Dionisio Cancian

(Torre di Pordenone, 4 June 1925 – Buchenwald, 23 April 1945)

Address:

Via Zara, 29 - Pordenone

Laying date:

23 January 2023

Engraving:

HERE LIVED
DIONISIO CANCIAN
BORN 1925
ARRESTED 6.8.1944
DEPORTED
BUCHENWALD
MURDERED APRIL 1945

Via Zara, 29 - Pordenone

23 January 2023

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Dionisio Cancian was born in Pordenone on 4 June 1925. His parents were Luigi Cancian and Teresa Borean, and they lived at Via Zara 27 in Torre di Pordenone.
He worked as a mechanic, and on 6 November 1944 he was arrested during a roundup by German forces and RSI units. At the time of his arrest he was classified as a political prisoner and placed among the “red triangles,” people arrested for security reasons. Two days later, on 8 November, he was registered in the judicial prison of Gorizia and assigned inmate number 2687. In those overcrowded cells he met fellow prisoners from Pordenone, Agostino Brieda and Anteo Pitton, with whom he formed a close friendship.

On 15 November, with authorization from the State Police and the Security Service of Trieste, he was deported to Germany to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he arrived on 19 November 1944 and was registered under prisoner number 34825.
From Buchenwald, on 20 April, he was forced to board an “evacuation convoy” to be transferred to the Terezín camp, which served as a collection and transit center for prisoners bound for extermination camps. From that day on, no certain news of him was ever received: it is presumed that he died on 23 April 1945 during this transfer and that his body was abandoned somewhere along the railway line, in an unknown location near the border between Poland and Germany.

Documents from the Buchenwald concentration camp relating to the admission and forced labor assignment of Dionisio Cancian.