“Non dimenticate la tragedia dell’Arandora Star”

In 2003, Quotidiano Nazionale published an article about the tragedy of the Arandora Star after speaking with Santo Stefani to hear his testimony.

Santo's grandson Luca Stefani has shared his invaluable testimonial published here.

Quotidiano Nazionale 2003 Domenica 26 January

The Massacre of '40

A survivor of the sinking speaks

“I, in the furnace of the Arandora, escaped from torpedoes and lies”

Viareggio (Lucca)

“Do not forget the tragedy of the Arandora Star”

This heartbreaking exhortation comes from Santo Stefani, almost a century of life carved on his face lashed by the salty air of Marina di Pietrasanta and by an incredible life.

The last witness of a massacre that the English buried under the weight of shame and the Italians under the no less oppressive weight of a lost world conflict, is now 94 years old and has spent 40 of them in Ayr, Scotland, first in his uncle's café, then in the grocery store that opened after the war. He was on the Arandora Star on July 2, 1940.

His exceptional testimony confirms that we will never know enough about that drama that faded into a war crime, paid for with the lives of at least 700 people, 446, or perhaps more of our emigrants to the United Kingdom. This was ascertained by the meticulous research work in England by Alfio Bernabei and in Italy, by the Florentine scholar Maria Balestracci with her “Arandora Star una tragedia dimenticata.”

Oblivion

It may seem like a paradox, but even today, 63 years later, there is a lack of will to shed full light on those distressing and forgotten events, culminating with the sinking of the ship that was carrying our compatriots, all civilians deported to labour camps overseas, rounded up in a few hours between June 10 and 11, 1940 when Mussolini brought Italy into the war alongside Germany. An old first-class cruise ship was chosen, 15,500 tons refitted as an armed military vessel: a floating prison, complete with barbed wire on the main deck, which set sail without the Red Cross insignia required, according to the Geneva Convention, to indicate the transport of prisoners.

The Arandora Star was torpedoed by a German submarine on the morning of July 2, 1940. It is difficult, if not impossible, to know how many people were actually taken on board the previous day from the Liverpool dock destined for the prison camps in Canada. Consequently, it is difficult, if not impossible, to establish an exact toll of that massacre.*

And the very existence, unknown to all, of a survivor who is still alive, lucid despite his years, calls other details into question. When in 1990 the President of the Republic, Cossiga awarded the honour of Cavaliere to the group of our fellow countrymen who, it was believed, were the only survivors still alive, Santo Stefani was not there. No one looked for him, no one pinned the cross he deserved to his chest, simply because no one knew he was on that ship.

“You wrote that two hundred English soldiers were escorting us [on the Dunera], but that wasn’t exactly how things were. Those weren’t soldiers, but lifers, common and dangerous prisoners, scum who were released from prison in exchange for that service. Scum,” Stefani repeats several times, thinking back to the humiliations he suffered before the disaster and then immediately after, when he and many other Italians were once again taken on board, this time to the prison camps in Australia, where he remained for six years.

“Even when they transported us to the Dunera, first to Perth, then to Melbourne, we risked being torpedoed. Twice. We didn’t know where we were headed, we only knew that we could die at any moment: the priests, to hurry things along, had abolished confession before communion”

On the Arandora Star, in addition to 174 crew members, there were Italian civilians, German and English prisoners of war, and outcasts released to act as an armed escort. “Cannon fodder” those who claim that the English were not very concerned about the fate of those prisoners, but above all needed to take them as far away as possible, offering them to the fire of their own compatriots, are very close to the truth.

Santo Stefani was saved by a miracle. “I was lucky,” he recalls, “I was four floors below the main deck: there were eight of us in a cabin and we slept on the floor, on straw. When we were hit by the torpedo, the electricity went out and we were left in the dark. In that hell.”

The flashback of Stefani, who in 1920 left Marina di Pietrasanta to join his uncle Oscar Bartolucci in Scotland, is increasingly in focus. “There was an incredible crush: we were trying to reach the bridge and in that enormous confusion, suddenly, I saw a life jacket tied with a rope to the handrail of the stairs. I grabbed it and was almost lifted bodily upwards. The Arandora Star was sinking and when I reached the outside it was almost completely sucked into the water.”

The tears

Re-emerging from the belly of the ship, Stefani found himself faced with an apocalyptic vision. “I will never forget those poor priests,” he says with increasingly moist eyes, “who remained there, even if it meant death, and from the deck of the ship they blessed us repeating with an almost mechanical gesture of the hand the sign of the cross.

I saved myself in those freezing waters, clinging to a wooden plank for almost ten hours, until a Canadian ship rescued us. Two other people were clinging to that same plank, but they were not as lucky as me and were unable to resist. The waves dragged us to the bottom. Many people, especially those who jumped into the sea first, died hit by objects that others threw from the ship to find support once in the water; tables, wooden planks, and more.”

*In 2024, researcher Alfonso Pacitti published the details of a thorough investigation https://www.pacitti.biz/embarkation-listing.html into the numbers of Italians onboard the Arandora Star. In total 707 boarded, 442 perished at sea and 265 survived.