The Italian invasion of Albania

Hearsay on the train, April 1939

For the last six months, I’ve been living in Florence, Italy as a Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute, or EUI. The EUI was founded in 1972 as a joint venture between six European nations that had, only a few decades earlier, been at war with each other: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Since then, nearly all EU countries have joined the EUI, with the notable exception of Hungary (and a few other nations). The vision of the EUI - to promote research and to foster inter-national understanding - were borne out of the postwar period as an effort to prevent another disastrous war between European nations.

In 1939, when Opapa arrived in Italy en route to America, such an institution would have seemed improbable at best — more likely, it would have seemed ludicrous; a pipe dream. Hitler was sending troops to the Polish border, and Mussolini was only a month from signing an the “Pact of Steel” with the German Reich.

Since I am in Florence, it has been especially fascinating - and sobering - to learn more about Italian history through references that Opapa and his family members made in their letters. In my post yesterday, I mentioned the Mussolini quotes “decorating” buildings in Venice. But even before Opapa arrived in Venice, he wrote about another important event — one that he would continue to associate with his escape from Hungary for the rest of his life. This is how he recounted it in the draft of his autobiography:

While I was on the train into Italy (I was going to Paris through Venice and Genoa, and then the Riviera, and then to Paris), the Italian army marched into Albania.

I had (somewhat embarrasingly) never heard of the Italian invasion of Albania, so I looked it up: it was a six day invasion, which began on April 7 (the day that Opapa boarded the train in Budapest) and was completed on April 12, 1939, when Opapa was probably in Florence, staying about a fifteen minute walk from my apartment at a hotel near the Santa Maria Novella train station. This was the political event that defined his stay in Italy.

Now that I’ve read Opapa’s letters from 1939, I know exactly how the news about the Italian invasion of Albania was relayed to him. While Opapa was on the train from Budapest to Trieste on April 7, 1939, sometime after the drunk Hungarian man asked to see his zither, he met someone from Yugoslavia:

Later a Yugoslavian passenger got on the train, we were talking with him in German.  He told me about the invasion of Albania. 

It’s notable that it was a Yugoslavian man who told Opapa this news — the invasion of Albania would have been especially terrifying news in Yugoslavia, where many feared that this was just the first in a series of attacks against the Balkans. They were not wrong.

The invasion was big news in Hungary as well. On April 12, 1939, Opapa’s younger brother Matyi wrote a letter describing his own experiences since Opapa’s departure five days earlier. “First of all,” he wrote, “I will try to tell you – one thing after the other - what has happened since you left.” Matyi “left the station,” then “took a bus.” After that, he met Devecseri Gabór, a Hungarian poet who, I believe, was involved in performing a play written by Opapa (more on that in a different post):

So, I met Devecseri Gabi. I heard about the invasion of Albania from him. The first thing that came to my mind was that we are next. 

The news was spreading like wildfire — both Opapa and Matyi heard about the invasion from other people, rather than from the newspapers, which means that it was on the top of everyone’s mind. It was also front page news in the New York Times, and many other newspapers:

It seems like the invasion was the first thing that friends - or even strangers - would mention to each other. “Did you hear?” I can imagine thousands of people saying to each other across Europe that day. “Can you believe it?” The excitement of sharing news would have been mixed with anxiety: “It’s really happening. Are we safe?”

For both Hungarians and Yugoslavians, it was a foreboding piece of news. As Matyi wrote: “The first thing that came to my mind was that we are next.” Just a year earlier, Germany had signed their Anschluss with Austria, meaning that Hungary now shared a border with the increasingly militant German Reich. Now Italy, too, was flexing its military might and claiming new territories.

It was a terrifying time. By the time Opapa reached Florence, in mid-April 1939, the invasion was complete: Italy had successfully conquered Albania, and Albania had become part of the Italian Empire. With the victory, Mussolini was emboldened, and he signed the Pact of Steel with Hitler the following month.

Today, it seems unthinkable. But of course, it’s not. The more I read about the 1930s, the more grateful I am for institutions like the EUI — products of the post-war vision of a peaceful Europe. But I also don’t take these institutions for granted. One of the more sobering parts of my research has been finding neo-fascist websites (that I will not link to) that reiterate Italian territorial claims in the Balkans, and especially in current-day Slovenia and Croatia. Meanwhile, the current Italian Prime Minister refuses to condemn Mussolini, saying that while Mussolini made mistakes, he was also an impressive leader. How long will the vision of the EUI prevail? Like a functioning democracy, it requires constant maintenance.

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Nuts to crack:

• I am still trying to figure out the exact route that Opapa’s train would have traveled from Budapest to Trieste. If a Yugoslav man got onto the train, then he probably went through what is now Slovenia. This is especially interesting to me, because this is the exact region Opapa would return to in the last few months of the war, when he fought with the Yugoslav Partisans. In 1944, during his ill-fated paratrooping mission, he landed near Maribor, instead of in Austria. Did he take the train through Maribor on April 7/8, 1939?