I hadn't realized I had touched such a nerve, in issuing my first report on "WWII Massacre of Italian Civilians by former German Ally" I already passed on to you the response of Anthony Ghezzo.

Now, I would like to forward the response of Paul Paolicelli, a most respected Italian America author of "Dances with Luigi" and "Under the Southern Sun"
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Richard:

Your Annotico Reports (on the "WWII Massacre of Italian Civilians") and your exchange on the H-ITAM Bulletin Board were both cogent and insightful. Bravo.

I have long contended that the story of Italy after the fall of the Mussolini government has been one of the most misinterpreted or ignored of all of the significant events of World War Two.

What has always been most surprising to me is how those of us with ties to the regions most affected knew virtually nothing about those events. I grew up in a family like so many other "boomers" where Italian history ended when my grandfather arrived here.

Of course, his contacts and ties continued for many years. In my grandfather's case, he made many return trips to Italy, some of them on behalf of the Mussolini government to return to his Abruzzo village and region and proselytize the peasants on the glories of Fascism.

It wasn't until I looked into this as a professional journalist that I realized both the complicity and guilt my grandfather must have felt, thus the reason for the silence during my childhood of anything to do with Italy.

But, also in my grandfather's case, his own village of Gamberale in the province of Chieti was the site of a massacre in September of 1943 when the Germans arrived and headquartered their commanding General Kesserling. The Nazis posed as British troops who were entrenched across the Valle Di Sangro on the opposing mountains, and asked for help from those who spoke English.

Thirteen men from the village, all of whom had been to the US and all of whom had worked at one time or another for my grandfather's construction company in Pittsburgh, volunteered to help. They were marched into the village square and summarily executed.

The soldiers drove the surviving villagers out into the surrounding mountains (Gamberale is the second highest point in the Apennines) for the winter of 1943-44. A third of the population of Gamberale died from that exposure. I never heard that story until I went to Gamberale and asked questions on my own.

A few weeks ago I bumped into Joe D'Andrea, the gentlemanly and generous former Italian Consulate for the Pittsburgh area. He had just returned from Italy and was visiting a local coffee shop to drop off some new maps of Abruzzo and Molise. I told Joe that I had recently met Bruno Sanmartino and Bruno told me the most touching story about his experiences as a youngster in a neighboring village to my grandfather's, Pizzoferrato.

Bruno said that his childhood hero was his mother. The Germans had taken over the village and they were living in the mountains that winter. They were starving. His mother returned to their cellars to steal their own food and was shot by the Germans, yet miraculously escaped and survived. Unfortunately, that story was not an uncommon one that winter.

Joe responded by telling of how a group of World War One vets used to come to the Consulate every year on Veterans' Day for a special ceremony. One of the veterans told him of living in Pietransiere, at the foot of the mountain where Gamberale and Pizzoferrato are located, during the German occupation in World War Two.

Over the course of that winter the Germans rounded up 126 villagers, marched them into their fields and ordered them into 4 masserie, or stone shepherd huts, and then machine gunned every one of them to death.

But it was Joe's reaction that impressed me the most. "Why didn't I know about this?" he asked. "I grew up in that same area and never knew this. Why did I only find this out so many years later?"

I think that's a question many of us are asking.

There had been so many atrocities in those mountains that the stories were all but routine at the end of the war. The Germans, as Richard Lamb reports in his most recent book ("War in Italy, 1943-1945") were barbaric in the extreme and Kesserling was never even charged with most of the brutality and death he had exacted on the Italian population, innocent peasants working fields in most cases, not armed partisans or political activists.

And at the end of the war they felt guilty and somehow responsible and only wanted to figure out how to fill the bellies of their children, and forget the past. Those safely in America also wanted to forget, I think, for they too, like my grandfather, had guilt and undoubted remorse. So two generations have come and gone without those stories ever being told beyond small family circles or close relationships.

Joe D'Andrea says that locals tell of a German who used to return to Pietransiere every year on the anniversary of the massacre. That he would stand alone in the field where the families had been slaughtered in silence for a long period of time, then quietly return to wherever he came from. No one ever spoke to him on these visits. No one ever asked him why he came or what he had done. It was so typical of those villagers to keep their distance and their silence.

It's encouraging to see that now some of us are finally breaking that silence.

Paul Paolicelli
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RAA Note: There are NO results on a Google Search for the Gamberale, Pizzoferrato, or Pietransiere Massacres. There is not even mention on city sites, or regional sites, though in some cases mentioning massacres in 1799, and Roman times. Ignoring these victims, is heaping insult on injury.
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"Dances with Luigi" and "Under the Southern Sun" can be viewed at:

PaulPaolicelli
http://www.paulpaolicelli.com