2023-08-31 00:18:37
by LUCIANO BEAUTIFUL PEACE
Alfredo Belli Paci, future husband of Liliana Segre, was among the 600,000 who said no to Sal. His son reconstructs here the story of the young officer and his companions who, after the armistice, did not give in and were interned by the Germans. A sacrifice buried for decades in oblivion
In my childhood there was a very strict taboo: one could not talk about what my mother had gone through just 20 years earlier. No questions, especially about that number 75190 tattooed on her left arm by bad men. And Mom had to avoid a number of things: scares, darkness, violent films, war documentaries – especially the ones with piles of skeletal corpses – the proximity of wolfhounds, the sight of smokestacks, people screaming. Even about that grandfather in the photograph, eternally young unlike the decrepit grandparents of the others, one shouldn’t have asked.
Keeper of the rules of the tab was dad, who played his role with the harshness he thought was due with sons. A harshness that he primarily reserved for himself, as he always did throughout his life, and which translated first of all into forbidding himself to tell about his own imprisonment. It was clear that he wanted to talk about it and that he was proud of that chosen sacrifice that had marked his youth, that had made him the man that he was of him and that no one had recognized him. But the reason for keeping silent about him wasn’t just the fact that if he had talked about it, he would have dangerously crossed the border of the taboo that he had imposed on us. In his demeanor there was also a form of extreme respect for his mother, given that the enormity of the tragedy she had experienced was so incomparable compared to the great sufferings he had endured and seen in the German concentration camps as to intimidate him.
And this second inhibition survived the first, indeed ended up being sharpened by the extreme content of her testimony. I believe that it was above all this form of modesty that prevented him forever from giving us an organic account of his ups and downs; story that we, unfortunately, with the harshness of sons never asked him. We have only sentences, episodes, jokes, sighs and the meager report presented to the military district of Pesaro on his return.
September 8th arrived like a hurricane in the clear skies of Athens, where the young officer Alfredo Belli had celebrated his 23rd birthday a few days ago. The war, up until then, had had nothing bloody for him, let alone heroic, just a monotonous garrison. That day everything changed, with the chain of command gone mad, the strangest rumors chasing each other, chaos.
Comrade Richard, welcome! Give me the sack, it slips, mind you. The enemy across the road…, so said the propaganda song that the second lieutenant had made his marching platoon sing so many times. And so, on 9 September, the welcome comrade Richard really showed up, surrounding their barracks in a flash with units in warfare and ordering their immediate surrender. An entire army, barring very few episodes of heroic resistance, laid down its arms in that way and surrendered itself prisoner to yesterday’s ally. It was only the beginning of a chain of humiliations.
Deceived by false promises of repatriation, our IMI (Italian military internees) meekly took the path of deportation. The group which included Second Lieutenant Alfredo Belli, after an interminable journey into the unknown through the Balkans, on 23 September reached the first concentration camp, Luckenwalde (Stalag III-A), south of Berlin. Six more will follow for Alfredo: Deblin Irena in Poland (Oflag 77), Lathen Oberlangen (Oflag VI) on the border with Holland, Bocholt (Stalag VI–F), Paderborn (Sennelager), Wietzendorf (Oflag 83), Soltau ( Fallingbostel–Stalag XIB). The Imi – addressed with contempt Badog-l-io (the Germans do not pronounce gli) – lacking the supervision of the Red Cross, reserved for real prisoners of war, were subjected to vindictive treatment and had tens of thousands of deaths from ill-treatment, , untreated diseases and even shootings. Alfredo too, like everyone else, spent those 19 months hungry with food rations bordering on survival, exposed to the freezing temperatures of two winters in his increasingly torn summer uniform, kept in pitiful hygienic conditions and promiscuity, without medical care, the victim of bullying and harassment of all kinds.
As officers they could not have been forced into forced labour, but after a few months the German command communicated that the exemption did not apply to the IMI. Alfredo and the other prison mates found themselves united in refusing any form of collaboration with their Nazi captors, even if they would have had better rations as they worked. In retaliation, the SS took the highest rank of that camp, Captain Bosisio, and locked him up to the bitter end in a penalty cell to die of cold. In order to save the life of their fellow prisoner, the inmates eventually gave in. Alfredo, due to his initial refusal and his hostile behavior, was assigned to the most lurid and heavy services of the factory; after a few days, due to our unaccustomedness to manual work and the state of malnutrition in which we fell, we were reduced to extremely exhausted physical conditions.
The more the living and working conditions became impossible, the bodies perished, the oppression increased and the recruitment campaigns of the Italian Social Republic (RSI) became tighter. The Republican officers beat the camps to the carpet. Anyone who agreed to join their army (it was enough to sign an illegible scribble …) would have obtained the immediate end of the nightmare, the return to their homeland, food, treatment, clean uniforms, honours, the possibility of seeing their families again at the first leave . Very few joined. Alfredo was one of the 600,000 NO who remained prisoners by choice, causing the CSR to fail to equip itself with armed forces capable of having an impact on the conflict. On the occasion of an attempt to enlist, he made one of his most daring gestures: he spoke up to incite his comrades to persist in what we believed to be our precise duty: to remain in the concentration camp in spite of any pressure, intimidation and sacrifice.
There is something sublime about this example of mass conscientious objection. Alfredo’s generation had known nothing but fascism and had been completely shaped by the regime, growing up in the cult of hierarchy and in contempt for individuality. Yet, the trauma of 8 September and collective humiliation produced an unprecedented social phenomenon: face to face with their own conscience, hundreds of thousands of soldiers decided to no longer believe, no longer obey, no longer fight on the side of the Nazis.
When liberation arrived, Alfredo and his fellow sufferers were at the end of their strength. In recent months, the collapsing Reich had further reduced the rations of prisoners, and every day the situation became more desperate. Alfredo now weighed 40 kilos, danced in his uniform and woke up at night with bloody hands, after having bitten them while dreaming of food. On April 17, 1945, the return to life appeared with the appearance of the British troops advancing in that sector of northern Germany. The prisoners, who had waited spasmodically for that day with every fiber of theirs, exploded into scenes of exultation, hugs, liberating tears. They would have liked to embrace their saviors too and share with them that joy so great as to be almost unbearable, but a new humiliation awaited them. The English remained icy and distant, they too began to repeat the same contemptuous Badog-l-io (they too unable to pronounce gli) and finally lined up with their backs to the emaciated men they had just freed, in a sort of honor of the reverse weapons.
After a few months, Alfredo and the other Imis were repatriated. Second Lieutenant Belli had saved his skin, he could finally embrace his parents again, start living again, resume his interrupted studies, leave behind the tragedy he had experienced. Yet he never succeeded. As with all Imi, a feeling of bitterness and disappointment always remained in him because all that sacrifice, instead of being honored as a shining model of moral resistance, was misunderstood and buried in oblivion for decades as an embarrassing chapter in Italian history. If the internment veterans had immediately given themselves an organization, considering their number and homogeneous geographical distribution, they would have been by far the main anti-fascist resistance association. But they were perhaps too heterogeneous politically and socially to do so. For the far right they were traitors, for the left they weren’t partisan enough, for everyone they evoked a shameful page of a book that for a long time no one would ever want to reopen. Thus it was that those boys of ours, who had been abandoned by their homeland on 8 September 1943 and who had rebuilt their homeland in their own moral universe by themselves, felt abandoned forever.
The meeting at Women’s Time
On Friday 8 September 2023 – exactly eighty years after the announcement of the armistice that marked the fate of Liliana Segre, survivor and witness of the Holocaust – the life senator will be a guest of Tempo delle Donne, the party-festival of Corriere della Sera and de La27Ora which this year reaches its tenth edition and returns to the Milan Triennale from Friday 8 to Sunday 10 September. The theme of the 2023 review is freedom. On this the Corriere journalist Alessia Rastelli will dialogue with the senator and with her son Luciano Belli Paci. But also on 8 September experienced by a not yet thirteen-year-old Liliana who, a few months later, will be deported to Auschwitz, and on 8 September by her future husband Alfredo Belli Paci, of which we give a preview on this page. Among the topics are also some passages from the senator’s book A strange destiny (edited by Alessia Rastelli, preface by Carlo Verdelli, Solferino, 2023), for which Luciano Belli Paci himself wrote a text. The meeting will take place during the event Our freedom, from 8.30 pm at the Triennale Art Theater (and streaming on courier.it). Among the other appointments scheduled for the evening conducted by Barbara Stefanelli, deputy editor of Corriere: speeches by Luciano Fontana, editor of Corriere and Stefano Boeri; the dialogue between Silvana Sciarra, president of the Constitutional Court, with director Fontana; the interview with Mara Venier by Maria Volpe and the one with Pif by Chiara Maffioletti and Micol Sarfatti, in addition to the presence of Arturo Brachetti.
August 31, 2023 (change August 31, 2023 | 00:21)
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