Groscavallo, the country without Memory: not even a post to celebrate the Liberation

Yesterday morning, April 25, I woke up and received an invitation to participate in a celebration of Liberation Day in a town in my valley, the Val Grande di Lanzo, near Turin. I didn’t go because I thought it would be more appropriate to celebrate it in my town, Groscavallo. So I left the house, with a terrible wind whipping my face and a pale sun that warmed me in vain, and I headed towards San Bartolomeo, the hamlet of Groscavallo which houses the War Memorial. The names of the people from Groscavallo who fought the Resistance are engraved on the tombstone. Among these a partisan, Battista Mangiardi, and an Italian military internee who died in the Nazi concentration camps, Francesco Enrietta, who six years ago received the Medal of Honor in Memory from the Prime Minister.
The Municipality of Groscavallo has not planned any celebration, not even a symbolic post on the Instagram profile. I have been a municipal councilor of this municipality for four years. Minority.
I didn’t hesitate. I stood in front of the war memorial for a few minutes of recollection. No speech. No bands playing. Only silence, amplified by the solitude of the moment, in an objectively unique context: a large square overlooking the provincial road, the mountains over 3000 meters high in front of me. A friend, who was passing by and to whom I explained the reason for my gesture, took a photo of me (very beautiful and eloquent, I must admit) which a few minutes later I published on my personal Facebook profile. I explained in the text the reason for that gesture. I wanted to make it public to denounce the absence of any celebration, which is also provided for by a state law.
I never thought I’d capture so much attention and so much sensitivity.
My thoughts went to Simone Teich Alasia, a young Jewish doctor who joined the partisan formations of Groscavallo in 1944. In the elementary school of the Richiardi hamlet, he created, with the decisive collaboration of the local population, a small hospital that would also treat a wounded German. After the war Teich Alasia will be a distinguished surgeon of international renown, founder of the CTO Hospital of Turin and of the famous Department of Major Burns.