The Line

It is one thing to draw a line on a neat, white map in a conference room. It is something else again to impose the line onto the patchwork of tiny vineyards, minute garden patches and chicken yards that speckle a Trieste hillside. Well armed with the tools of the surveyor's profession, a detachment of the border commission in charge of dividing Trieste between Italy and Yugoslavia arrived one day last week at the two-acre plot of Luca Eller, a 65-year-old farmer of Italian extraction. The commissioners discovered that the line laid out in the Trieste agreement would cut directly through the trim, two-story red house where Eller lived with his wife, his two sons and his two grandchildren.

The Yugoslavs on the mixed commission (made up of Yugoslavs, Americans, Britons and some Italian observers) promptly suggested that the line be bent to put the entire Eller farm in Yugoslavia. While a large crowd of kibitzing Italian and Yugoslav peasants looked on, the line-drawers argued it out. The U.S. senior officer present, Major William Grower, disagreed with the Yugoslavs. He suggested that since the Ellers were Italians the line should be bent to put the farm entirely in Italy. The Yugoslavs refused. After two frustrating hours, Grower ordered a stake driven near the wall of Eller's house that put the old farmer's kitchen and two bedrooms in his native Italy, consigned the remaining six rooms plus the chicken house and stock barns to Yugoslavia. Farmer Eller started to protest but was hushed by the police. An Italian neighbor shook his head in dismay. "This is worse than Groizia," he mourned. "All they did there was separate the town from the cemetery."

Seven Brothers. The commissioners moved on, and friends comforted distraught Luca Eller with assurances that the border was still only provisional and might yet be rectified with small adjustments. (As a matter of fact, the agreement specifically provides against cutting houses in two.) Meanwhile, Luca Eller and family sadly set to moving as much furniture as they could into the Italian side of their internationalized farm house.

The Ellers had company. The seven Samec brothers, whose seven houses were clustered in a tight group near Muggia, were horrified to learn that one had been left behind in Yugoslavia after the partition. The expatriated brother promptly picked up his furniture and belongings, abandoned his house and went to live with one of his luckier kinsmen, only to be told next day that there had been an error of 90 feet in the survey. It reinstated Giusto Samec's house in Italy. "I hope this is final," said Giusto, moving back.

Safe in Sicily. Said 50-year-old Luigi Crevatini on finding that his house was on the wrong side of the frontier: "Until 1944 I lived in Fiume. Then I saw how things were going, and I moved to Capo-distria. When Capodistria became Zone

B in Yugoslavia, I went to Belpoggio. Now I have to move again, but this time I'm not stopping even in Trieste. I'm going right on to Sicily and be safe."

By week's end some 1,400 Italians caught on the Yugoslav side of the new border had transferred their possessions into the Italian zone. "I don't intend to leave Tito so much as a chair," said one.

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