Trieste

by Dasa Drndic · 2011

In the novel Trieste, elderly Haya Tedeschi lives alone in Gorizia, Italy, surrounded by photographs and newspaper clippings. Six‑decades after World War II she still awaits the reunion with the son she bore to an SS officer, a child taken from her by the Nazi Lebensborn program. Through a collage of maps, verses, Nuremberg trial testimonies, and interviews with second‑generation Jews, Haya reflects on her Catholic‑Jewish family’s ordeal, the massacre of Italian Jews in Trieste’s concentration camps, and the broader horrors of the German occupation of northern Italy. Drndić weaves these fragments into a powerful, experimental narrative that illuminates memory, trauma, and the lingering shadows of the Holocaust.