I’d had our trip to Italy planned for over a year, and mostly booked for two months, before I realised that there was one possible side-trip we could do almost purely by accident.
On one day we would be driving between the coastal towns of Riomaggiore and Portofino, passing through a larger town called Chiavari, which is on the blue line in the upper left of this picture.
And it just so happens that near Chiavari in 1941/42 my Dad was a POW in PG52: Campo di concentramento per Prigionieri di Guerra no. 52. Perhaps I’d be able to visit whatever memorial existed for the camp, if any. Investigations began and produced the following website sub-section, Camp52, Chiavari.
That in turn produced many interesting snippets of information, including where the camp had been located, a few miles inland from the town.
More important was the information that a small museum dedicated to the POW camp had been set up in Chiavari. It was part of a larger military museum located in the base of the Scuola Telecomunicazioni Forze Armate – the School of Telecommunications Armed Forces.
But most important was the information provided by one commentator who visited the original site in 2007:
The camp was beside the bridge and bordered the river. Believe it or not we met the Italian Camp Commandant (then 92 – in 2007), he struck us as being a nice man. He, nor his 2 sons could speak english, and my italian is limited, however, he had the original books, in pristine condition, recording all the names of the PG52 POW’s.
Later in that thread came the information that some years later, after the old man died, his sons had passed all those books and other memorabilia to the little museum, and that this included the original POW index cards, according to another poster writing twelve years later.
Lt. Zavatteri, the adjutant at the time of the armistice, took away what I have always understood to be the entire collection of prisoner of war records on 9/10 September 1943 or thereabouts – before the Germans arrived to take over the camp. When Lt. Zavatteri died his son gave the material to the Communications Museum.
I had to see if Dad’s was one of them. I’d made the whole day available for the drive anyway, to allow time for photostops, lunch and so forth. An unhurried day of some 94kms driving narrow, coastal roads: three hours if we did not stop at all. I had the time and finding the place would be easy in these days of Siri and Google Maps.
We arrived at about 1pm and there was the base as advertised.
We pulled straight in and a guard opened the gate and let us park. Some confusion followed as he looked at my hand-written notes, then made a phone call. A few minutes later a bloke in his fifties, wearing the uniform of an Italian Naval Officer, turned up on a bicycle and explained in fairly good English that visitors were allowed to see the museum only with a letter of invitation.
My heart fell for a second.
Then he smiled and told me that since we had come all the way from “Nuova Zelanda”, he would allow us in, at which point we were introduced to Warrant Officer Venuto who would be our escort, since it’s still an active military base.
A few minutes and many keys later, we were inside. The museum, which is predictably enough dedicated to the history of Italian military telecommunications, occupies an entire building. Warrant Officer Venuto was very proud of the place and enjoyed showing us around the other sections as well. All very cool – but I was keen to get to my real objective: the PG52 archives, built into a bedroom-sized annex.
In this photo you can see the boxes of index cards at the bottom of the picture, with a large photo of the camp on the wall above it and shelves of memorabilia like helmets, canteens and boxing gloves. Not seen on the right is a pair of shoes made by the prisoners, which was a pretty sad reflection on the sparse life of a POW.
Having said that, Dad had no real complaints about either of the Italian camps, which were run efficiently but without the edginess of German camps.
A couple of minutes searching through the boxes and there it was: my Dad’s POW card, created when he entered the camp in December 1941. That’s the red one sticking out in the picture.
And below is the card itself.
There’s a lot more information on it than on the German one Dad filched from the Commandant’s office at Stalag IVB in 1945 just after the Germans fled and before the Red Army arrived. The capture date here is likely out by a day, although different groups of 24 Battalion were captured for several days after Nov 30. Dad reckoned his capture was Dec 1st and that’s what’s recorded on the Stalag IVB card.
Also there’s no mention of Sidi Rezegh, just “S. Tobruk“, which is at least reasonably accurate and understandable in the chaos of war. It was also good to get the exact departure date for PG57 nailed down, as I’d had only a range of dates based on the letters he wrote to Mum.
In one respect the card is nothing, and I wondered what Dad would have said about my journey to this place. Probably something along the lines of “Why the hell would you bother doing that?”. To him it was simply a year in one place, not fondly remembered, in a time of vast and terrible events that millions of other ordinary blokes like him experienced.
But to me this small thing meant a great deal. I felt a wave of mixed emotions as I extracted the card and eagerly read the details. A simple piece of cardboard – but touching it, reading it to confirm it was really him, that he had really been there, seemed overwhelmingly important and still does as I write this. Perhaps it’s the fact that history wipes most people from the face of the earth, leaving not a trace, sometimes not even memory. I reflected upon the dialog from the TV mini-series, Chernobyl, where the main scientist involved is threatened by the head of the KGB:
“You will remain so immaterial to the world around you that when you finally do die, it will be exceedingly hard to know that you ever lived at all.”
This card, and other small things, are the answer to that, at least for my Dad.
There were other bits of memorabilia in the place, including the wonderful drawing on the left, of the inside of the huts and the bunks the men lived in, and a large drawing of the camp, probably made by the same artist.
And this photo is of our escort, Warrant Officer Venuto, in his workaday clothes, who spoke only broken English but was a warm companionable man who could see what I was feeling.
I’m very grateful to him, the base commander and the guard at the gate who did not simply turn us away when they could have, and I must write them a thank-you letter.
I drove away feeling light-headed and light-hearted. A long-shot effort to trace a little piece of family history had come off. That evening, as I sat in an open-air bar just below the Portofino lighthouse, I could see across the way the lights of Chiavari and the hills behind it where PG52 once was, so I raised a glass to Dad and the men who gave so much of their lives for us, sometimes everything they had.
I’d like to think that Dad would be amused that his son would one day travel through the same place in a time of peace and prosperity, but I think he’d say that it made the sacrifices of he and Mum worth it.
And I remembered the words of the historian Simon Schama, in the last episode of his great documentary series, A History of Britain:
But history ought never to be confused with nostalgia. It’s written, not to revere the dead, but to inspire the living. It’s our cultural bloodstream – the secret of who we are.
And it tells us to let go of the past even as we honour it, to lament what ought to be lamented, to celebrate what should be celebrated.
And if in the end that history turns out to reveal itself as a patriot, well, then I think that neither Churchill nor Orwell would have minded that very much.
And, as a matter of fact, neither do I.
No Minister 
Comments are closed.