39. La Risiera di San Sabba-A Nazi concentration camp in Trieste

Approaching the Risiera from the street. It stares at us with the hollow eyes of its many windows.

Monday, December 30, 2019: My friend Marco and I visit Trieste’s La Risiera di San Saba, a Nazi concentration camp for the detention and killing of political prisoners—collaborators and partisans—and a transit camp for Jews, most of whom were then deported to Auschwitz.

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Lefthand photo: Inside the death cell. Our audio-tour explains that everyone knew that anyone assigned to this room would be killed within a few hours.
Righthand photo: Interior courtyard of the compound of the concentration camp.

The Risiera, a five-storey brick compound built in 1913, originally functioned as a rice husking factory. Today, it’s a civic museum, serving as a grim reminder that Italian Jews were rounded up and then experienced the same fate as other Jews in Europe during WWII. Over 3,000 people were killed at the Risiera and thousands more were transported elsewhere.

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  Prisoners’ possessions.

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  Marco standing on what was once the bottom floor of the large holding rooms.

Looking at the small prison cells, large holding rooms, and other parts of the Risiera, including a cremation facilities, and then trying to imagine what occurred and what life must have been like for the imprisoned is chilling and depressing.

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  A prison cell with its sleeping platform.

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  Looking at multiple prison cells.

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  Large holding area. You can see from the photo that there had been four stories of such rooms.

We stay for about two hours, guided by the audio-tour, listening, looking, witnessing. Some of our time is spent in the museum, viewing documents, including letters that the imprisoned wrote; watching videos of interviews with those who survived or had witnessed what had occurred; looking at prisoners’ possessions; reading columns of statistics; and more. We walk quietly to the bus stop and travel back to the city center.

Memorial sculpture.