The three Italian pages are a prisoner of war camp, a mixed displaced persons camp and a transit camp for emigration, covering 1945 to 1952. Rimini Camp on the Adriatic formed part of the much larger Rimini and Bellaria enclosure; Caserma Zucchi in Reggio Emilia was a cattle market turned artillery barracks in 1877, run first by the Allies and then by UNRRA; Bagnoli, in the western suburbs of Naples, was where families waited for a ship.123
Ukrainians came to each differently. Thousands of former soldiers of the Galicia Division were held at Rimini after surrendering to British forces, moved there from 17 October 1945, and inside the wire they built schools, workshops and a theatre while campaigning against forced return. At Bagnoli people arrived from the camps of Germany and Austria on their way overseas, and a police report of April 1947 describes the transit population as it then stood.456
The Reggio Emilia page turns on one documented episode, the antisemitic attack of May Day 1946, recorded in contemporary agency reports and in a UNRRA nationality list of the camp compiled that month. None of the three pages carries a Ukrainian population figure. What survives instead is camp paperwork: petitions, orders, the camp's own newspapers and its postal issues.789
A transit camp in an unopened Fascist boarding college on the western edge of Naples, where a Ukrainian parish, choir and school took shape while families waited for ships and aircraft to take them overseas.
The former Zucchi barracks, a cattle market converted to an artillery barracks in 1877, served after the war as a mixed displaced-persons camp under Allied and then UNRRA administration. Its best documented episode is the antisemitic attack of May Day 1946.
Thousands of Ukrainians were held at Rimini after surrendering to British forces. Inside the wire they built schools, workshops and a theatre, while campaigning against forced return and preparing for an uncertain move to Britain.