Rescued from the Ragman

Einaudi, 2009

L’ultimo fronte (“The Last Front”) is Nuto Revelli’s presentation and selection of letters sent by Italian soldiers who didn’t return from the war. In his introduction to a revised edition of the book, he notes that many of the collections of letters he obtained, most sent by alpini serving in the Soviet Union to farm families in the province of Cuneo, happened to be missing the final letters—that is, those posted around Christmas and New Year’s of 1943, just before the Soviets broke through the Axis lines on the Don and put an effective end to the Italian military postal service. But it is perhaps better to let Revelli tell the tale of these missing letters himself:

It has been twenty years since L’ultimo fronte was first published, and yet, for many people, this book is still living and topical. Just as well that, after the research for La strada del davai, I didn’t say, “Enough about the war.” It was gathering the 200 collections of letters for L’ultimo fronte that I entered the peasant world. Without that precious experience, I would never have written either Il mondo dei vinti or L’anello forte.

In the introduction to the 1970 edition, I assert that, covering the length and breadth of my province, going from one house to the next, I collected 6,000 letters—that is, 80 complete and 120 incomplete collections. I then mention 4,000 other letters, those from “Presenti alle Bandiere,” [a fund that made monetary allocations to the family members of the fallen or missing in action in the Second World War], letters acquired, when they had already been sent off to be pulped, in an altogether unexpected fashion. What I don’t say is that I got them from a Cuneo ragman. I had kept this unsettling detail to myself, because I had thought it would humiliate and offend the family members of the dead and the missing. But I realized, as a member of the “Lvov Commission,” that history is still being abused, and I mean to censor myself no longer, come what may.

Bureaucracy is really an awful monstrosity. Lord only knows who the bureaucrat from Rome who forced all of the families of the dead and the missing to go without their last letters was! This was the blackmail: “Show, by submitting your last letter, that your family member was on a battlefront rather than at home or it will not be possible to create an official file that will enable you to receive a monthly allocation equal to the pay or the salary received by the dead or missing combatant.”

It had taken me a while to realize the last letters were missing. I acquired the collections of letters, photocopied them, then saw about returning the originals—I put a lot into this work. I didn’t have the time to take a close look at the documentation I was acquiring day after day.

I noticed something wasn’t right only when I began the second phase of my work. Comparing the collections of letters from the Eastern Front, I noticed that almost all of them came to an end too soon, around mid-December. And the letters from Christmas and New Year’s? The military postal service of the Alpino Army Corps, and thus of the Cuneense Division, had been operational until early January 1943!

I thought that the family members had withheld the last letters, the most precious ones, and I sought confirmation. But all were sure they had given me every single one of the letters. Then, a woman from Malandrè, in Robilante, remembered she might have had to give the last letter to the police. Another woman told me she might have had to turn it over to city hall. “Could they have ended up at the recruiting office?” I wondered, even though such a destination seemed to me not only highly unlikely but also senseless.

So I turned to Lieutenant Colonel Enzo Chiorando, my close friend, who, after a brief inquiry, located the sixteen sacks containing all of the paperwork for the “Presenti alle Bandiere” in an attic of the military recruiting office. Enclosed with each file was the last letter!

How to deal with the problem? Enzo suggested that I go the official route:

“Ask the recruiting office to return the last letter to all of the families that gave you collections of letters. If your request is turned down, we’ll see what we can do to get around the obstacles.”

My request was turned down:

“These are confidential, untouchable documents meant for the archives in Rome,” I was told.

I took my work up again, but my obsession was to be able to add the last letters to my collections of letters. Enzo went on setting my mind at ease:

“Don’t worry,” he would tell me. “I’m keeping an eye on those letters. We’ll solve the problem sooner or later, you’ll see.”

He calls me one morning:

“Nuto, I have bad news for you. I was on holiday—”

“I know what you’re going to say. Where did the letters end up?”

“They’ve been sent to be pulped. A group of alpini on fatigues showed up to clear out the attic and threw everything onto a truck. That’s all I can tell you.”

I made it at a run to a nearby paper mill, where I was told they bought paper sorted by type and color, not mixed. I had to turn to the ragpickers. I found them, finally, the sixteen sacks, in Cuneo, in the warehouse of the first ragman I turned to. They were still intact. The negotiations went on a long time, as complications and fears emerged. Finally, I closed the deal. Those 4,000 “Presenti alle Bandiere” files didn’t cost me much: 25,000 lire in all.

Nuto Revell, on the Davai Road Again

In La strada del davai (Einaudi, 1966), Nuto Revelli, himself a veteran of the retreat from the Don in January 1943, speaks to more than two dozen former Italian prisoners of war in the Soviet Union. These PoWs were held in the Soviet Union until after the end of the war and thus did not experience the partisan warfare, following Marshal Badoglio's September 8, 1943, radio announcement of Italy's surrender to the Allies, of northern and central Italy. The partisans, of course, were held up as heroes after the war. The survivors of captivity in Russia were all but forgotten.

As Revelli notes in his preface to the book, it is the raw fury of one of these forgotten men, the madman "Mauthausen," that prompts his realization that the war has not left his blood, that he, a former officer, has a debt to pay to the men who did not return from Russia and to those who returned broken.

Contrada Mondovì in Cuneo, Italy--Photo: G. F. Fanti

It was “Mauthausen”—a poor madman I met by chance—who stirred up this tangle of resentments of mine, of repressed rage, of fanciful meditations, of disappointments, of defeats. “Mauthausen,” in telling me of his war, spoke a true language, intact, not worn out by time. His memories of the war were my memories of the war. But less filtered, less reworked, sparer, more authentic. “Mauthausen” was a madman, one of the many wrecks of war discharged only in appearance. But war is madness, and every one of “Mauthausen’s” curses, every one of his shouts, was a sacrosanct truth. As “Mauthausen” hurled oaths I relived my nights in the open, I experienced the forty degrees below zero again, the collective madness, the crying colonels, the obsessive shout “fire… fire,” the abandoned wounded, the gangrene, the snow, so much snow and so many dead. It was the complete chapter of the retreat from Russia reemerging from my poorly healed wounds. Listening to “Mauthausen,” I realized my war was still in my blood, like a cancer; I realized I had a large debt to pay.

I sought a dialogue; I approached my first witness, Mattio, along the mule tracks that connect the stunted Bosco dell’Impero and the ancient world of Tetto Giordano and Tetto Cannone upstream from Roccasparvera. Then, still in the area of the Bosco dell’Impero I met Renaldi, a wise and self-assured farmer from Vignolo. Renaldi was raking leaves… Renaldo and I talked about this and that, about his people, about the poverty of the mountains. I spoke about the Second World War and about the dangers of a third world war. We’re all generals! The army is the only branch of the state that the citizen gets to know through and through. The soldiers of my generation know a lot about it. After eight or ten years of military life, after years of war, they still remember everything about the army. They speak, in almost technical language, about weapons, tactics, maneuvers, organization, and disorganization. They speak above all about defeats, about retreats! Renaldi agreed to arrange meetings for me with some of the Russia veterans around Vignolo. Antonio Nova, Giuseppe Giraudo, Dalmazzo Giraudo, Andrea Serale… They were almost clandestine meetings, in houses, in barns. I wanted my witnesses to speak as free men, in a peaceful environment, in an environment far from that of the claims staked by the usual combat, confessional, and political imperatives. 

There were bounds—the retreat and captivity in Russia—to my particular interest. Recording was impossible; it intimidated the witnesses. The best thing was to take shorthand. To prepare the witnesses, I had asked them to tell me everything from the start, from their first day of military life. The first part of the stories would be a warm up, talk I wouldn’t use. 

With total rigor, as if I were gathering evidence, I wrote everything down, noting even the emotions of my interlocutors, their long silences, their fits of weeping, their moments of abandon. But soon enough I realized the whole stories of the witnesses fascinated me, not just the war in Russia.

The bibliography on the Second World War includes hundreds of diaries, stories, and memoirs. But, as always, it’s the so-called men of letters who have written for the humble, for the unlettered. Our generals have written dozens of memoirs, often full of wretched belated accusations, often dry like the outlines of maneuvers in formation. Missing was the peasant’s war, the mountain dweller’s, the laborer’s, the poor tubercular, malarial, nephritic fellow’s, the never-ending war. My ultimate aim was but one: for the soldier finally to “write” his war, too.

With research devoid of set plans, entrusted to chance, to whatever turned up, I thought I could get a large enough sample of experiences.

“Mauthausen” curses the war, the country, everything. He doesn’t talk; he shouts. “How many gold medals does the Julia have?” he shouts. “Tell me how many gold medals the Julia has.” He shouts and cries. “They say I’m crazy. Was I crazy when I went off to be a soldier? If I was crazy why did they say I was fit?”

“He’s a pain in the ass,” the bien-pensants say of him, “he’s just acting crazy.”

Pinu d’ Rússia has war on the brain, too. He lives like a stray dog, telling his stories full of madness. After the war he was committed for two years to the asylum for the criminally insane in Aversa. The few people who still listen to him say: “He can thank Mussolini!”

Mattio is raking leaves; his hill is a wilderness, a mountain. His life is all here:

“Eighty months of military service, France, Albania, Russia. I started when I was twenty and finished when I was thirty. By the time I was six I was out of school; I was earning my bread: if you’re a jackass, you live like an ass. I carry everything on my back just like a beast of burden. But if you have some schooling you don’t work this way. A wretched life. There’s no water here, there’s no electricity, no roads. We’re godforsaken. When the tax bill comes we pay our pittance. In the summer, I take care of the land; in the other seasons I go down and do day labor here and there, but I can’t work out anything permanent. The old proverb is right: ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss.’ But I have no way out. A ciabot [small farm] on the plain would give me enough to live on, but I don’t have the guts to rent one. I’d like a steady job in a factory, but how to find one? I’m almost fifty, I have five mouths to feed, and it’s late.”

Marro works a small ciabot just outside Cuneo. He’s tired, sick, old, a specter in the raging economic miracle. “We’ve been forgotten,” he says to me, “not even a plaque in Passatore in memory of our eighteen dead. Let there not ever be any more wars. Even now I often dream and suffer: I dream I’m a prisoner of the Russians.”

Arlotto manages a gas station. He’s tired, sick with gloom. He has never told his story, not even to his father, who fought in the First World War.

Sasso left the countryside after ten years of working like a dog. He’s sick; his liver is killing him; he stands up by force of will. He helps his wife in a bar on the outskirts of town. “I would have liked to write my story,” he says to me, “the story of the stupid and horrible war. I’d like to write; I’d like to thank the people in Russia who helped me. But I keep putting it off…”

Beltramo is a farmer. He doesn’t have the strength to work the land. “I weighed eighty-three kilos when I left for the Eastern Front. In June 1944, in Siberia, I was down to forty-eight kilos. The camp doctors often weighed us; they said if we lost more than half our normal weight we wouldn’t survive. Today I barely manage to get up to sixty-six kilos, and I’m always tired, tired like an old man.”

Galaverna, a former laborer, caught TB in Russia. His house looks like an izba. He’s on a war pension.

Antonio Nova works for a contractor cutting and tying rebar. A life of poverty, picking up crumbs from the building boom. “I’m almost done for,” he says to me, “no strength, a wreck. With my children still young.”

Viale, once a farmer, runs a village tobacco shop. Like all the former prisoners from Russia, he’s sick, and it’s his first time talking, telling his story: “Our fathers never stopped talking about the First World War. Even now they talk about it with each other, they bring it up again, they tell stories. For me, for us, it’s completely different. I’ve never told anyone my story; you suffer again when you tell it. And whoever hasn’t gone through that experience can’t understand it, can’t believe it.”

Giuseppe Castellino, farmer, Western Front, Albania, captivity in Russia, has gone through intimidating amounts of agony and injustice. He’s more dead than alive, hollowed out by fevers and by struggles. But when he recalls the heroic Major Annoni he comes to life again, lights up. Castellino has the right to ten war pensions; he has his papers in order. But the bureaucracy for war pensions is a monster: no small number of the workings of our bureaucratic machine are worse than epidemic typhus. Twenty years later Castellino is still waiting, setting store by the “judges,” the “gurus from Rome.”

Giordano, a mountain dweller, lives in the Upper Grana Valley: “Our land is poor; we’re cut off from the world. I have small children and I don’t have the courage to go down to the plain. It’s just as well a lot of people were smart and ran off to the plain. The best-looking young man, if he wants to live in the mountains, won’t find anybody to marry. The girls go down to work and they get married there so they don’t have to come back to the mountains. In my village there’s a church, but it doesn’t have a priest.”

Giuseppe Giraudo, born in 1916, laborer, the Western Front, Albania, Russia, and a lot of wretchedness, had a “tired” heart and no war pension. He died in 1962.

Giovan Battista Dutto is a day laborer: in addition, he helps his wife work five acres of tenanted land. “I gave the country ten years,” he says to me. “I have four small children to raise. I need five kilos of bread a day. Because of my malaria, two or three times a year I shake like a leaf and my spleen gets this big, like two fists. I asked for a pension, but I never got anything. This morning I got the ballot for the next elections and I said to myself: ‘May God never send any more wars.’”

*

This is the world that inflames me and dismays me.

They knew nothing of fascism. In the easy days they weren’t members of the fascist youth: they lived free, far from the great national happenings. They didn’t even have the black shirt: at most, they could come up with a few set phrases, Mussolini’s miracles, and nothing else.

They became a mob on only one occasion, when, drafted, they went to “draw their number.” Then, like bands of rebels, they descended on the city with their accordions and clarinets. Under cover of the colors of the annual contingent everything was permitted. They sang, danced, drank. Shy as they were, they often went too far: young girls had to give them a wide berth. They sang the anti-militaristic songs of their elders. Their favorite refrain, “col vigliac d’la testa plà, l’ha fame abil a fé ’l suldà,” [That bald-headed coward declared me fit for service] they shouted twenty times, in anger, in defiance, even though they had asked to be Alpini. If you weren’t an Alpino, you were at best a reject.

All of them, the survivors of captivity in Russia, are exceptional men. It wasn’t just luck that helped them survive: they have antennae at their disposal; they have rare virtues.

Today, as they did before the great ordeal, they live on the margins of society, detached from the environment around them. They all bear a deep, hidden mark. They are sick, tired, old, falling to pieces. They all had the right to a pension, but the war pensions bureaucracy is an impassable wall: only the shrewd, the cunning, can get around it.

They tell their stories and they suffer. It’s the first time they tell all or almost all. As they talk they yield; they weep.

Castelmagno, alta valle Grana, province of Cuneo, Italy--photo: M. Plassio

In village houses, on farms, when the wife and children are listening, the story is less cruel, more humane. In taverns they don’t want witnesses; outsiders can’t understand; they can’t believe. Hardly any of them have ever read a book on the war. They don’t curse. They don’t hide the truth; only victory is embellished. They say terrible things, shocking things, with the simplicity of someone who is reencountering the past intact. They are ingenuous, resigned, today as much as then.

The war in Ethiopia, the Western Front, and the campaign in Greece are engraved in their memories. But when they relive the retreat from Russia, when they relive captivity in Russia, they go into a trance. Their faces go tense, their hands shake, madness resurfaces in their astonished gazes. It’s cruelty to urge them to tell their stories, to make them talk.

They talk about Albania, about Greece, Yugoslavia, Austria, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Siberia, Mongolia. And then they may not even know where Russia is on the map. Some of the witnesses ask me who those civilians—the Jews—were who marked the long route of the troop trains heading toward the Eastern Front!

They don’t know the war against the Soviet Union was a total war. They don’t know that Hitler’s “new order” was our plan, that three million Soviet prisoners were killed or made to die of hunger and exhaustion, that millions of Russian civilians were deported to Germany. They don’t know that in the Soviet rear the population was starving to death; they don’t know that the lunacy of Hitler and Mussolini cost twenty million Russians their lives, that six million Jews died in the gas chambers, in the ovens, in the Nazi death camps.

September 8 doesn’t belong to their past; they are mutilated. Not having seen “Badoglio’s mess,” they can’t believe it; not bearing the marks of that anguish, they can’t understand; not having chosen then, they didn’t choose later.

Our struggle for liberation—a war of volunteers, of the people, of rebels—is incomprehensible to the survivors of captivity: they consider it an insignificant chapter of the war. In Cuneo and the valleys quite a few families lost one son in Russia and another in the partisan war. But the partisans, in the talk of the former prisoners, are the phony heroes of an easy war, of a phony war, phony because it was fought at home.

Departure for the Hereafter and Return

Nuto Revelli

Nuto Revelli (Cuneo, 1919-2004) took part in the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union and survived the winter retreat from the Don. In the fall of 1943, not long after his return to Italy, Revelli became a partisan commander. After the war, he managed an iron-products warehouse and began the research, traveling the length and breadth of his province, for what would ultimately be eight impure books, impure in that they combine anthropology, oral history, sociology, and memoir (not to mention a subtle literary dialogue with the fictional work of his excellent countryman Beppe Fenoglio) but do not fit squarely into any one of these categories. Revelli himself, often called an oral historian, an anthropologist, a sociologist, a writer, invariably protested: by training, as he always reminded his audience, he was a geometra, a land surveyor.

In September 1972, as part of his research for Il mondo dei vinti (“The World of the Defeated”; Einaudi, 1977), Revelli takes the testimony of one Bartomoleo Garro. Garro, born in San Benigno, a hamlet in the outskirts of Cuneo, Italy, in 1922, is a peasant and tradesman. In 1945, Garro was a partisan in the Twentieth Brigade. His testimony, from which the excerpt below is taken, is titled “I Know the Fascists Who Shot Me”:

At ten o’clock on February 2, 1945—it was a Friday morning; it was Candlemas—the service in the San Benigno parish church started. Before the mass the priest had to give the big candle to the penitents and la paiütta, the small candle, to the faithful. I made it to the square in front of the church when the service had already started. In the church there were two hundred people, men, women, and children. While I was outside the church chatting with a few men, I see a motorcycle and sidecar with a Breda machine gun mounted on it. We scatter. I try to get through the door to the church, but the motorcycle stops in front of it and one of the Fascists shouts: “Don’t move, or we’ll shoot.” A truck with twenty armed Fascists shows up. They’re wearing heavy leather jackets, they’re from police headquarters, from the Cuneo police. They are commanded by a lieutenant, Frezza, a short and squat fellow, ’n tupun, a mole, about this tall.

When they came up, the Fascists opened fire on Dutto and a disbanded soldier: by some miracle, Dutto got away, but the soldier, a southerner, was killed.

The Fascists assemble all of us who were on the square in front of the church. Then they go into the church, grab some other young men, and bring them out. They make the women and children stay in the church. Then they go back into the church, call the priest. When the priest comes over, Lieutenant Frezza starts shouting: “You’re in cahoots with the rebels. You warned them of the danger by ringing the bells.” The priest had had the small bell rung not to signal the arrival of the Fascists but, as usual, to signal the start of mass. The priest says to Frezza: “Here we always ring the bell before mass.” “Go back to your place, go back to your church. I respect your vestments and the stole you wear. But these young men are for us to take care of.” Lieutenant Frezza comes over to my group; we’re lined up against the wall now. He asks us for our papers, wants to know where each of us spent the night. He kicks and slaps us.

Among us is a married fellow. Lieutenant Frezza pulls him out of the group. Another fellow has his papers in order; he was born in 1922. He pulls him out of the group. There are sixteen of us left. By my side is Bartolomeo Degiovanni, Trumlinot, born in 1926. “Speak up,” I say to him, “tell him what year you were born.” He answers me: “I don’t have the courage to speak up. The lieutenant is too furious.” So I intervene. “This boy is a youngster,” I say to the lieutenant. “He was born in 1926 and doesn’t have to report for military service yet.” Then Trumlinot takes heart and speaks up. “Lieutenant,” he says, “I don’t have to report yet; I haven’t been called up. As soon as I’m called up I’ll report.” Giorgis and Giacoma were born in 1926, too, and they speak up, step forward. They are safe. There are thirteen of us left, all sons of peasants, all innocent, in front of the firing squad.

The machine gun is adjusting the elevation; it is making us its target. I have the feeling the volleys won’t hit me, maybe they’ll hit me in the right arm because I’m the last one in the row. Lieutenant Frezza shouts: “You’re all criminals, all bandits. You go out at night and thieve and kill and now you want to be spared.” Then he orders his men to open fire. I hear five bursts, don’t see anyone standing around me anymore. I’m still standing. “I’m alone,” I think. All the others have fallen onto the snow and they are shouting and crying. Lieutenant Frezza orders his men to open fire again; someone with a Sten fires at me. I fall forward; I’ve taken a bullet to the chest. I hear moaning, I hear separate shots from the machine gun. They are the deathblows. Finally, a complete silence. A Fascist shouts: “Lieutenant, this one’s still alive.” When I fell forward I hit my chin; I have blood in my mouth. I try to get up to catch my breath, but when I put out my hands to push myself up I see Frezza near me with the machine gun. I hear a shot—bang—and fall back down. I black out. The lieutenant tried to shoot me in the temple just as I was moving, so the bullet went in beneath my right ear and came out beneath my left ear. I feel people touching me, I hear friendly voices. I hear people saying: “Bring the holy oil.” My poor mother was at mass and knew I was up against the wall. Now that the Fascists have opened the door to the church and taken off, my mother runs out to see the tragedy, too. The poor woman, my face is so bloody she doesn’t recognize me.

Little by little, I come to; I see my mother, who is crying, kiss me. There are some people who say to carry me off, to get me help. But nobody moves. They’re afraid the Fascists will come back; the massacre has left them in shock. I stay there two hours, with two or three of the bravest people by my side. Then a good man, Giovanni Gallo, goes to get na siviera, a ladder to use as a stretcher, and he puts me on it. But no one dares pick up the other end of the stretcher. So Gallo runs to get a handcart, puts me on it, takes me to the Oggero family’s barn right there by the church. I hear people praying, I hear the priest saying: “He going to die any minute now, he’s dying, he’s dying.” I hear people whispering, people saying: “If the Fascists come they’ll burn the house.” Everybody is afraid. I can’t talk. My jaw is fractured and my tongue is burned. But I say to myself: “No, no, I’m not dying.” And I make a sign with a finger. With a finger I say: “No, no, I’m not dying.” I am alive. “Run and get a doctor,” says someone.

Before coming, the doctor from Tarantasca, Vezzosi, wants Lieutenant Frezza’s permission. He calls him, says to him: “One of the victims of the execution in San Benigno is still alive. I’ve been asked to go to his aid. May I treat him?” Lieutenant Frezza says to him: “Go ahead and treat him, heal him. Since the bullets didn’t kill him I’ll come later to see him hang.”

Doctor Vezzosi says I have to be admitted to the hospital right away. But no one dares take me. Finally, a good fellow with a family, Bartolomeo Fantino, Trumlin, puts me on his cart. Ahead of the cart is the old civil guardsman of San Benigno and behind it, on bicycles, are my father and my uncle.

By the time we make it to the Santa Croce Hospital in Cuneo it’s dark; it’s seven o’clock. The doctors look at me, treat me. A Fascist stands guard over me. During the night my chest wound starts bleeding again. I’m losing blood out my back, I’m bleeding to death. The Fascist on guard stops them from giving me a transfusion. They give me oxygen. I come to.

After seventeen days in the hospital, Doctor Delfino and the nuns advise my parents to get me out. They have found out that the Fascists are planning to arrest me. My father turns up at three in the morning. He takes me to the stables of the Tre Muletti Inn, where they cover me with straw. When the curfew is over, they disguise me as a nun; my head is all wrapped in white. They put me on a break, one of the closed ones of the kind the nuns use to go out and collect money. My father sits next to me, and there’s a woman driving the break. We make it past the checkpoint, leave Cuneo.

In San Benigno I keep hidden. Doctor Vezzosi comes to treat my wounds every day. After a month, Doctor Vezzosi and Doctor Toselli have to operate on my jaw because I can’t close my mouth anymore. They strap me down to the kitchen table and operate on me! Then I get a little better, so I spend the days hiding between the stacks of meliàs, of corn, in the country.

I know the Fascists who shot me. I run into some of them on the streets in Cuneo. When I see them I avoid them. One time I ran into the one who was driving the sidecar motorcycle and I insulted him. He wanted to lodge a complaint against me. “I was already sentenced once,” he said to me. “You’re not going to sentence me, too. Be careful, or I’ll get you sent to jail.” Well! After the Liberation the trial of the Fascists from San Benigno lasted four months. Frezza was sentenced to life in prison, but he was released almost immediately. Now, he’s better off than me.^[1]

---

[1] After the Liberation, Bartolomeo Garro reconstructed the massacre of San Benigno in a few pages of notes. He titled these pages “Departure for the Hereafter and Return.”

The Davai Road

In La strada del davai (Einaudi, 1966) Nuto Revelli takes the testimony of forty veterans of the Italian campaign in the Soviet Union. Giuseppe Castellino, born in 1916, a peasant with a third-grade education, fought in the western Alps, in Italy's Balkan campaign, and on the Don, where, in January 1943, not far from Valuyki, he was taken prisoner. In November 1945, after two years in a prison camp in Central Asia, he is finally nearing his home in Roccadebaldi, a small village in the province of Cuneo.

In Turin, at the garrison mess hall, they refuse us a meal. They want the vouchers. I still have an image of the Madonna the priest gave me in Milan and three apples. I offer the orderly the image, but he’s not all that interested in it; he wants the voucher.

We sit there for a long time. The orderly yawns; he wants to go to bed. We haven't eaten; we're not sleepy. A major pretends not to see us, not to hear us. He goes on reading his paper undisturbed.

“Good grief,” I say, “so many bombs killed so many good people. At least one of them could have landed here.”

The major finally looks at me. “Where are you coming from?” he says to me.

“Captivity.”

“I know. But where from?”

“Russia.”

“Have you eaten?”

“No, we don't have vouchers.”

Then he tells the orderly to bring us something to eat. Vegetable soup, a few noodles with a little rice, beans, stuff of no substance, for rearing, not for fattening.

In the morning the mess hall closes. We wait in the lobby for the first train.

On the trip people ask where we are coming from. But I’m already stuffed, and I say only: “You hardly need to ask. Just look at us.”

A long transfer in Fossano because the bridge over the Stura is destroyed. I get off on my own. But then I can’t get back on the train. Battista Basso, the cowherd who winters in Crava, helps me. He pulls me up, while the train waits for me.

I get off in Magliano. It’s November 4. I set my rucksack down by the tracks, sit down on it. Then I go to wash my face. Finally, I go back to sit down on my rucksack, and I stay there a long time.

Gallo, the railway hand, takes a good look at me. “Ma ses Castlin?” he says to me. “Castlin,” I say to him. “T’lü seti che l’è spusase tua sorela?” [“But are you Castellino?” “Castellino.” “You know your sister got married?”] I keep quiet; I don’t say anything else.

An hour later the stationmaster comes to talk to me. He wants me to call the car rental man Dogliani. But I don’t want to.

My rucksack is empty, but heavy. The stationmaster keeps it in left luggage, gives me a receipt. “Send for it later,” he says to me.

I start walking. First stage, two hundred meters, to the Canetta farmstead. There I stop. Second stage, three hundred meters, to the Carleveri church. I have only one thought in mind: what will I find at home?

I have trouble walking. I run into my uncle who is on his way to Morozzo by bike. I raise a hand, stop him. “Ciao barba,” [Hello, Uncle] I say to him. Then I go quiet, out of breath, so weak I am. He has gotten fat. Then the watchman Giulio comes up and stops to talk.

I set out again, alone. I run into a villager, who goes with me for a while. “They said Candela is dead, then that he’s alive,” he tells me several times. I listen; I know the story; I don’t want to say anything either about the dead or about the living. I say only: “Sarà pru, sarà pru.” [So it is, so it is]

At the Pasquero tavern I go in like a wretch. “I have no money,” I say first thing. “Am I not capable of giving you something?” replies the innkeeper, and he offers me a vermouth.

I drink, and the innkeeper sees my feathers are drooping, the way it is with sick hens. Then he takes out my glass, moves it to one side the way you do with TB patients.

I set out for home again. I go by a young fellow from my village. His back is turned to me; he’s putting an edge on his sickle. “You need a hand?” I say to him. Silence. I ask again, this time louder. But he keeps working. I call him by name: “Lorenzo.” Finally, he recognizes my voice, takes me to his house, gives me a glass of wine, a cigarette. So I start coughing; I vomit. Lorenzo goes to let my family know, my mother, my father, my brother, who was in Russia with the Fourth Baggage Train and who made it through the retreat.

Day after day of confusion follows. People come from everywhere; the courtyard looks like a bicycle depot. Everyone wants to know, but after half an hour I have no more strength. They ask me: “How was it there?” and I say only: “Look at me.” The nights are long; I never sleep. The night of the eighth, the eve of the feast of the Madonna, my father promises me a special dinner, a bell pepper stew and polenta, for the next day.

I go to the garden to pick the peppers; I eat a lot of them raw while I am picking them. That way, my stomach swells like a balloon, just the way it did in the camps in Russia.

“Al Ninot,” I say to myself then, “I’m an old hand, I know how to save my skin.” I struggle back in; I stretch out on the table, throw up.

When my mother comes up I’m more dead than alive. But then it’s all over.

I’m idle for days and days, watching everybody else working. I gain a kilo a day. A month later I can’t see the tips of my shoes. But I have no strength. Finally, I deflate.

You can’t be in the country and not do anything. So, little by little, out of necessity, I start working again. But the fever torments me.

The war. I’ll go to the bridge over the Stura, which is high, sooner than go through my war again. If my wife gives birth to a son I’ll strangle him sooner than have him live like me. We have a “government,” an unjust society. I can’t work; I’m more dead than alive. I have a War Cross that doesn’t do me any good. I’m unfit for work for two years. But no war pension.

I don’t want to hear of the Germans; they have little to do with me. I’d like to take our people who want communism to Russia to eat a little of the “quota” bread; they’ll teach them there.

The few of us from Russia are in bad shape. TB or chronic disease. The men who are in fairly good health have another weakness; they’re alcoholics.

Injections keep me on my feet. Chronic nephritis, a contracted kidney, malaria, palpitations that send me running off and my wife who shouts: “Ma cos’eti, cos’eti,” [What’s wrong? What’s wrong?] and I feel myself dying. That’s what war is.

Back in Italy

On 17 March 1943, at half past five in the morning, Nuto Revelli's troop train pulls into the station in Tarvisio, Italy. Behind him are six months of fighting in the Soviet Union, the catastrophic winter retreat from the Don. In a cafe in Udine, Revelli, in bad shape after the long ordeal, catches sight of himself and laments that only his boots say that he is perhaps an officer.

But Revelli is one of the lucky ones. The Cuneense, the Alpini division that recruits from his home province of Cuneo, has been annihilated, its men killed in combat, frozen to death, or taken prisoner and sent to PoW camps from which few will ever return. The local Fascists have the division parade through the streets of the city of Cuneo. Revelli and his parents, who live in an apartment overlooking the parade route, close their shutters, unable to bear the farce: shirkers from the rear, from the baggage train, officials from the home front, green recruits, some with their mules, posing as members of the annihilated division.

As an officer, Revelli, as the local Fascist officials are quick to let him know, has not yet discharged his duty to the Nation:

Third reminder from the Fascist federation. Until today I have held out to avoid scenes. But my father insists and I promise to do as he wishes.

I know what to expect. The high-ranking shirkers have by now instructed the few survivors of the Russian front. I'm the last one. To me, too, they'll say a good Italian shouldn't talk with enthusiasm about the Russian people and with hatred about the Germans...
*
At the local Fascist headquarters, Sclocchini, a poor little fellow "unfit for service" talked to me about patriotism, about slandering the German armed forces, about the sympathy of the home front.

I asked the Fascist official, the Fascist shirkers, not to bother me. I paid my share in this damned war, I more than paid for my Fascist youth camps. The lies, the patriotic rhetoric: they nauseate me. Let the Fascists from the home front go see the Germans up close. Let them get to know the Germans the way we got to know them on the Russian front. There's still time. Today, the Fascists should be at least at Belgorod, on the front line, to stop the "red hordes." Instead, they're in Cuneo, holed up like marmots.

My voice quavered a little as I spoke. Then I slammed the door behind me.