From refugee to university academic director in Rome

By Kielce Gussie

Sixty-nine years ago, the largest refugee camp in Italy opened. In the 22 years that followed, some 100,000 people—primarily from Eastern Europe escaping the Soviet Bloc—found refuge in that camp: the Roberto Rossi Longhi Refugee Camp in Latina.

The camp, located just 72 kilometers (45 miles) southeast of Rome, was only a stopping point. It was not to become the refugees’ new home, just a place of transition before its inhabitants were able to relocate to countries such as the United States, Canada, and Australia.

One of the thousands of families that found safe passage out of the Soviet bloc was Professor Darius von Güttner Sporzyński’s. His family left Poland and made the challenging journey to the camp when he was in his early teens.

Although he was older, the professor described his memories of the camp as flashes and childhood-like recollections. Speaking to Vatican News, he depicted his family’s escape to Italy as “one of those journeys that was never to be repeated.”

What memories remain…

“I remember traveling during the night…I think my parents explained that it was a holiday. This is how it was explained to the children.”

The end of the Second World War, the rise of Communism, and strict state controls pushed many families to seek a different life outside of Eastern Europe.

During the Cold War, migration was limited, but not halted. About 14 million people moved from East to West, and 10% of this number was classified as political refugees and asylum-seekers. Most were tied to political crises and conflicts in different countries.

Professor von Güttner recalled meals on the road, checking a map, armed guards, and hearing his parents’ cries of joy after crossing the border from Yugoslavia to Italy—a step that signalled freedom.

Yet what has stayed with him all these years are the friendships he built in the Latina Camp—with other young people who shared his experience of fleeing their own homes.

“We were all disconnected from our past, from our friends, from the schools we attended. And suddenly we found each other in this big melting pot,” he shared. While people connected and built trust, the professor stressed that the camp was still a holding zone—not their permanent home.

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“You were in between two worlds: safe away from that danger of the old world, but you have not yet arrived at the safety of the new world.”

Moving to a new world

For many, leaving the holding zone took years—getting the right documents, choosing a country to call home, and preparing to say goodbye to everything familiar.

Professor von Güttner’s family left Europe after a few years and headed far southeast to Australia—a country built on migration—to start their new life. “It is a country that is welcoming and receives strangers, including refugees, in significant numbers,” he highlighted.

However, the move was still difficult. His family had to learn a new language, find jobs, start school, make friends, and build a community—what the professor described as “a typical migrant story.”

After finding his footing and settling into a new life, Professor von Güttner became a historian and the academic director of Australia Catholic University in Rome, Italy—bringing him back to the country that first offered him and his family safety and the chance for a new life.

The professor with one of the Australian students at the ACU campus in Rome

“It is a great opportunity”, he explained, for Australian students “to open their eyes” to see what Europe is about, “but then to look at their own country and their own situation and put it into context.”

Part of the human story

In today’s world, where migrants and refugees have become a political issue and their faces and stories reduced to numbers and statistics, Professor von Güttner highlighted how the search for a better life free from persecution and violence is “very much part of the human story.”

The Latina Camp has long closed, and Soviet regimes have ended, but the need to welcome strangers and help migrants continues to be a crucial thread in the fabric of our human family.

Yet, the professor recognizes that the world today is different. It is more complex. There is no longer a straightforward “divide between right and wrong.” Before, it was “easy to see it as a binary division of the world”—East and West, the Soviet Union and liberal democracies—he explained.

Nowadays, our screens are flooded constantly with images of migrants and their stories: on social media, computers, television. Nevertheless, it is easy to ignore them. “We are saturated with the message of need and that very often creates conditions in which some people may not feel so benevolent towards others,” Professor von Güttner noted.

Therein lies the danger, and that is one reason why remembering the Latina Refugee Camp is so important almost seventy years after it was first opened.

Marking 70 years of the camp’s history in 2027, the Professor explained, highlights “the goodness of the people that started it…At the same time, it reminds us that today is perhaps not so distant from the days we spent [in the camp].”