In a Corner of Carnaro: We Were Too Few To Make History

Description

Why am I writing? What is prompting a seventy-eight year old perso to look back at her own life, her memories, her emotions, and the personal and environmental or circumstantial events that have determined the course of her life? May it be that, at this point, I am becoming aware that I have lived my life to the fullest and I want to make an inventory of who I am?

No, I’m not going to do this. I am not important enough, have not achieved any special merit in either science or academics, yet I feel that sitting on this chair in front of my computer I am seeing my life as in a film. There are so many people I am seeing in the cast of this film: relatives, friends, unknown people, experiences of my childhood, of my adolescence, the blow of unforeseen persecution, the world events putting wind in my sail.

This is not a book of history, but history appears between the lines of my personal biography because it surreptitiously sets and upsets the pattern of our lives, molding, changing fitfully, forcefully individual plans.

Katrine or Caterina Lager was born in Fiume in 1920. Her parents’ families had landed in the city when it was a cosmopolitan and flourishing port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her mother valued education and encouraged her to pursue her passions: piano and dance. At a young age, she was sent with an older cousin to study in Vienna.

Back in Fiume, after the promulgation of Mussolini’s Racial Laws the entire Jewish population remained stateless overnight. The very large Goldstein-Lager family found itself in dire straits. They understood that there were no means for everybody to flee. With the help of ” Aunt Bertha”  who had moved to New York years earlier, they decided to send all the youngsters to America. Six and soon after eight teen-agers ended up living in their aunt’s apartment in the Bronx, seemingly unprepared for taking on factory jobs and the struggles of working class New Yorkers.

During the war years the family kept in touch as possible trying to follow or imagine the very different fates of various members. Some were deported to Auschwitz, some ended up in Italian internment, others fled to Palestine and some managed to flee Fiume and remained in hiding.

Caty’s memoir takes us through her return to Italy, her life in Bari where her parents had settled and established a transient Jewish life for many refugees and survivors who lived in the Apulian DP camps.

Many years later, when, in 1962, she started to work for the Rome office of HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid society) helping refugees from Libya, Ethiopia, Yemen, Iran, and Russia, her life experience became a powerful resource to organize, foresee, assist, offer a shoulder and understand the state of mind of people who are in no position to make plans for the future and struggle to inscribe their past and their own lives in the narratives the relief organization system tries to impose on them.