Matteo Dalena
translated by Annalisa Nicastro
The day was hot, so hot that the watermelons would burst, as Federico Buffa would say, in an attempt to present the football match played in the summer of 1941 between Yugoslav and Polish prisoners on the ground in Ferramonti di Tarsia internment camp, in the province of Cosenza.
There were ten minutes to go, and the match had been one of the most exciting I saw at Ferramonti ever.
The Buffa of the time is called Ernst Steiner, a Jewish prisoner of Austrian nationality, interned starting from 29 September 1940 in the largest camp in southern Italy and then transferred from December 1941 first to Grosseto and then to Scipione di Salsomaggiore. But Steiner is a professional: he has been playing in an unspecified Viennese team for ten years.
Within the "Israel Kalk" Fund of the Contemporary Jewish Documentation Center in Milan, I found the "football adventures and impressions" of Ernst, a footballer in internment.
1. The soap man
A "magnificent Saturday", on August 1940 Ernst Steiner, an Austrian Jew living in Milan, is taken by two men in plain clothes and taken to the police station: "It is only information - Ernst notes - and so my destiny was fulfilled". Three weeks in prison in San Vittore are the prelude to deportation. Ernst is loaded together with 150 other Jews on a military road with destination north of Calabria. Ferramonti di Tarsia is an unknown location, the internment camp is little more than a sketch in the plain malaria. At the Milan station, Ernst embraces his wife Carolina who manages to pass him two large suitcases.
We all left with suspended spirits! Ours was one of the first transports and the Calabrian camp, which later became famous, still appeared to us in somewhat primitive conditions: there was nothing. The shacks were still under construction, there were no sanitary facilities, even the kitchens were under construction and everything was badly organized [...] We arrived in Ferramonti after traveling for 36 hours, and when I unpacked, I saw that my wife had them crammed with toilet soap as I had recommended.
Everything is missing in the field. Ernst's mates complain that they have left home the necessary for personal hygiene: soap, toothpaste and toothbrush, "trifles, which were missed, however," writes Steiner. From that moment Ernst began to sell part of the soap to his companions and at the same time wrote to Carolina to send him some more. After two weeks, a first package is delivered containing five kilos of soap, toothpaste, skates and so on. Doubts about the lawfulness of this trade assail him, but having obtained authorization from the management for the sale of those products among the 46 barracks in the camp then occupied by about 400 men, the Viennese prisoner ends up becoming "the soap man". Ten kilos of toiletries go away in a week.
Word soon got out that I was selling soap, and soon I formed a circle of regulars. Then, after six months, the first shacks of single women were formed, my business underwent a notable increase and requests for lipsticks, face powders, creams, cosmetics, wadding and everything that ladies need to make themselves beautiful began to flood!
The trade at low prices lasts two years, during which Ernst becomes the official supplier of the management and the soldiers of the camp. On the eve of the transfer to Grosseto, he passes supplies and customers to another prisoner chosen to continue that activity appreciated by guards and inmates:
Even today, after almost ten years, when I meet some of my Ferramonti clients, we laugh together at my business - notes Steiner - but basically everyone was very satisfied.
2. Think about sports
But Ernst Steiner's real passion is Fußball. When he arrives for the first time in Ferramonti he is 34 years old and has been with a Viennese team for at least ten. He affirms it in the passionate account played on the narrow border between the football field and internment: "When everything worked out we found time to think about sport".
The literature of games played in captivity reactivates the memory of a "Liga Terezin", the football championship played in 1942 within the Nazi camp of Theresienstadt. Then there is the famous death match between German officers and Ukrainian prisoners: recently praised by the storyteller Federico Buffa, it was the inspiration for the cult feature film Victory or Escape for Victory, directed by John Huston. In Ferramonti in the autumn of 1940 football began to be played. And it is Steiner himself, well seen by the management of the field, who interprets the need for a playing field:
We immediately went to the director, who showed great understanding and granted us an open space to equip as a sports field. After 15 days the field was ready, and we had two teams which, in short, became four, and finally ten, with presidents, vice-presidents, sports directors, just like in real sports clubs.
The enthusiasm is great and the first games are played "at random", the choices made at the moment and "without well distributed roles". The Ferramonti football championship gradually acquires its own physiognomy with four stable teams, two more made up of boys aged 6 to 10 and from 11 to 15 years, finally one of "elderly" from 40 to 50 years which, according to Steiner, "Asserted himself". Everything happens on Saturday, every Saturday of that cursed imprisonment. The dream is to "escape" with the ball and ... play a real game beyond the barbed wire, perhaps in Cosenza.
3. A tournament for nations
The prisoners' competition grows, especially when teams of athletes of the same nationality are formed. The most feared are the Hungarians and then Germans, Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechoslovakians. The matches are on, full of fouls and bruises, everyone plays with extreme seriousness "as if there was a reward at stake", comments Steiner. And there probably would have been without those last ten terrible minutes of the match between Yugoslavs and Poles.
The latter defended their door like tigers and had a point of advantage. Everyone was very excited: would they be able to equalize the Yugoslavs? The referee was very busy to prevent the game from escalating into a scrum given the tense atmosphere. Two minutes before the closing kick, the Yugoslav right winger made one last attempt. It was a magnificent pass, the center attack took the ball and kicked into the goal. Goal! The tie had been obtained, but it cost very dearly, because the Yugoslav attack center collapsed to the ground hit by a fatal syncope.
All matches are suspended and the camp management opens an investigation that entrusts the prisoners themselves. The truth, explains Steiner, is that "the dead man was heart-sick and that the doctors had strictly forbidden him to play". "The strain of football, a very popular game, but it is not for everyone", say the doctors. All aspiring footballers are subjected to scrupulous visits "to find out if they could endure such hardships". Then, one day, the surprise: "The fame of our strong football team spread and we were invited to play in Cosenza". The camp director would have gladly given his consent but, according to the story of the Viennese prisoner, he could not do without the authorization of the superiors from Rome. Authorization that, perhaps because of that tragic death on the pitch, never arrived. And so, concludes Steiner, “our dream, to play for once off the pitch, to play a real football match, remained what it was: a dream!”.
-Cdec Kalk Fund, VII testimonies and documentation, envelope 6, file 73.
- Account of the football game in Ferramonti and Steiner's Impressions and football adventures, cc. 2, typescript.
- How I was selling soap at Steiner's Ferramonti, cc. 2, typescript.
Thanks to Mmasciata.it (director Alfredo Sprovieri) in which, on April 25, 2017, a first version of the article, taken up by the author Matteo Dalena, was published.
Credits Photographs: the Israel Kalk Fund of the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Milan
Riproduzione riservata © Copyright I Parchi Letterari
C/O Società Dante Alighieri 
