There’s a kiosk on the grounds of Trieste’s Castello San Giusto where you can get a glass of wine for three euros, or a pint of beer for five. An archeological dig carries on as the clock creeps past four; drinkers stand at the barrier’s edge, sipping and picking at bags of chips, watching the archaeologists scrape at dirt with little wire brushes. It’s early November, and there’s only an hour or so of the day left. People gather at the kiosk to watch the light shift across the Gulf of Trieste; on the far side is Venice and as the sun drops somewhere behind it, the sky turns glucose-orange. As the darkness closes in, bats come out to search for their evening meal.
I’m in Trieste to do the final checks of my manuscript for Dying Days. The novel is set against true events that occurred here 80 years ago. On May 2, 1945, an advance group of the New Zealand army arrived in the city, and one of their first stops was the castle. Inside were some of the last Germans left fighting the war, holed up and taking shots at Tito’s Yugoslav fighters gathered outside. The Germans knew the Kiwis were on their way to Trieste and had decided to hold out, preferring their prospects as POWs over their likely executions by the partisans. To the disgust of the Yugoslavs, the Germans let the Kiwis roll straight into the castle. Protocols of surrender followed, and the New Zealanders spent the evening inside as guests of their new prisoners, waiting for the Yugoslavs to cool down.
Down in the city, at the Tribunale, things were more cooperative. SS men who’d brutalised Trieste for 18 months were drinking themselves stupid inside the massive building. Lieutenant-Colonel Haddon Donald of New Zealand’s 22nd Battalion offered them similarly safe passage to a POW camp, but their commanding officer, presumably off his face, wasn’t interested. Donald’s response was to round up every tank he could find and blow a hole in the Tribunale’s massive stone walls. The New Zealanders then left the Yugoslavs to clear the building.
The joint liberation of Trieste ended the Nazi occupation of the city. It also, on the face of things, ended New Zealand’s Italian campaign. But it precipitated an immediate, if little-known, postwar crisis. The Yugoslavs had arrived on the first of May; the New Zealanders had arrived on the second. Both were under orders to secure the important port city. Winston Churchill wanted it as a communications and supply line up into Austria. Tito wanted it as part of a new Yugoslavian state, for which there was some justifiable claim: Trieste is at the corner where Austria, Italy and Slovenia meet and has always had a large Slovenian population. The Slovenian partisans in the surrounding countryside and the underground networks inside Trieste had taken huge risks to undermine the German occupation, and they weren’t about to hand the city over to the British easily. What followed became known as ‘The Forty Days’: an event some historians have identified as the first of the Cold War.
The New Zealanders had played an inadvertently vital role in a moment of major geopolitical consequence. But what they resented, in the weeks that followed, was that ‘the Jugs’ (from the Slavic spelling, Jugoslavija) were prolonging their war unnecessarily, not least because they’d landed in a kind of paradise: a beautiful city, filled with beautiful beaches and beautiful young women, with a very diminished pool of local men to compete with. Tito’s partisans (now an organised army) had fought existentially against the Fascists, the Nazis, the largely Serbian Chetniks and the Croatian Ustaše for several years, and had a very different view of the local Italian population. Every night, Triestini were rounded up on the pretense of their alleged collaboration with the Fascist and National Socialist regimes.
This aggravated the New Zealanders and significantly escalated the tensions between the two sides. But the New Zealanders’ own naïve and arrogant behaviour contributed too: parades celebrating their liberation of the city (even though the Yugoslavs were there first); athletics festivals; officers’ balls with Trieste’s high-society daughters; taking over the city beaches and inviting pretty locals to join them in the early summer sunshine. Kiwis were caught at checkpoints after curfew with young women in their vehicles. VD numbers were going up so quickly that an order was issued, stating that any man found to have contracted it would have his leave cancelled for three months.
For the Yugoslavs, the Trieste question was a deeply serious one. Since September 1943, the city had been controlled by a cohort of SS men. Before being transferred there, the same group had run the Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor death camps in Poland, where they were responsible for the murders of up to two million Jews. At their head was Odilo Globocnik. Knowing the game was up, Globocnik escaped Trieste on April 29. He was caught in Carinthia a month later and committed suicide before he could be held responsible for his crimes. But the drunks still in the Tribunale when the Kiwis arrived would have counted among them many of Globocnik’s men from Poland, making them, collectively, some of the worst war criminals of the 20th century.
When they’d arrived in Trieste, Globocnik’s men had rounded up the city’s remaining Jews, packed them into trains to Auschwitz, and cleaned out every last remaining store of Jewish wealth. They also established a killing facility at the Risiera di San Sabba, a former rice-husking factory. It was primarily used as a place to detain, torture and execute partisans; the SS force had been converted into specialist partisan hunters, often jacked up on cocktails of speed and other drugs as they were sent into the surrounding countryside, where they burned down villages and slaughtered civilians in the paranoid hunt for the groups fighting them from the shadows. Their response to the resistance was always horrifying, and always wildly disproportionate. When partisans infiltrated a German officer’s club and set off a bomb, the Nazis responded by hanging 50 political prisoners in the stairwell of Palazzo Rittmeyer (now a music conservatory), leaving their dangling bodies on display for several days. At the Risiera, prisoners were kept in kennel-like cells, and were often killed with a blow to the back of the skull from a mallet. There was a crematorium there too, which was blown up just before the city was liberated. Traces of it are still visible in the Risiera’s courtyard.
Trieste still bears the scars of this horrendous period. There are shrapnel marks on the outside of the Tribunale. When I nudge past the security guy and a chunky Italian kid lugging a cello down the corridor of Palazzo Rittmeyer, I find that the stairwell is as it was in the appalling photos of the atrocity that happened there, with signage that explains the massacre. The Risiera di San Sabba is now a moving Holocaust memorial and museum.
The crimes committed by the other sides are remembered too. I catch a bus to the Foiba di Basovizza memorial on the outskirts of the city, a sealed mineshaft which had been used by the Yugoslavs to dispose of Germans and their collaborators. Jagged stone pushes out of the hard ground like shingles, and there’s a kind of Hansel and Gretel trail through the surrounding woods, where light falls through pines and birches in great slanting lines. It’s easy to imagine victims being led along it from the city, before they were shot on the lip of the mineshaft and kicked into the abyss. There’s a marker showing the different layers of victims inside, and the wars during which they fell.
This is the moral difficulty of Trieste’s wartime past: while there’s no doubt the Germans were utterly appalling there, it’s also true that they were aided during their occupation by the remains of Mussolini’s fascist supporters. There can also be no doubt that there were many Italians who risked and lost their lives trying to undermine this regime. And just as the Yugoslavs likely executed many people who didn’t deserve such a fate, their fight was essential to the defeat of Nazism in this corner of Europe. Both populations exhibited great bravery and committed terrible acts; both claimed Trieste as part of their own nationalist myths.
At a certain point during the standoff, a rumour began to circulate in the city: that among the Italians being swept up, several New Zealand soldiers had fallen foul of the Yugoslavs, and had likely been thrown into a hole somewhere. There’s no evidence that the rumour had any basis, nor of where it started. But it was looked into as part of a wider Allied investigation into Yugoslav atrocities in the Trieste region. During the standoff, facts were continually manipulated depending on nationalistic aims; stories were spread through whispers on the streets; people disappeared or reinvented themselves; and all sides spied on each other. This was ultimately what led me to the final shape of Dying Days: an attempt to face this past head on, albeit in the form of a thriller; a fiction that builds upon very real historical lies.
There was also a family connection. I descend from the ‘Dallies’ who settled Te Tai Tokerau / Northland, and I was fascinated by the idea that people who were cousins were on either side of the standoff (there are brief mentions in some accounts of Dallie and Māori lads from Northland being able to speak with partisans on the way to Trieste). The first time I visited Trieste 16 years ago, my wife was pregnant with our son and we’d come from visiting my relatives further down the coast, in Dalmatia. I’d never met them before, we’d been separated by several generations, and yet they looked like me, looked like my father, and they still lived on the vineyard my great granddad had left behind when he migrated to New Zealand. I’d asked them about our family’s Balkan wartime experiences, both in the 1940s and the 1990s. Neither topic went down particularly well; families can keep truths from themselves, imagine new pasts into being.
Perhaps because I was looking for it on this trip, the war kept seeping out of Trieste’s walls, in mutated forms. Newspaper kiosks sold 2026 Mussolini calendars, Il Duce’s big square mug leering, month after month. For dinner one night, I returned to a place where I’d previously had a wonderful bowl of mussels and got wasted on local grappa. This time I ordered a pizza, which was topped with a kind of stringy, saffron-coloured meat-floss that I eventually – like a moment from a wartime protein nightmare – figured out was dried horse.
I hunted down the once-grand villa the New Zealanders had used as an officers’ club, hard to find because it’s now completely enveloped by a university known for its specialisms in quantum and nuclear physics. And I went up into the foiba-riddled borderlands to climb a small mountain I’d used as a setting, the switchback trail I followed dotted with crucifixes, warnings of demons who live at the summit, and the cave-tombs of hermit monks. Back in the city, I went to the Rosetti Theatre, Trieste’s performative heart: a magnificent and luminous blue room, its stage horseshoed by several layers of pillared seating so that everyone is pressed up against the actors. I saw three short plays by Chekhov, all in Italian, which somehow I convinced myself I’d fully understood.
Everything shifts here, constantly: time, the language, the light, the people and their history. It is a city of half-truths and drama. I became very interested in the darker storytelling possibilities of the war in such a complicated place – principally, that everyone, no matter what side they were on, had to resort at some point to lies and violence to survive.
The murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust was carried out primarily by young men like the ones sent to Trieste. Their formative years had been shaped by the cynicism, hate and lies of Nazism. Just as it was in the 1930s, the young are now being fed a near-constant diet of rumour, misinformation and nationalist myths. Young men were crucial to the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024. In Australia, where I now live, we’ve had neo-Nazi rallies in Melbourne’s CBD and a sustained series of antisemitic attacks against Jewish Australians, which culminated in the Bondi mass shooting. Meanwhile, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is experiencing a big bump in support, particularly among men, at the same time as she travels to the UK to sit down with the far right’s favourite posterboy, Tommy Robinson.
It’s a grim picture, and it is everywhere. During my Trieste stay, I shared an Air BnB with an Argentinian chef who’d recently moved there and was trying to find his own place. One morning we had coffee together and he asked me about my book. When I explained, he told me about intervening a week earlier, when a Jewish mother and her children were being abused on the street. History is always with us, and most dangerously so when we choose to ignore it.
Dying Days by Anthony Byrt (Affirm Press, $36.99) is available in bookstores nationwide. It’s a thriller set in Trieste, based on events in WW2. The Italian campaign was the defining victory of New Zealand’s contribution to the war, with thousands of soldiers involved in its success. Cassino was the turning point, but Trieste was its tense and much less-known culmination, where the New Zealanders found themselves on the front line of a standoff with their allies, Tito’s partisan fighters. The book has been picked up by publishers Simon & Schuster, and creating a buzz in the international book trade.
