The camp in Prignano sulla Secchia, in the province of Modena, is the source of the most evident signs of the ethnically-based census and rounding up activities organised by prefects and police forces in response to arrest efforts targeted towards ‘gypsies’ throughout the kingdom.
In 2010, the town’s municipal administration, in collaboration with the Them Romanò association of Reggio Emilia and the Federazione Rom e Sinti Insieme, placed a plaque in memory of the internment of Sinti within the town.
In this case, the documents at the central state archives do not seem to have left any trace of the Prignano camp. On the other hand, what was found was the narration of a direct witness, who had published a story mainly for children: Giacomo Gnugo De Bar had told of being born in Prignano, in a concentration camp, where all the Sinti of his community (all of Italian citizenship) had been imprisoned between 1940 and 1943. Research about this had continued in a community narrative project edited by anthropologist Paola Trevisan. A direct witness, Giuseppe Esposti, who was six years old at the time of his imprisonment, was then added to the project.
Paola Trevisan and Vladimiro Torre, a sinto active in local historical research, then went to the municipality of Prignano in search of traces of internment. Evidence of internment was found and was clear: the municipality had kept cards, titled ‘internees’, on which all the names of the Sinti families concentrated in Prignano. What was absent from the central state archives, was instead present in the small municipal archives of the village and in some documents at the Modena archives, which provided further proof of the camp’s presence: there we read of disputes with the owner of the area, the lack of subsidies, and problems related to the camp with respect to citizenship. The records kept in the municipality made it possible to give a name and surname to all the Sinti people imprisoned there.
The concentration camp appears to have been set up in the Autumn of 1940 on cultivated land owned by Gino Baldelli, who complained on several occasions about the presence of Sinti people because of the damage the area had suffered. Management was entrusted to the podestà (most senior authoritative figure of the town) while control was the task of the Carabinieri. There were no shacks in Prignano, but it was agricultural land. After 1940, there were no new internees, the families there remained the same, until the day of the armistice, when the Carabinieri’s control loosened and the families resumed their journey towards Modena. It seems likely that the camp at Prignano sulla Secchia was set up in order to respond immediately to the order issued at the national level to arrest ‘gypsies’ and then continued to operate at a local level, without providing for the further transfer of prisoners to the concentration camps at Bojano and Agnone, which became the places of imprisonment indicated by the Ministry of the Interior to be reserved for ‘gypsy’ persons.
Reference texts:
G. De Bar, L. Puggioli, Strada patria sinta. Un secolo di storia nel racconto di un giostraio sinto, Fatatrac, Firenze, 1998. (il cognome di Giacomo Gnugo de Barre è a volte riportato anche come De Bar, come nel caso di questo testo)
P. Trevisan, Storie e vite di sinti dell’Emilia, Cisu, Roma, 2005.
P. Trevisan, Un campo di concentramento per zingari italiani a Prignano sulla Secchia (Mo), in “L’almanacco. Rassegna di studi storici e di ricerche sulla società Contemporanea”, n. 55-56, Dicembre 2010, pp. 7-30.