Tarsia

The town stands on a spur of the lower Crati valley, at the point where the river opens its way towards the plain of Sybaris, and in its territory stood the largest of the fifteen internment camps built in the summer of 1940 by Mussolini's order: Ferramonti, ninety-two huts within a perimeter of a little more than one hundred and sixty thousand square metres, close to the river. Activity began on the twentieth of June, when a first group of one hundred and sixty Jews arrived from Rome; up to 1943 the names are known of at least three thousand three hundred and eighty-two foreign Jews who passed through, and for about half of them the camp was only a stage on the way to forced residence, in small groups, in comuni scattered across the whole peninsula. The reason the camp went up in a malarial zone, it must be said, was not racial but accountancy: the builder Eugenio Parrini, close to important party bosses, already had a worksite open there for reclamation works, and the huts that took in the first internees were the ones his labourers had slept in. In the camp he also imposed a monopoly food shop.

Inside, the internees were able to elect their own representatives and obtained an infirmary with a pharmacy, a school, a nursery, a library, a theatre and their own places of worship: two synagogues, a Catholic chapel and a Greek-Orthodox one. Couples formed there and twenty-one children were born. None of the internees suffered violence, none was deported to Germany from here, and the camp authorities never acted on German requests; the first director, the police official Paolo Salvatore, was removed precisely because he was held to be too permissive. The only violent deaths were four, on the twenty-seventh of August 1943, from the strafing of an Allied fighter engaged in a dogfight above the camp. The British freed it in September 1943, but many former internees stayed on, and Ferramonti was officially closed only on the eleventh of December 1945: the first camp for Jews to be liberated and the last to be formally shut.