ITALIAN MARTYRS Comment by Claudia Capone, former v.Pres.Comites Greece Il grido di Dante
Quando ho accettato di prendere parte alla commissione per la memoria degli italiani uccisi dai nazisti tedeschi, l`ho fatto per interessi storici ed umani.Volevo infatti conoscere di più i fatti svoltisi in Grecia dopo il `43 e, nello stesso tempo, avvicinarmi al dramma vissuto da quei militari, il cui sacrificio è rimasto ingiustamente anonimo per così tanto tempo.
Ho conosciuto anni fa Achille, arzillo contadino di settant` anni, attendente, durante la seconda guerra mondiale, di un ufficiale italiano in servizio nel Montenegro. Raccontava personal stories with emotion that he had lived at that time and pointed out what he had learned from that tragic experience. When he told of his hair and beard all `official of how prepared the bath and polished boots. But not only. He also spoke of less fortunate comrades, their tremendous suffering in the cold Balkan, how they were going to die in an unfamiliar place, in a war whose meaning escapes them. Once exhausted topics, Achille start again, always adding other details warped by age and memory, and are offended if someone looked up to heaven, feeling tired of saying the same things. He wanted to convey what he had lived, the sense of those tragic days, but it was difficult. Achilles, however, was lucky he came back from the front, he built a family, has faced the vicissitudes of a normal existence, had a nephew who bears the same name, has died.
scroll through the names of those soldiers and officers shot in Kessariani in `43: their age was no more than 35 years and discovered that one had only 19. I shudder: how do we face a firing squad at just 19 years? What unspeakable, heinous crimes committed could have a boy of 19 years to deserve such an end? Dante, whose only fault, perhaps, was to oppose a no to fascism and war, we have seen tearing the life in a cowardly and wrong. Unlike Achilles, he was denied the right to return home to start a family, to realize their dreams of giving birth to offspring. But the cry of protest emerges naked from her date of death, through 66 years and is strong and piercing to the ears of those who stop to listen . Dante is a hero not because he has experimented in shares particularly daring, but because it had a strong and determined attitude in a situation where the `yes el surrender were much more comfortable and easy or simply because there has only been in that situation and has paid the price with his life, a victim of blind fury of the Nazis.
His cry may be weakened when our future generations will know that there were young people in the past, like Dante, have not resigned, fought for a fairer world, have died unjustly and their sacrifice has gone for a long time in silence . They can not and should not reciprocate again with `indifference and with the excuse that today there are other issues to be addressed. Through an imaginary dialogue between old and new generations, made up of studi, ricerche e riflessioni sui fatti, anche un solo nome riportato alla luce ,una sola identità serve, è utile ,soprattutto per evitare di rifare errori tremendi. E la formazione di una società più pacifica, giusta e democratica, passa anche attraverso queste strade.
Claudia Capone
