Between National and International Mandates: Displaced Persons and Refugees in Postwar Italy

Abstract

In the years of postwar reconstruction the experience of refugees in Italy was rapidly eclipsed, both in public discourse and in the growing number of studies on war and liberation. The need for resurrection and the desire to dissociate itself, both from Fascism and from the role it played in the Second World War, led Italian society to drive uncomfortable memories into the shadows. This forgetting of the recent past in turn engendered the misleading interpretation that the end of the war represented a watershed, and this misleading interpretation has extensively affected Italian historiography for several decades. At the end of the 1980s, some of the most relevant and controversial issues surrounding the war and postwar years started to be investigated (such as the Resistance as civil war, the deportations of Jews and the Allied bombings during the Second World War), while the history of refugees has been addressed only very recently and almost exclusively in relation to the revision of the eastern Italian–Yugoslav border. Research about Displaced Persons (DPs) still lags behind.