A large tree obscures the new house in which Eitan lives, as if those who planted it years ago knew that one day they had to protect that child from the looks and attentions of the people, a little curious but above all moved by its history.
It is in a red brick building in a hamlet in the Pavia countryside that the only survivor of the Mottarone massacre is beginning to live again. The home of his paternal uncles, Aya and Or, where he used to go to play, has now become his home. Here he celebrated his sixth birthday, a few weeks after his discharge from the Regina Margherita hospital in Turin. Here, now that the fractures are healed, he has begun to take his first steps in the garden of the house again, clinging to the walkway that his paternal grandparents, who live in the house next door, have built to connect the two courtyards.
In the large room of the two cousins, the uncles have added a bed, desk and chair for him, just like those of the two girls, only in a different color. And slowly Eitan Biran is becoming in effect the new member of that family, as established by the tutelary judge who in recent days has confirmed the custody of aunt Aya. Doctor, able to translate the delicate clinical and judicial situation, very close to the child, between Italian and Hebrew: she immediately decided to take care of Eitan, when he was rescued from the sheets of cabin 3 of the cable car of Stresa. Next to him the lifeless bodies of 14 people including his mother Tal, his father Amit and his little brother Tom, two years old, who had participated on May 23 in that trip on Lake Maggiore during the trip to Italy of two great-grandparents, who arrived from Surprise Israel a few days earlier and died with the rest of the family. “At that moment they were moving and had other things to think about, but they were very happy with that visit from relatives – tell the friends – They were very well integrated here, but they were equally linked to the Jewish community and their roots in Israel”.
Since the day of the accident, several family members have been commuting between Tel Aviv and Pavia and it is between the two shores of the Mediterranean that Eitan’s affair has now turned into a furious offensive, when the maternal uncles Gal and Ron have defined the nephew ” hostage in Italy “, claiming to want to ask for his adoption to take him with them to Israel. Words that aroused bewilderment in Pavia, to which aunt Aya did not reply. It was the lawyers who responded with a signal of conciliation: “Eitan needs as much love as possible and there are doors open, indeed very open, to all members of the family who want to participate in this process, as long as they all look in the same direction and the goal for everyone is solely the good of the child. Later, when he grows up, he can make his own choices “, said lawyers Armando Simbari and Cristina Pagni.
Among the accusations made by the maternal branch of the family is mainly that of having enrolled Eitan in a Catholic school. “In reality it was Amit and Tal who enrolled him in the institute of the Canossian nuns, known in Pavia as an avant-garde school. Indeed, to be sure that they would take him in first grade, they had already enrolled him in the last year of kindergarten. it was aunt Aya who then followed them, also enrolling her daughters “, says Cristina Arina, who shared whole afternoons with Tal, at the Borgo Ticino oratory or in front of school to accompany the older children, while their bellies were growing of their second children, speaking of children and studies, of the distance psychology course that Tal had enrolled in and of what was missing from Amit’s degree, who like many compatriots had chosen Pavia for the Faculty of Medicine, following in the footsteps of his sister Aya .
Recently Tal and Amit had taken up residence in the Città Giardino neighborhood, closer to the ring road to Milan, where Amit worked in the morning in the service of the Jewish community. “Certainly in those who go to live far from their own country the thought of coming back every now and then there is, but their intention was to stay here in Pavia – says Piero Monni, a neighbor in the Borgo – When the accident happened, they had moved for a couple of weeks: there were still things to take away in the yard where our children grew up … “
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