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11 NEWS maltatoday | SUNDAY • 9 SEPTEMBER 2018 onwards we never saw him again." Cini says that "to agree to those pro- posals of conformity with the fascists appeared to us to be treacherous to the people of Malta who were fighting a war in favour of the British… our sense of sol- idarity with Malta would have changed into one of great cowardice." To Fraschette and Fossoli By September, a small group of 'sympa- thisers' had moved out of the Grand Ho- tel and placed at another hotel. In Octo- ber, the non-sympathisers started being shipped out of the hotel to the concen- tration camp. "We all trembled and were anxious to follow them and join them in their fate whatever it might be," Cini wrote of this period. "From the 1st October, since we already knew the conditions at the concentration camp and the treatment which was faced there, my father wasted no time in informing the Swiss Legation in Rome by way of letters sent secretly, asking for immediate intervention and urgent help for the Maltese families." Cini says the Maltese were settled in barracks where they slept on straw mat- tresses. "Lunch, or better, the stale food, was disgusting and insufficient. Hunger be- gan to be felt from the very first days… the Swiss legation responded with the necessary urgency assuring us of their immediate interest. They started with the despatch of food parcels which con- tinued to reach us regularly every month from 5 January 1943. "There were months of sorrow. I re- member that chestnuts, when we could find them, were the only things one could acquire to diminish the terrible hunger. I also remember that some Italian soldiers assigned to guard duty along the closures of the camp gave part of their bread ra- tion to children, human gestures much appreciated by us." Xuereb says that several Maltese died in the camp during Allied bombing cam- paigns. His interviews with survivors are set to reveal the stories of desperation in- side the camp. "Maltese women were raped by Ger- man soldiers who were administering the camps later on. They suffered aerial attacks by Allied forces. Some of the Maltese were killed by German soldiers for trying to escape the camp. And un- beknownst to the Maltese interned there, the Jewish detainees were being slowly shipped out to the death camps." Xuereb shows me the photo of a lit- tle boy who met a gruesome end when he fell inside a boiling cauldron in pitch black darkness. The episode is recounted by Romeo Cini: "One evening in early December 1942, whilst we were lined up along the tables of the dining hall awaiting the rations, the light went out accidentally, leaving us for several minutes in the dark… a boy of about four was seized by panic and es- caping the control of his mother, started to run between the two long rows of ta- bles. He tripped and fell into the cauldron which was full of boiling soup which was to be distributed. The soldiers assigned to distribute the rations became aware of the fall and pulled him out of the great pot. They took him immediately to the hospital in Alatri to treat him, however, all attempts to save him were in vain. The poor boy was so badly burnt that he died immediately after his arrival in hospital." That child was named Gaetano Falzon and is buried in the cemetery at Alatri where other Maltese also rest in peace. Xuereb says life in the camp was des- perate and lugubrious, but at least they evaded the horrible fate of the death camps in the rest of Europe. People like Romeo Cini's father was recognised by the Swiss Legation in Rome as the rep- resentative of the Maltese, and worked to improve food rations and relations with the administrative authorities of the camp. Cini writes that the Maltese even passed rations to Slavic detainees who were not recognised by the Red Cross as recipients of their munificence. Xuereb also says that a chapel dedicated to St Francis was built at the centre of the Fraschette camp, the ruins of which stand to this day: nuns from a nearby convent ran a school for the children, as the Maltese were allowed to practise their religion. On Armistice Day on 8 September 1943, as General Pietro Badoglio and the Kingdom of Italy officially declared war on Nazi Germany, two German jeeps ar- rived at Fraschette. "They came so suddenly that we initially believed that they were the British, but quickly we realised that they were Ger- mans coming to disarm the Italians who escaped. Some of them hid in our quar- ters," Romeo Cini writes in his memoir. "We gave them civilian clothes to allow them to escape. The Germans advised us not to leave the camp so as not to become involved, in those days of their merciless and massive invasion of Italy." And then, a tragedy struck the Mal- tese. About 20 migrants who had been interned in Villa La Silva near Florence were separated from their families. One of them, Natalino Aquilina, tried to es- cape to avoid falling in the hands of the Germans. "At that very moment the Ger- mans arrived to take control of the Mal- tese civil internees. They saw Natalino escaping. Despite their order to halt he continued running in the hope of sav- ing himself, but was mortally hit," Cini writes. Migrants once again As the invasion of Sicily led to the in- tensification of bombing in Italy, by 1944 American fighter-bombers were attack- ing the area. Several Maltese died in the attacks. Xuereb says the attacks prompted an evacuation of the camp to Rome, and fi- nally to the concentration camp of Fos- soli outside Florence. The camp was di- vided into different sections with barbed wire, with machine-gun towers at the corners. The guards were fascists of the Republic of Salo under the command of the Gestapo. By April 1945, the German troops were in full retreat. By then the Maltese had been released to farmsteads and Italian homes as the Germans fled the camps. Xuereb has collected dozens of inter- views with survivors of the camps and relatives of the Maltese migrants who were interned in these concentration camps. "When the migrants were shipped back to Tripoli, many of them returned to find nothing of what they had owned. So those who did not have a house, ended up spending up to two years in a new concentration camp run by the British forces. "They requested compensation for war damages with the Governor and the For- eign Ministry in London. A ridiculous compromise was proposed, 27 pounds sterling per family, or the equivalent in blankets and bed sheets. It was deeply humiliating," Xuereb says. "By the mid-1950s, all these migrants were leaving Tripoli to go to far-flung places like Australia, which is where I met the survivors. None of them came to Malta. They were after all, the Maltese of Tripoli. And after their ordeal in Italy, having sworn allegiance to the British crown, they returned home to find noth- ing. So that's why they are a forgotten people." Left: Marlon Grima and Mario Xuereb (centre) travelled to Australia to meet Romeo Cini (right), an internee with a vivid account of the war years in Italy; and right: Jenny Zammit, née Cassar Left: the Maltese take time for a snap in the concentration camp of Fossoli, which stood right into the 1970s and was still used by the Italian governments; and below, the Maltese in Fraschette Fraschette in 1942 (left) and Fraschette today... ruins of this concentration camp are still standing today and historians are still piecing together the stories of survivors from WW2