From Schio, Tullio Binaghi sent us this witness. It’s about a prison experience ( from 1945 to 1946) in Slovenia. His story is completed from a list of the people he had the chance to meet on that painful occasion. In his letter he specifies indeed “being one of the few survivors of that group, I believe I must make known what I am acquainted with”. We are thankful to Mr. Binaghi.

My witness wants to be as brief as possible, limited to the events I am sure of, concerning mainly people detained at Trieste and Gorizia during the 45 days of the Yugoslavian occupation, people who were deported and for the most never come back. My personal considerations are present because I could be blamed as impartial, and this would be even human; the attachments (the list of the persons I met and the prison map) are supporting evidence. I was arrested by the Yugoslavian on 27th June 1945 at Divaccia/Divača railway station where the train that had to take me from Trieste to Pola/Pula stopped. I was coming from Venice, where, from the half of May I was hosted as a veteran, at Morosini dormitory at the Fondamenta Nuove. Previously I served the Italian Social Republic, first at the registration office of the Pola Military District and later, as a common soldier, to the thirty-first Provincial Storage- storage company, field-post 847- at the barrack of via Rossetti in Trieste. When the followers of Tito arrived, I found refuge in Venice together with Dino Montagner, born in Bagnole (Pula) my comrade and friend. On 27th June, in the morning I got on the train at Venice station to go back to my family, unaware of the troubles I was running through. I didn’t know why they halted me. Perhaps the boots I was wearing made the officer suspicious and he told me to get off; for the rest I was dressed as usual, which means very bad and I was taking on my shoulder a rucksack with a few belongings. Olga Angelini, a distant relative who during the war lived in Trieste, in via Udine and she was witness to my halt. I spent the night at Divaccia, locked away. The following morning with two other inmates I was moved by train under an armed escort to St. Peter of Carso, at the Milice Barrack. I spent there only one day because that same night on an open truck, together with many others, with my hands tied behind my back with a telephone wire, I was driven to Villa del Nevoso in an old and rotten jail. Some days later I was moved with other wretches, to the former Carabinieri barrack placed a little outside the village, on a slightly uphill road. Despite the way being short, everything went following a tested script: dark night, open truck, telephone wire. The building was used to file the prisoners and have information  from them in any way, from intimidation to violence. I wasn’t abused, they took pictures of me and my fingerprints, like all the policemen in the world do. The prisons were taken in the cellars of the barrack and at the window, almost ground level, there were some boards to avoid us to see and to be seen. We had to whisper, we were gasping for the heat, the thirst and the poor ventilation. I stay there until 14th July: that night I was transferred, with the usual system, to Aidussina/Ajdovšĉina. The jail here was partly ruined due to a recent bombing or fire. I was put in a corner cell, at the end of a corridor running parallel to the entrance courtyard. In the room there was a thin and tall man with grayish hair; he spoke a quite good Italian, he told me he said his name was Fortkner, he was a consultant in Portorose/Portorož. In a room upstairs there was his wife; they had a baby girl but he did not know where and how she was.
The following morning he was transferred.