Bolzano. Who was Irfo Borin? Why isn’t there a school, or a street, or a gym with his name in Bolzano? Why does a 19-year-old boy, partisan, Croce al Merito di guerra, killed with a gunshot to the head on May 3, 1945 in the courtyard of the Lancia, does not at least deserve the respect for memory?
This is a forgotten story, hidden under the dust for decades. Which brings with it the pain of a family destroyed by mourning and loss. Seventy-six years later, the only one who can tell it is the niece Marzia Bonfanti, daughter of Irfo’s older sister, Jone. Marzia pulls out of her drawers a packet of black and white photos and card number 13 of the National Partisans Association, provincial committee of Bolzano. An ad memoriam card. Year 1946.
Here he is Irfo: tall, thin, the muscles tense of a mountaineer, the black eyes, the dark hats pulled by the grease. Born in 1926, student with excellent grades at the Iti in via Cadorna, passionate about the mountains and all kinds of sports. His father Mario, a driver for the Ente Tre Venezie, arrived from Veneto in the late 1920s. A socialist, Mario, who has always hated fascists. Since they killed Giacomo Matteotti like a dog.
«They lived in Viale Venezia at number 23 – Marzia begins -: on the mezzanine floor there was a German military command. My mother told me that the Nazis threatened them all the time. “
“If we lose the war, everyone broken, we blow you up with us ”, they said to the Borins making the sign of the finger that cuts the throat. “So much so that my grandfather, to keep quiet, decided to send the displaced family to Rencio.” The only ones left in viale Venezia are Irfo and his aunt Gisella, his mother’s sister, who prepares lunch and dinner for him and washes his clothes. To escape recruitment into the German army, Irfo had been “forced” to Lancia with dozens of other young Bolzano men. Formally “workers for the Reich”, even if in fact the objective was quite different: to save lives destined for the fronts of Hitler’s Germany, and to sabotage the war industry of the Third Empire. As a student of the ITI, skilled and expert in machines, Irfo was put on the lathe. He has very clear ideas. He is anti-fascist by nature and family tradition. He said nothing to his people so as not to worry and involve them, but he joined the Resistance. He is a second lieutenant of the Gap, the Patriotic Action Groups active in the cities. It is recognized in Justice and Freedom. On 3 May 1945 he got up at dawn to go to Lancia to guard the factory. Thousands of en route Germans are crossing the city to reach the Brenner Pass. The order of the National Liberation Committee is to keep the situation under control without engaging in firefights. But the air is heavy. For days the stragglers have been entering buildings and factories. They look for food, trucks, cars, gasoline. They even steal bicycles. Irfo, around 6 in the morning, returns home to secure his. His aunt begs him: «Stay here, don’t go out anymore, it’s dangerous. The Nazis are everywhere ».
Irfo can’t tell you anything. But he has to go. He descends the Roma bridge on foot, stops for a moment at the Cln checkpoint. “Watch out – they tell him – you hear shots from the industrial area, watch out for the stragglers.” Twenty minutes later he is in Lancia. At 7 am, from the roofs of the Ceccarini factory, the workers fire on a column of the Wehrmacht. At 7.30 from Lancia they shoot a car on via Razza (today via Volta). There are senior officers on board. A truck of backup soldiers arrives. The workers throw bombs that hit the box. There are dead and wounded. The retaliation starts immediately, led by a company of paratroopers. Ruthless, tough men, accustomed to torture and massacre, veterans of the anti-partisan repression in Veneto and Friuli. The para react: they place an armored car with a machine gun in front of the Saffa (where the Metro is today). Not far away, at La Ceda, they execute on the spot Romolo Re e Virgilio Lorenzettor. The para enter the Lancia. They kill Ermanno Bonnani a few meters from the entrance. Then Annibale Bertolina, on guard at the porter’s lodge. Inside the workers take refuge in a shed, the partisans mixed with blue overalls. Whoever has weapons hides them. The paras sift through the factory. They push the workers into the yard with their hands behind their heads. They search everyone. One by one. Irfo Borin, has a pistol stuck in the cuff of his breeches. Some witnesses will say that it was just a charger. Others that it was the Mauser of a German captured the night before and locked up in a basement of the factory. The para find the weapon. They yank him out of line. An officer sticks the barrel of the machine gun in his belly. Another intrudes: “Don’t do it, don’t kill him, can’t you see he’s just a boy?” But that nothing, he doesn’t hear us. Arms the dog. The other does not insist.
«Well, do as you like …».
Gust. Irfo has time to murmur “mom” twice. An invocation. The German gives him the final blow to the head. Shoot in front of Carolina Zenoni, 19 years old as Irfo. Carolina is an assistant cook in the canteen, she wanted to be in the factory because “our someone must also feed them”. She and Irfo know each other, there is a strong sympathy, perhaps the beginning of a love born while hiking in the mountains. Blood splatters on the apron. It is the end of everything. Nothing is the same anymore. She is gone. Does not speak. He does not hear. She died with Irfo. “It’s probably this beautiful girl with him in the photos,” says Marzia Bonfanti. Black and white shots of a group of twenty-somethings. Each photo is marked: date and place. 1940, trip to the Vajolet Towers. 1941, Coronelle Refuge. January 21, 1945, Bolzano, a day on skates. Corno Bianco, 1945, a trip in the snow. April 1945: Irfo and Carolina. Irfo with a sweet, gaunt and broad smile. Carolina alone photographed by Irfo: she looks at him dangling her bare legs sitting on the wall. With that helmet of rebellious curls barely tamed by hairpins.
Now yes, we know who Irfo Borin was. He has a face, a family, friends, a girl. He wanted to become an engineer, get married, build a better Italy. The photos and the story of Marzia bring him back to life, do him justice, remove him from the dust. He is one of the 36 deaths of that tragic May 3. Together with the shot at the wall of the Lancia, the randomly killed in the streets of Don Bosco, the mowed down by a machine gun or a mortar round. One victim is also Carolina, who died at the age of 80 on April 14, 2006 after having spent her life in asylums and psychiatric hospitals. “Dissociative syndrome caused by trauma,” said the doctors. She remained there forever, nailed, paralyzed in the courtyard of the factory in front of the German with the Mauser. Just as, on May 3, the life of Irfo’s parents, Mario and Maria, also ended. «My grandparents – continues Marzia – learned what had happened only a couple of days later. My mother said that in the confusion they had piled up the bodies in the hospital, and they were very hot days, and they were waiting for the coffins because there were not enough of them among the desperate screams and tears of other fathers and other mothers. An agony. Lancia then paid for an expensive galvanized coffin ». They place it in the crate with the leather jacket they loved so much.
Other photos: the funeral at the Oltrisarco cemetery. The coffin hoisted and pushed into the niches under the arches next to the chapel. The tombstone: «On May 3, 1945, BORIN IRFO was killed by Nazi lead for the homeland. Parents, sisters, relatives, Lancia and workmates as a perennial memory ».
His father Mario puts the black mourning button in the buttonhole of his jacket. He will never take it off again. He imposes mourning for three years on his wife and daughters Lidia and Jone. The loss of Irfo, on which he had pinned his hopes, aspirations and future, is devastating. The Bolzano committee of the Partisans Association gives Mario the honorary card in memory. So does Justice and Freedom. Friends bring him Irfo’s ice ax and rope. Months later a girl (Carolina?) Shows up in viale Venezia, as if to apologize for a promise of love that she will not be able to keep.
Other photos: May 3, 1947, the mother in Lancia for the inauguration of the memorial stone for the fallen; the workers in silent overalls, the sisters dressed in black with their faces hidden in white handkerchiefs. May 3, 1948, the commemoration in Piazza della Vittoria: the widows, mothers and sisters of the martyrs. April 27, 1954, piazza IV novembre: a high officer points on the chest of Mario la Croce to the war merit of his son. “A young fighter in the Liberation struggle – he says -, distinguished by dedication to the cause and courageous behavior, he boldly committed himself with other comrades to protect the industrial area from the retreating Germans”.
But a medal is not enough to alleviate the pain of denied memory. Postwar Bolzano is in a hurry to forget. The ceremonies vanish, the stones accumulate yellowed crowns and withered flowers. The dead remain alone, confined to the regret of broken lives, anchored to families who curse lost opportunities and never found killers. Here, perhaps now, after 76 years, the time has come to say: Thanks Irfo. Before it fades again. And this time forever.