In Coltano, near Pisa, a large concentration camp was set up for soldiers of the CSR surrendered or captured in the spring of 1945 : there were about 34,000 crammed awaiting trial on any responsibility for killings during the 1943-45 civil war. Among them were some "very young" destined to become well-known personalities, from Walter Chiari to Raimondo Vianello, Enrico Maria Salerno, the journalists Enrico Ameri and Mauro De Mauro up to the future minister Mirko Tremaglia . They were the losers of the civil war, for the most part " boys from Salò ", who after 8 September had chosen continuity with the values of the Ventennio, in the name of a misunderstood sense of homeland and honour.
United by the same initial choice, these young people did not have the same destiny. Some were overwhelmed in the convulsion of reckoning, others managed to eclipse themselves before the collapse, others ended up in places of imprisonment like Coltano.
With a careful work on the autobiographical testimonies and the scientific documentation, the historian Gianni Oliva retraces in his "Il Purgatorio dei vinti" (Mondadori, 2023, pp. 216, also e-book) the story of the prisoners of the Pisan detention camp , the difficulties of living conditions, the vagueness of their legal status, the ambiguities of a season suspended between punitive will and need for normalization, the subsequent paths of memory.
The result is an evocative fresco, in which Coltano does not appear as the prison camp of nostalgic ex-combatants, but as the mirror of the ideological and moral bewilderment left in consciences from 1943-45.
We ask Gianni Oliva first of all how he came to be interested in the events of the camp near Pisa:
«The curiosity came to me years ago, reading about Ezra Pound imprisoned in Coltano in an iron cage, news moreover wrong: Pound was imprisoned in Metato, near Lucca, in a prison camp set up by the Americans for their own soldiers guilty of insubordination . As soon as I had time, I did specific research and the book was born».
Many prisoners, famous and not, were locked up in the Coltano camp... how did these thousands of defeated veterans look alike and how did they differ?
«Personal events were similar: adolescents or slightly more educated in the myths of the Italian Youth of the Littorio, who perceived 8 September as a betrayal and sided with Salò to defend honor and seek the 'beautiful death'. The paths of memory were different: someone admitted without hesitation like Raimondo Vianello who said in an interview 'I don't deny either Salò or Sanremo'. It was a way of acknowledging that he had chosen the wrong side of history but had done so in good faith. Others, such as Dario Fo - who was not in Coltano, but served in the Blue Battalion, the volunteer paratroopers of the RSI - denied their connection with Salò and sued those who remembered these past. Except being forced to embarrassed admissions in the face of irrefutable evidence.
Why is there so little talk about the fate of the defeated in the war of 1943-45?
«In our republican and anti-fascist culture, Salò represented absolute evil. This elaboration was the consequence of the civil war and its exasperations, but it was also an alibi for forgetting the previous faults of an entire generation. Thinking that the fascists were the 'republicans' made it possible to acquit the many who had accumulated honors, prestige and wealth in the twenty years. By demonizing some, we avoided dealing with the others, with those who had endorsed the alliance with Hitler, the racial laws, the war of 1940-43».
What does a story like that of the "Purgatory of the vanquished" teach us?
«Studying Coltano and his prisoners certainly does not mean rehabilitating his choice, but historicizing it. An unsuspecting partisan like Italo Calvino did it many years ago, in 1946, who wrote in his “Sentiero dei nidi di ragno”: “The anger that makes us shoot with the hope of redemption is the same anger that makes the fascists shoot . So where is the difference? It lies in the fact that we, in history, are on the side of the right and they are on the side of the wrong".