FOR YEARS Alessandro was unable to use his hands. He looked at them often, but as if they didn’t belong to him. He couldn’t even caress his wife. With those hands, one evening in August 1944, Alessandro had carried the bodies of his friends killed by the Nazis. Twelve teenagers more or less the same age, with whom he had to play bocce. He finds them lying on the ground, in the Borgo Ticino square, under a sheet. He loads them on his shoulder, on the wagon and on the ladder, and takes them to the cemetery. “With these hands, precisely with these hands”, he repeats after many years.
Alessandro is one of the little boys who survived a forgotten war, the “third war” of the Nazi-Fascists against Italian civilians between ’43 and ’45. Fifteen thousand victims. After a very long silence, their family members decided to tell. Plots that have the step of the epic, to be read with due caution when going through shocking intimacies. Precious tales to return a chapter of history otherwise threatened by collective amnesia.
Pier Vittorio Buffa, a long-time journalist and author of various historical essays, went to the places of the massacres with the children, grandchildren, brothers and cousins of the victims. The fruit of his work is I saw, a collection of thirty testimonies of those who keep in their eyes the murder of their father and mother, sometimes of entire families, and even of those who thought they were dying, condemned to a life as a veteran. “Words that cannot be missed”, says Buffa, who also created the site www.iohovisto.it to include new testimonies.
An operation also necessary to restore justice to those who have never had it. For fifty years the concealment for reasons of state of the almost seven hundred files closed in the “cabinet of shame” (from the famous Franco Giustolisi investigation) weighed and later the sentences came too late. Sometimes the trials ended with an dismissal, as recently happened to the Stuttgart prosecutor who cleared seventeen SS operating in Sant’Anna di Stazzema.
Each testimony is unhappy in its own way, but there is almost always a recurring reason. The discharge of the machine gun and the sharp echo of the gutturals. The bitter smell of gunpowder and the sweetish smell of blood. The irrepressible instinct to flee, frozen by the sight of the fugitive stunned by bullets. The maternal body that acts as a shield, and falling on the child guarantees his safety under the heap of corpses. But among the many common threads that sink into pain, the frivolous gaze also emerges from time to time, the unexpected detail such as the colored handkerchief or the doll or the beautiful dress of the party, the tender detail that Paola Medri Buffa calls “the glimmer of light”, and that’s what allows you to start over. And to tell us what really happened, in the squares and in the forgotten farmhouses of seventy years ago.