Due to its connection with the events taking place at the Fossoli camp, the Carpi railway station plays a key role in this trail, having witnessed historical events of national and international importance during the Second World War. Here in the late spring of 1942 began to arrive the military convoys bringing British prisoners for the newly built Fossoli camp; here in 1954 arrived the first families of exiles from Istria, who settled down in the Saint Mark’s Village, as the former concentration camp was then called. Already between 1938 and 1943, on the basis of the economic agreements made by Hitler and Mussolini in May 1937, this station had played a significant role as departure point for the Italians sent to Germany to work in factories and farms.
Certainly, the most dramatic period was the one that saw the Fascist collaboration with the Nazi project of deportation and extermination of Jews and opponents: during the months from September '43 to November '44, Carpi was the arrival station for Jews and political opponents coming from all over northern Italy to be imprisoned in the nearby Fossoli concentration camp to await their "unknown destination".
And from the very same tracks left the convoys full of Jews and political opponents taken from Fossoli and sent to the Third Reich's work and extermination camps, including Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Ravensbrück, Bergen Belsen and Dachau. The strategic position of the railway line passing through Carpi, and connecting it directly with the Reich territories, played a crucial role in the organisation of the deportations to the Nazi camps.
Of all of them, we remember the departure of the first convoy of Jewish deportees to Auschwitz, on February 22, 1944, on which Primo Levi travelled, who described it as follows: 'They loaded us onto coaches and took us to the Carpi station. Here the train and the escort for the journey were awaited us. Here we received the first blows [...]. There were twelve wagons, and we were six hundred and fifty; in my wagon there were only forty-five of us, but it was a small one. [...] freight wagons, closed from the outside, and inside, men, women, children, crammed mercilessly, like goods, by the dozen, on their way to nowhere, on their way down, to the bottom'.
Due to Allied bombings and partisan sabotage actions, the railway line remained unusable from the summer of 1944 until 1947, when it was reactivated.
Today, a memorial plaque inside the station's waiting room recalls through Primo Levi's words its role as key step towards hell for thousands of people.
