When Italy broke its treaty with Nazi Germany and signed an agreement with the Allies in September 1943, Hitler’s army invaded parts of Italy’s northeast, including Trieste.
By October, southern Italy was under the control of the Allied forces. Everything else became part of the Italian Social Republic, a remnant of the fascist state headed by Benito Mussolini. Italy had been partitioned by various powers.
This is the moment when the Holocaust fully reached Italy. Mussolini proclaimed additional antisemitic measures, and by November 1943, all Jews in Italy were ordered to be arrested and sent to concentration camps.
Trieste belonged to Nazi Germany’s Operational Zone of the Adriatic Coastland. The Germans occupying Trieste had secret orders from Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s commander-in-chief, to rid Italy of its Jewish population.
Parin’s Jewish ancestry – his “blood” and “race,” as antisemitic ideology proclaimed – led to his arrest on April 14, 1944, at his home on the via di Torre Bianca. His Swiss citizenship should have protected him, but it didn’t.
The Gestapo targeted Parin because of his Jewish parents. No matter how much Parin might have thought of himself as Italian, Catholic, or Swiss, the Nazis considered him a Jew.
Trieste’s Detention Centers
Upon his arrest, Parin was first taken to the Risiera di San Sabba, a former rice refinery located near the synagogue. From 1944 onward, it served as a holding and transit camp for Jewish and political prisoners.
In March of that year, the Nazis also added a crematorium to the Risiera, the only one in Italy, to burn the bodies of those who died there. An estimated 3,000-5,000 people perished in this camp. In the spring of 1945, the Nazis blew up the crematory’s ovens and chimney stack.
24 hours after his arrest, Parin was moved to the Coroneo, Trieste’s municipal prison. The German Gestapo interrogated prisoners there, and it, too, functioned as a“holding station” where Jews from all over northern Italy were detained as they waited for deportation.
Transports took Jews from both detention centers to one of the many Nazi-run concentration, labor, and extermination camps. The Risiera’s records list at least 22 transports. Auschwitz, the extermination camp now located in Poland, was the main destination. Jews and political prisoners were also sent to Dachau near Munich, the Austrian labor camp of Mauthausen, and the women’s labor camp of Ravensbruck near Berlin.
From Trieste to the Fossoli di Carpi Transit Camp
When Parin was incarcerated in the Coroneo prison, Emile Bonzanigo, the Swiss Consul in Trieste, tried to negotiate his release by reminding the German Gestapo that Swiss citizens were exempt from arrest and property seizures.
On May 6, 1944, Bonzanigo visited Parin to tell him that he would be released soon. Three days later, the Swiss consulate in Trieste received a letter indicating that Parin had been sent by train to Switzerland and his confiscated property returned. By May 15, it was clear that something had gone wrong.
On May 26, Parin’s brother, Vittorio, reached out to the Swiss government for news. This is when the family learned that Parin had been sent to the Fossoli di Carpi prison-and-transit camp run jointly by Germans and Italians in the province of Modena. Among the Jewish prisoners in Fossoli di Carpi was Primo Levi, the author of well-known books about his survival in Auschwitz.
Swiss officials immediately tried to secure Parin’s release. By the time it was granted – on June 2, 1944 – Parin was no longer in Fossoli. On May 16, he had already been deported to Bergen-Belsen.
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