the partisans unjustly accused after the war – Corriere.it

“Will the world be able to give the right value to our actions”? “Once we get back to normal, will we be able to adapt to life, to a world made up of lies and hypocrisy or will we be misfits?”. These are questions that have long tormented the partisan Marisa Sacco (the only woman to be part of the III division “Giustizia e Libert” in the Langhe, under the command of Giorgio Agosti), who in the war of resistance had seen Romulus die, her youth love of her. A boy like you joined the gang, captured following an ambush and killed by the fascists on November 4, 1944 a few kilometers from Pinerolo, with a pistol shot in the mouth. “Sometimes at night I dream that I’m in a wood and I’m moving the autumn leaves and I don’t want to see the dead underneath. I was on the wrong side because I was still alive, I who would have continued looking for them all my life under the leaves that had fallen from the trees, who would never again be able to remember them with their faces”.

These words close Trial of the ResistanceThe book of the Einaudi history series by Michela Ponzani dedicated to a difficult theme, still difficult today: the legacy of the Resistance in the Republic, the way in which the State, after the tragedy of the dictatorship and the war, faced the season of rebuilding a unitary spirit, of a coexistence between Italians.

right to do so, not only because the date of April 25th is approaching, which we absurdly struggle to consider the feast of all Italians, but because of the feeling that in our national history the dramatic character of the conflict between freedom and authoritarianism has been removed too quicklybetween democracy and dictatorship that marked a good part of our twentieth century.

What Claudio Pavone courageously defined a civil war been overcome too quickly, removed and therefore continues to remain, under trace, in the conscience of the nation.

Michela Ponzani, in her book, takes us back to one of the perverse effects of the embarrassment and confusion that marked the country’s relationship after the Liberationwhose political balance will change profoundly in three years, however, with the struggle waged by thousands and thousands of Italians to counter the foreign occupation and bring about the definitive fall of fascism.

Who was responsible for ensuring the transition from dictatorship to democracy, who had to face the hard condition of the defeated and rebuild a system of international relations that would help the country recover, who had to participate in a new political conflict that was taking shape in a world that was discovering new fault lines, along the line of freedom, even among the ranks of winners; in short, whoever governed post-war Italy needed to close the previous season, to overcome it.

De Gasperi, on 10 June 1946, exclaimed these sorrowful words in front of the victorious countries: I feel that everything but your personal courtesy is against me: especially my qualification as a former enemy, which makes me consider as a defendant.

That speech, by someone who had fought the regime, was delivered as a representative of a defeated country that had contributed to the catastrophe of the war as an imprudent protagonist. Let us never forget that Mussolini spoke of a few thousand deaths to sit down at the table of victorstestimony not only of cynicism but of absolute strategic blindness.

Togliatti himself, with the amnesty that so many criticisms raised, set himself a similar objective he allowed the release of more than ten thousand fascists from prison (who knows what they would say today on social media), including service agents and those responsible for serious crimes.

Ponzani’s book documents a detailed case history of interpretative aberrations that the judiciary made of a legislative text that is already quite generous.

It’s worth what Piero Calamandrei wrote to Dante Livio Bianco as an example. The member of the black brigades who has looted the house of an anti-fascist and who perhaps still keeps the stolen furniture with him, could not individually be sentenced to compensation for damages or restitutions because his crime would be covered by the fact of war.

Many exponents of the Resistance were tried because it was above all the failure to equate the partisans to the effective members of the armed forces, for open the door to a judgment of irregularity for resistance actionsevaluated as episodes of common crime.

The author adds: And while former fascists and collaborators of the CSR, perpetrators of massacres and crimes against civilians, would have been acquitted, rehabilitated and even pardoned for having “obeyed superior military orders” or simply for their nature “as good fathers of family”, the partisans would have been judged as responsible (albeit indirectly) for the reprisals unleashed by the Nazi-fascistsfor not surrendering to the enemy.

the case of the Fosse Ardeatine. That absurd massacre, in which innocent children were killed, has been discussed for years not due to the ferocity of the Nazis or the collaboration of the fascists who compiled the lists, but to question the legitimacy of partisan action that was part of the war at ‘foreign occupier. Wrote the Cassation in 1954, about the Gappist partisans called to the dockhow it was inconceivable that what was now legitimately considered an act of war and indeed, as such, worthy of special mention could be classified as illicit and he added, to avoid a reversal of the roles of responsibility: Not criminals, on the one hand, but combatants; not mere victims of a harmful action on the other but fallen for the homeland.

There were many bloody and unjustifiable pages in the time of the civil war, crimes carried out by partisans without these being really motivated by the fight against the Nazis or the Fascists. I am referring, for example, to the massacre of Porzs, to the crime of don Pessina for which he pag, not only for a manipulated trial but also for the silence of his party, the innocent Germano Nicolini, or the killing of a Catholic trade unionist, Giuseppe Fanin.

But roles and responsibilities cannot be reversed in historical judgment. Just as we cannot forget the closet of shame, with the wrongly filed data of the Nazi massacres of 1944. Or the escape of Kappler, Walter Reder pardoned who said of Marzabotto I have nothing to reproach myself for, Kesselring, released from prison in 1952, Priebke fled to Argentina.

For me, an irrefutable phrase by Vittorio Foa addressed to Giorgio Pisan, senator of the MSI, who in a debate proposed undue comparisons is always valid: One moment. If we talk about the dead, that’s fine. The dead are dead: let’s respect them all. But if you talk about when they were alive, they were different. If you had won, I’d still be in prison. Since we won, you are a senator.

This, simple, is the difference between freedom and dictatorship.