Arandora Star tragedy

Blue Star Line's SS Arandora Star was a First Class cruise liner built in 1927 by Cammell Laird & Company Ltd, in Birkenhead.Footnote ¹ The Arandora, whose nicknames were ‘chocolate box’ or ‘wedding cake’, was one of the best-known ships in the world, cruising in the Mediterranean and the Baltic as well as the West Indies (Isherwood Reference Isherwood1970). She carried large cargoes and first-class-only passengers for 13 years. When the War broke out, the Arandora was placed at the disposal of the British government. On 19 June 1940, under the command of Captain EW Moulton, the ship was ordered to carry a large number of German, Austrian and Italian internees from Liverpool to St Johns, Newfoundland, Canada (Gillman and Gillman Reference Gillman and Gillman1980). In all, she carried around 1,600 individuals, ‘a mixture of German and Austrian Jewish refugees, German POWs, British servicemen and crew and Italian internees’ (Colpi Reference Colpi, Carr and Pistol2023, 47). The date of sailing was planned for 25 June, but the ship would leave Liverpool early on 1 July, unescorted. All went well until just before 7 am on 2 July, when the ship was 125 miles north-west of County Donegal, and she was suddenly torpedoed by German U-47 submarine (Gillman and Gillman Reference Gillman and Gillman1980, 192). At about 7.20 am the Arandora rolled over, flung her bows vertically in the air and sank, carrying many people with her. Such was the loss of life, the name Arandora was never again used by Blue Star Line in postwar years (Blue Star Line website).

Debates and controversies

The Arandora tragedy has been defined as a distinguishing feature of the British Italian community by several scholars. Fortier asserts that ‘the death of these men speaks primarily of alienation, exclusion, discrimination, and humiliation of Italians living in Britain during the war years’ (2000, 57). Nevertheless, transmission of narratives of the sinking was delayed, due to this being a ‘historically complex and controversial subject’ (Colpi Reference Colpi2020, 399). The tragedy generated several public and political debates, including controversies about the way ‘enemy aliens’ were treated during the Second World War and the perceived irregularity regarding the ship and the selection of Italian internees for deportation (Marin Reference Marin1975; Lafitte Reference Lafitte1988; Hickey and Smith Reference Hickey and Smith1989; Colpi Reference Colpi, Cesarani and Kushner1993, Reference Colpi2020; Sponza Reference Sponza and Dove2005; Ugolini Reference Ugolini2011; Chezzi Reference Chezzi2014; Pistol Reference Pistol2017).

While the sinking of the Arandora was due to the German torpedoeing of the ship, it is well established that a number of contributory errors or negligence added to the degree of the disaster: ‘overloading, insufficient lifeboats, no safety drill, gun placements, barbed wire on decks, no escort, no Red Cross flag to indicate civilians’ (Colpi Reference Colpi2020, 406). Furthermore, the ship had been designed for a maximum of 500 people, yet she carried between 1,550 and 1,610 individuals on her last voyage (Rumble; Pacitti this issue). Moreover, as Pistol summarises: ‘… none of the [deportation] transport ships were marked as carrying POWs. Instead, they set sail unaccompanied, equipped with anti-submarine guns, and employed a zigzag pattern in their movements, making the ships obvious targets for German U-boats’ (Reference Pistol2015, 48). Scholars agree that had some standard precautions been observed, many more individuals would have survived (Shankland Reference Shankland2014; Pistol Reference Pistol2015).

In addition, the selection of males of Italian origin for deportation attracted public and academic attention, being considered an ‘ingiusta prigionia’ (Marin Reference Marin1975, 87). Following Mussolini's declaration of war on 10 June 1940, Italian men between the ages of 16 and 70 with less than 20 years’ residence in Britain, were ordered to be interned (Colpi Reference Colpi, Cesarani and Kushner1993; Sponza Reference Sponza2000). The dominant social representation of Italians in Britain emphasised the risk of a ‘fifth column’ of thousands of enemy aliens who might include Nazi/Fascist agents and saboteurs (Pistol Reference Pistol2015). Subsequently, around 4,500 Italians were interned, including 300 British-born sons of Italian migrants (Sponza Reference Sponza and Dove2005, 154). However, it was felt that retention of prisoners-of-war and large numbers of enemy alien civilian internees on British soil might constitute a serious threat to the security of the country: those regarded as the most ‘dangerous characters’, therefore, were earmarked to be sent overseas (Gillman and Gillman Reference Gillman and Gillman1980). These numbered about 1,500 Italian men on an MI5 list, who were defined as ‘desperate characters’, such as professing Fascisti (Sponza Reference Sponza and Dove2005, 154), although their degree of loyalty to the fasci organisations was not assessed (Sponza Reference Sponza2000; Pistol Reference Pistol2015; Ugolini Reference Ugolini2015; Colpi Reference Colpi, Carr and Pistol2023).

A number of books have been written on the general subject of the internment of enemy aliens during the Second World War.Footnote ² Several sources state that the War Office's process of selecting Italian aliens for deportation from the MI5 list was uneven (Gillman and Gillman Reference Gillman and Gillman1980; Lafitte Reference Lafitte1988; Colpi Reference Colpi, Cesarani and Kushner1993; Sponza Reference Sponza2000). This was confirmed by Lord Snell in November 1940, in his inquiry into the method of selection of men to be sent overseas on the Arandora: he held that it had been the responsibility of the security services (Snell Reference Snell1940). Lord Snell reported that while there was no reason to question the deportation of ‘Category A’ Germans and Austrians, in the case of the Italians no classification by tribunals had taken place. He concluded that

In this respect, Sponza (Reference Sponza, Cesarani and Kushner1993, 129) quotes Foreign Office civil servant Harold Farquhar, who claimed that ‘the military authorities just filled up the number haphazardly by picking out any Italian between the age of 16 and 70 whether members of the Fascio or not’. By August 1940, the Home Secretary Sir John Anderson admitted that the criminalisation process of Italian men had happened without proper judgement and he appointed Sir Percy Loraine to establish an Advisory Committee to consider the cases of Italians’ eligibility for release (Ugolini Reference Ugolini2011).

Debates moved on, considering the innocence or the political involvement of Italians on board the Arandora and whether these men constituted a threat to national security (Ugolini Reference Ugolini2011, Reference Ugolini2015; Chezzi Reference Chezzi2014; Colpi Reference Colpi2020). Now, it is well-known that the majority of the Italians on the ship were innocent: indeed, they included countless ‘non-fascists’, alongside some well known antifascists, men with more than 20 years’ residency, and naturalised British subjects (Colpi Reference Colpi2020, 398). It is well established that several men of Italian origin who were imprisoned and deported aboard the Arandora were antifascist political refugees, or Jews who had fled Italy's harsh anti-semitic laws during the dictatorship (Shankland Reference Shankland2014). As Pistol explains, ‘unable to find the required number of “dangerous” internees required to fill the ships in time for tight departure dates, human cargoes constituted whichever internees were at hand’ (Reference Pistol2015, 47). Consequently, many Italians aboard the Arandora were wrongly deported (Colpi Reference Colpi2020).

Additionally, it is believed that the most ardent Fascists evaded internment as they managed to leave the country, as part of a pre-war arrangement. The ship Monarch of Bermuda with 630 ‘loyal fascists’, nominated by the Italian ambassador, and their family members, sailed from Glasgow to reach Lisbon by 26 June. The passengers were exchanged for British citizens who had left Italy on the SS Conte Rosso (Colpi Reference Colpi1991; Sponza Reference Sponza, Cesarani and Kushner1993; Bernabei Reference Bernabei1997; Balestracci Reference Balestracci2008). The Monarch of Bermuda carried several hundred privileged evacuees while, due to the confusion of the arrests, others ‘including the Italian consuls in Cardiff and Liverpool were found languishing in police cells’ (Colpi Reference Colpi1991, 110). With regard to those boarded onto the Arandora, as Colpi attests, ‘any militant fascistic intent amongst a minority remains largely unresolvable, with some files at the National Archives remaining closed until 2041, while others are missing or destroyed’ (Reference Colpi, Carr and Pistol2023, 48). Moreover, any lists or details of Fascists and their activity kept at the Italian Embassy or at the Fasci had been removed or burned as war became imminent (Balestracci Reference Balestracci2008). Eighty-four years on, further unravelling from official sources the historical facts surrounding Italian Fascism in Britain, the threats to national security, the deportation of internees, and the Arandora's sinking, remains complex and requires additional research.

Silence and efforts to collect oral history accounts

Several scholars have paid attention to the silence around the events of the Second World War in general, and the tragedy of the Arandora in particular (Ugolini Reference Ugolini2011, Reference Ugolini2015; Chezzi Reference Chezzi2014; Colpi Reference Colpi2020; Palladino Reference Palladino2022). Colpi provides possible explanations for the unwillingness of Italian community members to talk about the tragedy (Reference Colpi2020). She discusses how the traumatic shock of the sinking, with its high loss of civilian life, produced a period of repressed ‘silence’, due to self-imposed emotional repression or external censorship. Their silence might reflect, firstly, the psychological challenge associated with trauma, with memories triggering uncomfortable and painful emotions; secondly, the fact that being regarded as enemy aliens prevented members of the Italian community communicating openly about these topics; thirdly, the lack of knowledge of the facts, and therefore an inability to answer questions; and finally, the desire for reintegration after the war. All these factors acted to suppress the Arandora narrative (Colpi Reference Colpi2020, 393–394). This silence after the war in Britain can furthermore be attributed to the dominance of the victors’ master narrative and reticence amongst the marginalised war generation of Italians to challenge the status quo. In Italy, no details of the sinking, with mainly Italian and German victims, were given in the press, ‘due to suppression by the Fascist regime embarrassed by their German ally's blunder’ (Colpi Reference Colpi, Carr and Pistol2023, 50). The sinking represents an uncomfortable episode of war history that three countries wished to remain hidden.

Despite the lack of accurate records, in modern times there have been several attempts to reconstruct the sinking. For example, Alfio Bernabei's documentary Dangerous Characters produced in 1987 for Channel 4 uses archive film, photographs and interviews with surviving Italians who experienced the sinking.Footnote ³ In 1991, the Arandora ‘Missing List’ was published for the very first time in a book by Terri Colpi (Reference Colpi1991, 271–278), which included survivors' testimonies. Later, Maria Serena Balestracci emphasised the human consequences of the tragedy, bringing to fruition interviews conducted in Italy and the UK with descendants of victims and survivors (Reference Balestracci2008). She argues that this event risked falling into oblivion, as it could easily embarrass Britain, Germany and Italy. Undoubtedly, at the time of the disaster, Britain wished to silence any examination of its mass deportation of enemy aliens without the inclusion of a proper inquiry into the seaworthiness of the ship; Germany had made the mistake of torpedoing Germans and Italians; Italy, allied with Germany, was reluctant to acknowledge the loss of so many Italian lives (Balestracci Reference Balestracci2008). Balestracci embraced the challenge of unearthing a ‘forgotten tragedy’ by meeting and interviewing relatives of those who had lost their lives. In addition, Wendy Ugolini (Reference Ugolini2011) worked with personal testimonies, focusing on second-generation Scottish Italians serving in the British Army and women on the home front during the Second World War. In particular, using oral history interviews, Ugolini argues that with the lack of formal sites of mourning, family members and descendants of victims felt the need to cherish memories, ‘acting as private keepers of the memorial flame’ (Reference Ugolini2015, 98). For this reason, she emphasises the importance of memory transmission within families and across generations. Likewise, Bruna Chezzi worked with second and third generation Italians in Wales, for an oral history project connected to a memorial fund. The intention was to involve ‘all those who were affected by the Arandora Star, regardless of their nationality or affiliation’, to narrate their experiences and re-establish confidence in the transmission of memory (Chezzi Reference Chezzi2014, 380). By generating new narratives of stories that may have been repressed or held back, the project aimed at empowering a cultural minority in ‘unpacking a diversity of experiences that otherwise would have been ignored, forgotten and lost’ (Chezzi Reference Chezzi2014, 380).

Yet as the time passes, the number of survivors and descendants who can actively keep the memory of the tragedy alive diminishes. Therefore, oral history accounts from descendants of victims and survivors are worthy of academic attention for advancing Arandora scholarship. This article is driven by this knowledge need, emphasising the importance of intergenerational transmission of cultural trauma within family networks (Hirsh Reference Hirsch2001).

Methodology

Oral history is conceived as a field of study and as a method of recording memories of people and communities of past events (Ritchie Reference Ritchie2012; Thompson Reference Thompson, Perks and Thompson2015). What distinguishes oral history is its commitment to uncovering hidden histories and paying attention to ‘history from below’ (Burke Reference Burke2013). In Britain, since its emergence in the 1960s and 1970s, the mission of oral historians was to recover and challenge the imbalance in written historical records by supplementing these with histories and experiences of groups absent from historical archives (Cosson Reference Cosson2019). Thereby, oral history projects in Britain aim to encourage ordinary people to participate in the ‘construction’ of their own history, by giving voice to marginalised groups (Cosson Reference Cosson2019).

The oral histories discussed in this article derive from my PhD fieldwork project at Newcastle University (Palladino Reference Palladino2019). During the semi-structured interviews,Footnote ⁴ I let the participants guide the process, so they could talk about what was meaningful to them. Participants felt comfortable speaking about their own memories, leading to a large amount of data collected. At the time of the fieldwork, the Arandora sinking was not the main focus of my inquiry. A few years later, I revisited the oral history interviews and extracted references to this historic event. For the purpose of this article, I highlighted themes related to the sinking, taken from four research participants.Footnote ⁵

Findings

The biographies of the Italian community members I interviewed are intertwined with the Arandora narrative, as the following example indicates. Mrs G is a British-born, second-generation Italian, whose family was originally from the Tuscany region. She was 86 at the time of the interview. She was born and lived in a town on the east coast of England, where her family had run a coffee shop since the beginning of the last century. When the Second World War broke out, she was nine years old. She witnessed her father's arrest and, following policies of enforced relocation, she and her mother had to move inland, to Carlisle (see more in Palladino Reference Palladino2022). During the interview, she broke down in tears when reminiscencing about the wartime, and she shared anecdotes related to the tragedy.

Mrs G places her own subjectivity at the centre of the tale, by reporting the recollection of the lived experiences of the men involved in the tragic sinking, simultanously emphasising its mode of transmission. Mrs G recalled a specific episode she had been told by Testone, one of the survivors, and his companion in misfortune. Apparently, Testone used to narrate the painful experience of the sinking, when he was swallowed by the waves and heard the cry for help. This moan of entreating prayer was encapsulated in the word ‘mother’. Victims of the Arandora tragedy invoking their mothers as they were cast adrift in the ocean is well documented (Bernabei Reference Bernabei1987; Balestracci Reference Balestracci2008). In stating how in the atrocity of the war, nobody is a winner, Mrs G ends her narrative with a story of survival and deeply felt emotions. This extract conveys the solidarity between men in difficulty, across national boundaries, who helped each other and survived the sinking. This latter point challenges the trope of friction between Germans and Italians that prevented the rescue operations, as claimed by the media at the time of the incident. For example, as reported by The Times on 4 July 1940: ‘as the ship was rapidly sinking there was panic among the aliens, and especially among the Germans, who thrust aside Italians in their effort to reach the [life]boats first’.Footnote ⁶ Similarly, The Glasgow Herald declared that ‘great hostility was shown by the Italians to the Germans … because of the Nazis’ ruthless conduct in attempting to rush to the lifeboats’.Footnote ⁷ On this note, Balestracci interjects that the British newspapers tended to attribute the impediment to safety procedures to the conflicts between Germans and Italians (Reference Balestracci2008). She observes that the accounts quoted in these newspapers are all anonymous, and sometimes clearly at odds with each other, concluding that ‘such articles had been deliberately manipulated’ (Reference Balestracci2008, 250).

Further analysis of Mrs G's extract conveys how the Arandora is embedded into the narrative repertoire of the Anglo-Italian community, especially amongst family members of victims and survivors. It is clear how similar anecdotes have been passed on by word-of-mouth between and across generations. Mrs G recalls how, at a young age, she learned about the sinking (‘I got these stories later on, when they came back’; ‘Testone told us the story. He always used to tell that story’). Possibly, this spoken mode of transmission of memories might have contribuited to the ‘wrongness’ of the history. A degree of misinformation in Mrs G's narrative lies firstly in the number of men on the Arandora from Carlisle – only two in fact, not ‘lots’ – but both were victims (Pacitti this issue). This exaggeration indicates how the extent and the impact of the tragedy magnified all aspects of affect within the community members. Reliance on oral traditions to aquire information about the event is also evidenced by the way in which the name of the ship is mispronounced ‘Andora’. This resonates with Colpi's work (Reference Colpi2020, 392–393), who explains how the name of the ship became widely known as ‘Andora’ in Glasgow.

Furthermore, it is evident that family members are still trying to find justifications for the historical events. Mrs G's narrative reveals on the one hand how the arrest of her father and her uncle were seemingly justified by their lack of naturalisation as British citizens. On the other hand, Mrs G states that internees had the freedom to choose where they would be sent, either being interned on the Isle of Man or being embarked on the Arandora, directed to Canada. However, these men were subject to various restrictions and clearly lacked any freedom of choice, as stated by Pistol (Reference Pistol2015). A possible explanation for these historical inaccuracies lies in the way in which oral accounts were passed on by the survivors to family members, or to wider communities, and in the way memory continuously evolved over almost 80 years. Accordingly, this extract manifests how oral testimonies are sources of memory, conceived not as a passive depository of facts, but as an active process of adding meanings and making sense of lives (Portelli Reference Portelli, Perks and Thomson2015). Hence, this data informs the debate on the nature of memory in the field of oral history, shedding light on the purpose of retrospective meaning-making.

Since the paradigm shift to memory in the 1990s, oral historians have been concerned with exploring not only what people remember, but also how people ‘do’ memory (Smith Reference Smith, Perks and Thomson2015; Cosson Reference Cosson2019). Oral sources are a narrative product of the interplay between the present and the ever-changing interpretation of the past, necessarily artificial, variable and partial (Portelli Reference Portelli, Perks and Thomson2015). According to Portelli (Reference Portelli, Perks and Thomson2015, 52), ‘what makes oral history different is that it tells us less about events, than about their meaning’. Thus, Mrs G's extract can inform on how and why the past is remembered in this particular way and on the meanings associated with the selection of Italian men to embark on the Arandora. She narrates that her family members escaped the ill-fated journey thanks to ‘luck’ and their free decision-making to stay closer to home (‘they decided, “We'd rather go to the Isle of Man”. Because it was in England, you see. Luckily, they went to the Isle of Man’). Yet, this is a subjective interpretation about a wartime context in a time of peace (Portelli Reference Portelli1997). Consequently, conciously or unconsciously, instead of expressing anguish and fear of the unknown destination, the narrative framed the internees as actively involved in these decisions – possibly to retain a sense of dignity after the injustices experienced. Moreover, Mrs G's oral history extract indicates how Italian community members, and especially the victims’ descendants, in the present, attempt to reconstruct the sinking, adding meanings to the event, even if only partially known. This process of retrospective meaning-making is additionally evidenced in the example below.

Riccardo, in his seventies at the time of the interview, is a first-generation Italian migrant, whose family migrated from the Lazio region to the North-East of England prior to the war. Riccardo's family used to live in Newcastle and was involved in the ice-cream business. In our research encounter, his family history was elicited from a photo album:

Similar to the previous example, this extract demonstrates how memory is more than a record of experiences, but instead functions as an incessant work of interpretations (Portelli Reference Portelli2006). In this case, narratives related to the Arandora tragedy, embedded in family histories, are elaborated and transmitted at the hinge between orality and invention. Riccardo reveals that, at the time of the interview, there is still a lack of knowledge on the events (‘It is not known who torpedoed the ship’). Nonetheless, to construct a coherent memory in light of the overall war narrative, Riccardo suggests the idea of a conspiracy that is unfounded in historical terms (‘Germans were informed that Italian prisoners were on it’). Expressing ambivalence in dealing with the contradictions, this example resonates with previous works in the oral history field, which highight the difficulty of fully articulating war events from the perspective of civilians (Portelli Reference Portelli2006). As such, Riccardo's example indicates how the Arandora's narrative is interpreted in a partial and fragmented manner and is subject to manipulation and fabulation. Nevertheless, instead of dismissing these narratives as historically unreliable, it is possible to find hints of the work of memory and traces of the narrator's perspective at the time of the interview. This is because the peculiarity of oral history is that it provides access to the speaker's subjectivity (Portelli Reference Portelli, Perks and Thomson2015; Calabria Reference Calabria, Wynter, Ellis and Wallis2023), as will be discussed in more detail via the following example.

Elena V is a British-born third-generation Italian in her eighties, whose grandparents migrated originally from Lazio at the beginning of the last century. They lived in a town near Gateshead in the North-East, where they owned an ice-cream shop. She said:

This extract indicates how the unjust imprisonment of Italians during the War is reiterated amongst community members. Elena tries to find explanation for her uncles’ arrest, as she says ‘they had done nothing wrong’ but she attributes it to being in the ‘scouts’ at a younger age. The role of summer camps in Italy in indoctrinating young Italians from Britain according to Fascist ideology is highlighted in Bernabei's Dangerous Characters (Reference Bernabei1987), and discussed by Baldoli (Reference Baldoli2003). The participant also thinks that one of her uncles had a mitigating circumstance due to his involvement in the First World War on the Allied Italian-British side, a situation which, she conjectures, may have saved him from deportation. Again, this example shows how the events surrounding the Arandora have been open to hypotheses and suspicion. To justify the loss of life, Elena reports information that has been elaborated – for example, that the prisoners were chained, possibly a misinterpretation of the presence of barbed wire on board.

Similar to Riccardo's example above, Elena points to a lack of access to information regarding the event (‘You'll never get to know the proper truth’). Even so, this example expresses how the lack of official information and records caused speculation and intrigue as to the reasons behind the deportations and torpedoing. Victims’ relatives contributed to the creation of different tales and inventions to bring some kind of consistency to the events. In this case, Elena attributes the cause of the torpedoing to some items that the ship might have been carrying, presumably known to the U-boat captain who fired (‘Some reckon that they were carrying different things’). Distancing herself from the fabricating of stories, Elena accepts that she will never know (‘You'll never really know because they won't tell you directly what was on that boat’).

Moreover, it is worth noting the shift from the first-person singular, I, to the second person, you. According to Portelli (Reference Portelli1997) when in an autobiographical narrative, pronouns and verbs begin to fracture and multiply, it means that identity is questioned. In this case, Elena's transition from I to you might be seen as an invitation to the interviewer to put themselves in the narrator's place. On the one hand, Elena might refer to you as a fellow civilian, who does not gain access to the ‘proper truth’ – possibly referring to the false newspaper reports during the war, in contrast to Admiralty and government who retained the ‘official’ knowledge of events. On the other hand, Elena might refer to you as interviewer, revealing by this, the way in which I was regarded as a younger Italian student looking for stories of another time through which I did not live (see also Palladino Reference Palladino, Pritchard and Edwards2023a). Indeed, the data generated during oral history interviews are always the result of the encounter between interviewer and interviewee (Portelli Reference Portelli, Perks and Thomson2015).

The final extract is another example of how the remarkable wartime event of the sinking can be interspersed with misinformation and manipulations, generated in conversation with the interviewer. Mos is a British-born, third-generation Italian in his seventies at the time of the interview. His grandparents migrated to a village near Newcastle from the Tuscany region, at the beginning of the last century. He invited me to watch a PowerPoint presentation he was working on, about the history of Italians in the North-East. Mos was interested in this topic in order to find out more about his own roots. He planned on presenting this research to a private men's club he belonged to, in one of the wealthier neighbourhoods of Newcastle. So I sat next to him, on a chair in his office, and listened to his presentation. The slide show began with the history of the Italians who had migrated to the North-East since the 1870s. Moving on, he said:

This extract indicates how Italian families living in the UK often had ‘divided loyalties’ (Sponza Reference Sponza2000), as the father and the son were considered differently. Equally important, it is clear how historical events have been reinterpreted by members of the Anglo-Italian community, adding details that are historically inaccurate – the Arandora was not directed to Australia, and the victims were not all from the North-East of England. As asserted by Colpi (Reference Colpi2020, 393) ‘in most Italian communities, there was confusion over the ship's destination and location of the sinking … ’. In this case, Mos's narrative may have also been influenced by my request to know the history of the Italians in the North-East of England. At the time of the interview, I was a newcomer in the North-East, so this, possibly, might have shaped the way in which Mos magnified aspects of affect related to the tragedy in the local area. However, even if the story narrated can be shown to be untrue, it might still be valuable to social history (Thompson Reference Thompson, Perks and Thompson2015). In this regard, Portelli asserts:

Consequentially, in this case, it is important to ponder why a third-generation Italian is motivated to gather information on this historical time, to assemble his sources via a PowerPoint presentation, and to disseminate this knowledge in a public talk to his own community, due a few days after our encounter. This might inform on how the transmission of the Arandora event still takes place in today via orality – even outside the context of a research encounter, as occurred between Mos and me. In this context, ‘what counts is less the event told than the telling of the event’ (Portelli Reference Portelli1997, 43).

As mentioned above, the peculiarity of oral history is to pay attention to the complexity of individual experience, such as the speaker's subjectivity. Intrigued by my interviews, all four of which contained misremembering, I started to reflect on the biographical demand to know more about these historical events and the hope and desire of this group of people to be informed. For this reason, there is a strong argument for the need for further oral history research amongst those directly connected to the Arandora tragedy, to pay attention to the ‘histories from below’.