic sum when set against the cost of living in those days, but our situation became even more fraught when we found that, instead of our being issued with the aforesaid “bundle” of ten lire, we were issued with just two […] And were doomed to go hungry as well as a result. Those of us from Verona had started to eat at the same table, with everything we had being pooled together, but what we had was very little, so we decided to make do with one meal a day, at one o’clock in the afternoon. 

[…] We were in ongoing contact with ordinary prisoners, but we made a point of seeking them out so as to get to know them better, trying, in short, to see if they had any decency, any shred of sensitivity in them: then, when our finances were healthier, we used to help them out, passing them stamps and paper so that they could write to their families.

From contact with these wretches I reached the conclusion that many of them, had they lived in a society that would help lift them out of the mire into which they had fallen, would turn out to be men with a contribution to make towards the common good. True, there were those among them too who would be hard to rehabilitate, that being how nature had moulded them, yet these wretches might be placed in a position where they could not harm society but where society likewise should never budge from the idea of doing them no harm either.

Lipari: love in internment

After comrade Galleani and, to be specific, in September 1927, I saw a young woman arrive with a baby, the state of which genuinely moved me to compassion: on behalf of the Anarchist comrades, I made it my business to find her accommodation suited to her needs and after a few days I succeeded in my efforts. 

In the meantime I was stricken by “Lipari-itis”, an epidemic that left me bedridden for some days: we called it ‘Lipari-itis’ because it affected Lipari alone, and the new female internee, who was none other than comrade Maria Ciarravano, tended to me with genuine sisterly affection. During my convalescence, and given that the table I normally sat at had only very ordinary fare to offer, she volunteered to cook for me as well. We soon became like brother and sister who make light of their own worries and share each other’s pleasures, but that sort of love could not survive for long, since we were both young and we both had other needs and gradually different feelings grew between us. What was there to prevent us from becoming companions for life? Did we perhaps require the consent of the parish priest or the go-ahead from the mayor? What did all these father figures mean to two loving hearts feeling drawn to one another? We had come to a point where we could not live together without the breath of setting the other’s heart a-flutter.  We set up home together just as husband and wife do in bourgeois society, but with this difference: it was not the law that held our hearts united but affection, the purest, greatest affection. 

A queer priest on the run

In the earliest hours of the evening of 20 July 1928, with Michelagnoli, I slipped out of the hut where we both found ourselves, using a key that I had adapted for use in the machine-shop over the preceding days: we left with everything we regarded as vital if we were to pull it off, to wit, portable lanterns, ropes and clothing for use as a disguise: all of this had been smuggled to us that day along with some cash. We made our way immediately to the cell holding Canepa and Magri and donned our new clothes. […] I was the first one out on to the tiny balcony leading to the perimeter fence and scaled it thanks to a human pyramid that we all formed, clinging to a pipe channeling rain water: I had only just arrived there when I tossed down a rope for the other comrades and one by one they all followed. […] We used the same rope to climb down on the other side and we were outside the prison.

[…] We all made for the mountains, reckoning that was the best route for reaching ‘Canneto’ without incident. At one crossroads we heard a challenge from sentries posted there rather than in their usual location; their suspicions had been aroused by the ceaseless barking of dogs. Canepa, Michelagnoli and Ciarravano, trailing a number of steps behind us, and as yet unspotted, made a run for it whilst Magri and I stopped and answered the sentries’ challenge by saying that we were from Lipari. As we drew closer they could see from our clothing that they were dealing with a priest and a woman and they apologized and allowed us to go on our way. We walked a further hundred metres and then decided to wait for the others who, we reckoned, would have cut across country and would catch us up. We waited a couple of hours for the comrades, more time than we could spare: I insisted that we wait, not just out of a sense of obligation towards them, but also because I reckoned that the pair of us on our own would have some difficulty putting to sea and reaching the shore on our own. We heard the ‘cathedral’ clock strike two in the morning and could wait no longer. […] We decided to press on and started for the mountains, heedless of the dangers posed by a number of near-fatal slips; we were bathed in sweat and the soutane and above all the priestly collar I had on prevented me from displaying the agility of movement required just then. 

Having climbed half way, we skirted the mountains in the direction of “Canneto”, our rendezvous point: we strode on at speed, not allowing ourselves a moment’s ease, but time was marching on and we had already twigged that we were unlikely to reach “Canneto” at a suitable hour; […] in fact we climbed down to “Canneto” at around five o’clock; the crewmen assigned to man the launch were already at work and we had no option but to hide out in the hills and wait for another opportunity.

Giovanni Domaschi

From A Rivista Anarchica, year 37, No 325, April 2007 http://www.arivista.org/?nr=325&pag=35.htm

Translated by: Paul Sharkey.