In A Corner of Carnaro

Book Launch: In A Corner of Carnaro: We Were Too Few to Make History. A memoir by Caty Lager Bottone (1920-2015).

Conversation with Caty Lager’s daughters Dr. Marsha Fink and Sandra Bottone.

Reservations are required: rsvp@primolevicenter.org

“As Caty approached her 80th birthday she realized she had to cut back on her whirlwind lifestyle. So, in recent years, she has limited her traveling to Alaska, Scandinavia, California, Czech republic Canada, middle Europe and of course Italy with an occasional trip to New York. Oh yes, there was also a trip to Maine, squeezed in and one to the Canadian Rockies. Life in Norfolk has slowed down so she volunteers at the Symphony, participates in community activities and adds to this Tai-chi and her bridge games. We must not forget Torah study once a week. I’m breathless just reading this list. Also let us not forget that in her spare time she wrote an intriguing and sensitive autobiography dealing with her experience as a Jew in Italy in the 1930s and her early years in this country.”

With these words a friend of Caty Lager congratulated her on her 80th birthday in the year 2000. After more than 25 years, her memoir becomes available to the general public through CPL Editions.

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.

A note on history

Fiume (today, Rijeka, Croatia) was a theater to  the birth of fascism, the rise of nationalism, and the fall of empires after World War I. In 1919 the multicultural former Habsburg city was occupied by the paramilitary forces of the extremist poet-soldier Gabriele D’Annunzio, who sought to annex the territory to Italy. Many local Italians supported the effort, nurtured by a long-lasting nationalistic tale. Although Fiume population remained tied to the free port status it had enjoyed under Habsburg sovereignty, the Jewish community dwindled significantly after these events. After a period of turmoil and short-lived independence, between 1922 and 1924 the Fascist Regime lead a full-fledged coup d’état and annexed the city.

Thousands of Fiumani who identified as Croatians, Slovene, Hungarians, etc. became victims of legislative, political, and physical persecution. It was here that the first Fascist laboratory of ethnic cleansing took form. The Racial Laws of 1938 stripped of Italian citizenship all Jews who had acquired it after 1919. As Fiume became Italian in 1924, the entire Jewish community became stateless overnight and subject to immediate expulsion. The Laws were applied as efficiently as they were in the rest of Italy but with unmatched violence.

Many departed. Others managed to buy time foraging a predatory police department emboldened by its special status in a military zone. In 1940, when entering the war, the government ordered the immediate arrest of all foreign Jews who had remained in the country. Fiume’s Jewish men were arrested swiftly and en mass, including the elders and the sick, to be deported to various concentration camps in the peninsula. The women remained prey to a brutal system which they managed as they could until most of them were also arrested and interned. In 1943 the Germans occupied the region, maintaining the Italian civil administration in place. About 80% of approximately 400 Jews who had remained in the city were deported with the pervasive collaboration of civilians and the Italian authorities.