a Nazi-fascist massacre of civilians made to the sound of music – Corriere.it

The massacre of San Terenzo Monti, in August 1944, was consumed to the sound of a barrel organ. 159 people were killed, mostly women and children. It was the Nazis, to avenge the killing of sixteen of their own, which took place during a partisan action two days earlier. There were no edicts or invitations to surrender, the Nazis didn’t do that, they simply applied the accounting of the “banality of evil” as accountants: one of them was worth ten Italians.

Certainly Nazis, led by Walter Reder. The same ones who in those days, while fleeing defeated from Italy’s insurrection and from the arriving allies, killed 69 people in Nozzano, 560 in Sant’Anna di Stazzema, 162 in Vinca, 12 in Farneta, 159 in the Fosse del Frigido, 72 in Bergiola Foscalina, 770 in Marzabotto: 1963 victims in two monthsmostly women and children.

In San Terenzo they were not alone, however. As always. With them, playing the accordion while those poor people drowned in blood, there were the Italian fascists, in that case the republican soldiers of the Black Brigade of Livorno. One hundred took part in the massacre which took place at dawn on 19 August. Eleven of them were sentenced to life imprisonment for that horrendous massacre, but a few years later they were released and amnestied.

In An autumn in August (published by Chiarelettere), the beautiful book in which Agnese Pinidirector of newspapers, recounted (through the memory of her grandmother Iolanda), sinking the scalpel into her agony, that forgotten massacre in which her great-grandmother (Palmira Ambrosini) died, she remembers the ruthlessness of the fascists who escaped justice: «It was Giovanni Tomagnini known as Sergio, corporal, to quarter a nine months pregnant woman in Vinca: her name was Alfonsina Marchi… It was Sergeant Giovanni Bragazzi who gave the order to throw a two-month-old baby into the air, while five black shirts dressed as Nazis shot her in the air… It was Italo Masetti who threw a hand grenade inside a farmhouse to exterminate the women and children…».

They are, to say it, the procedural papers of theItaly that, after the war, in a hurry wanted to bury what had been. Perhaps a necessary operation: Italy certainly needed to look beyond the hell she had lived through: the dictatorship, the war, hunger, foreign occupation, the civil war, the bombings. She had to start living again and bury the hatred that fascism had generated among Italians. All true.

But what Agnese Pini courageously writes is also true: «In Italy there was never a Nuremberg, and if on the one hand judicial clemency succeeded in facilitating an apparent path of peace – which would soon be shattered in red and black terrorism – on the other it failed to build a deep, vital and strong conscience of the people and of the country on the and on the crimes for which the Italians essentially acquitted themselves. With great haste and just as lightly ».

Agnese Pini has combined the meticulous effort of the reporter of money order, who reconstructs facts through testimonies and documents, the strength of a warm writing, sometimes burning in the ability to describe, one by one, the stories of those children, of their mothers, of the illusion of finding salvation when war and ferocity transform people into pieces to be counted. People, not names. Pini tells of a man who, in order to save his family, was forced by the Nazis to look for people to exchange and resolved to stop two poor girls who were then killed.

Pini tells of the little girl, Maria, who he sees his parents mowed down by a machine gun discharge and takes shelter in the icy water to save herself, only to be looked after by the village priest who will die before her eyes, killed by the Nazis. Ironically, Maria’s surname was called Vangeli.

The massacre takes place in two acts. Fifty-three prisoners were hanged first and then an entire community was exterminated with bursts of machine guns. Only a little girl, Clara, survived by pretending to be deadand many years later she said resignedly: «What do you want them to do justice after sixty years, than to lose your mother…».

“The closet of shame” in which the papers of the massacres were forgotten for decades is the testimony of the cynicism with which the word an end was written to something that still lasts and tortures generations of Italians. The military prosecutor Marco De Paolis, one of the few who have tried to fight the removal, tells the author that once he reached the Nazis directly responsible for the massacres he had found them: «All inevitably old, but still full of cruelty and hatred ». They were convicted, but none got a day in jail.

These massacres of 1944, Agnese Pini emphasizes, were always carried out to the detriment of the least, of the peasants who lived on the fruits of their fields and on the work to make the animals grow. The Nazis first raided animals, confiscated food and then killed and rapedthey tortured.

Who will read An autumn in August he will hear all this not as a distant story, but he will feel its terrible, unexpected relevance. Bucha is not in Tuscany in the twentieth century, but today in our wounded and mad world, which forgets, removesrepeats the horrors of war and dictatorships.