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Buried alive: Remembering communism’s brutal Foibe massacre of Italians

7 3
12.02.2026

Feb. 10 marked the commemoration of one of Europe’s darkest chapters: the Foibe massacres. This day, recognized in Italy as Giorno del Ricordo, honors the victims of communist-led mass killings that targeted ethnic Italians in central Europe after World War II.

Thousands were murdered or exiled from their homes along the Istrian peninsula by the communists of Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslav partisans between 1943 and 1947, most of whom were cast into the foibe, a “narrow ravine on the Carso plateau, behind Trieste and Istria.” Historical accounts suggest that the women were raped first and often tossed into the foibe while still alive. It was a horrific period in Italy’s history that many have tried to cover up, hide, and deny.

Compared to the incessant mentions of fascist terrorism, communist atrocities are frequently overlooked, dismissed, or diminished in magnitude. Episodes of communist genocide, such as the Soviet Union’s Red Terror in the early 1920s, the Holodomor in Ukraine in the 1930s, the Great Purge in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the Chinese, Khmer Rouge, and Vietnamese communist atrocities in the 1960s and 1970s, don’t receive nearly enough appropriate awareness and scrutiny. The Foibe massacres of the 1940s receive significantly less recognition than those horrors, rarely, if at all, being mentioned in history books.

The ill effects of this absence are compounded by decadeslong state-sanctioned suppression efforts of the killings in Italy, as the Italian government shamefully covered up these crimes for years, with public recognition of the victims only coming in 2005 due to the efforts of the Silvio Berlusconi coalition government. As such, Giorno del Ricordo hardly gets any contemporary media coverage, if any, especially outside Italy.

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Furthermore, many contemporary socialists, communists, and other left-wing historical revisionists have sought to dismiss the Foibe massacres in connection with communism or left-wing political thought. While they don’t deny the existence of the killings of........

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