The Agnone camp is as present in the memory of the Roma and Sinti communities as it is absent and unknown to the historiography of the majority culture.
Zlato Bruno Levak had narrated its events in ‘Lacio Drom’ in 1976, the magazine published by the Gypsy Study Centre and directed by Mirella Karpati:
“In Italy we were also in a concentration camp, almost without eating. I was in Campobasso with my family. There were many of us. There were my uncles called Bogdan and Goman. There were also Italian Roma, from up in Austria, half-German. It was bad there too. We were in a convent, all closed with guards around like a prison’.
The first testimony in 1976 already spoke of a concentration camp in a convent, but for thirty years no one told anything more, while the former convent became first a boarding school and then a nursing home.
It was the arrival in Agnone of Emilia Milka Goman, in April 2005, that suddenly awakened the memory of non-Roma and non-Sinti people. Milka was a stateless Roma woman who had lived in Rome for more than half a century. The last nomad camp in the capital where she lived was Foro Boario, which was cleared just a few years after her visit to Agnone.
Milka Goman had been one of the prisoners of Agnone who, sixty years later, during a theatrical narration performed in Foro Boario, began to recall her imprisonment in a concentration camp in the town of Agnone, in Molise.
At that same time, in the town in upper Molise, a high school teacher, Francesco Paolo Tanzj, was conducting a local history workshop with his pupils who were laboriously reconstructing the history of the concentration camp that had been set up there between 1940 and 1943; no one seemed to pay attention or give any credibility to the story Tanzj was beginning to tell. The lists of 150 internees had also been traced, and among them was the name of Milka Goman and also that of Tomo Bogdan, another direct witness who lived in Rome, also in Boario, but who died without being able to return to the place of his imprisonment. Among the names of the internees on the lists was also that of Reinhardt Annetta with her son Celestino: they were two of those 58 people moved to Agnone when the Boiano camp was closed.
Milka’s return to Agnone was an unveiling: what no one remembered came back to the memory of the people of Agnone and what seemed far-fetched turned out to be true history. The documents tracked down then made it possible to recount this story in detail, as Agnone was the central place for the fascist persecution of Roma and Sinti.
The latter was a concentration camp from July 1940. The site was the former Convent of St Bernardino of Siena, owned by the Diocese of Trivento. It had a capacity of 150 places and was directed by the Police Commissioner Guglielmo Casale; supervision was entrusted to the Carabinieri, who were based in the building. When it opened, the internees were only men, belonging to the categories of enemy subjects (mainly British) and foreign Jews (mainly Germans and Austrians). Later, the prisoners were transferred to other camps, while on 15 July, 58 Roma and Sinti arrived from the Boiano camp, which was definitively closed. From then on, the facility became a ‘concentration camp for gypsies’. In 1943 there were 150 internees, all Roma and Sinti. The names of the families were Alossetto, Brajdic, Bogdan, Campos, Ciarelli, Gus, Halderas, Held, Hudorovic, Hujer, Karis, Locato, Mugizzi, Nicolic, Rach, Reinhardt, Rossetto, Suffer, Waeldo. In the Agnone camp, documents also testify to the camp director’s idea of establishing a school for the interned children, with the hidden aim of eliminating all traces of a different culture.
When the camp was liberated in September 1943, when the guards left their surveillance, Milka Goman and the other Roma and Sinti of Agnone resumed their journey home, and not far from the internment site, Milka Goman herself gave birth to their son Franco. In January 2013, on the wall of the former convent, the Memors project, in collaboration with the municipality of Agnone, finally placed a plaque in memory of the interned families; seventy years had passed since the events narrated.
The book edited by Prof. Francesco Paolo Tanzj and the pupils of class VA (2016-2017) of the Istituto Omnicomprensivo G.N. d’Agnillo di Agnone, Una storia mai finita, which recounts the research and events that involved the town of Agnone in discovering the history of the concentration camp, starting from a school workshop. Download here
References
L. Bravi, Rom e non-zingari, Cisu, Roma, 2007.
Z.B. Levak, La persecuzione degli zingari. Una testimonianza, in «Lacio Drom», n.3, 1976, pp. 2-3.
F.P. Tanzj, Una storia mai finita, Agnone, 2018.