the story
NoonDecember 20, 2022 – 08:36
A letter found by chance in a book and a student grappling with the story of children forced to suffer the war
from Vincent Esposito
“I cannot find peace, and I need not wage war; and I fear, and I hope; and I burn, and I am an ice». Yes, ice, and every time I took up my rifle those verses penetrated my brain. I do not know why. They had struck me years earlier, when a carpenter’s boy, Maria, a fourth year high school student, recited them to me. I didn’t think that the word, the verses, had such power. Yet they often manage to change a man’s soul without him realizing it. An ice, because today I’m part of the Jewish Brigade and I chose to go to war. I want to avenge my people, I want to undo this enemy so that certain things never happen again. I killed yes, and many times guys like me. I felt dismay but no remorse. I thought of their mothers’ pain and cried about it. What if I died? My mother would certainly have despaired, but I’m sure she would have preferred a thousand times that death for her son, with a rifle in hand while she was fighting, rather than reduced to a human larva and killed in a gas chamber. No, I do not regret. I love peace but I was forced to go to war. It is my truth and I leave it as a testimony for anyone who reads. Goodbye
Matteo Soriani (Selvino 14 June 1946)
The paper was yellow, the writing sick. Matteo, how strange the same name, had found it in an old book bought for a few euros on a stall. Le rime di Petrarca, Le Monnier edition of 1932. The cover was missing but the charm of the volume remained unchanged. Matteo had put it in his rucksack without opening it and only at home had he noticed that letter. He was also a fourth year student, another extraordinary coincidence, like the fact that his mother’s name was Maria. He had read and re-read those lines many times and obviously he wanted to know more. He had searched the internet for Matteo Soriani’s name.
Many rumors had come out, but none concerning a soldier of the Jewish Brigade. So he tried Selvino. And here something came out. It was the name of a locality in the Bergamo pre-Alps. And typing in the Jewish Brigade read: «In Selvino in the Bergamo Pre-Alps in the former fascist colony of Sciesopoli, a reception center was opened for about 800 orphaned Jewish children who survived the Holocaust (the so-called Children of Selvino), to prepare them for emigration to Israel. In Magenta a half-destroyed farmhouse was rented which served as a training ground for both military and agricultural work for valid refugees. The Brigade soon came at odds with British commands who sought to prevent such activities in support of clandestine emigration to the land of Israel. The unit was therefore transferred to the Allied occupation forces in Belgium and the Netherlands, finally demobilized in July 1946 by order of the British government, also due to the growing tensions in the Middle East».
In July, therefore Matteo Soriani’s letter had been written a month before the demobilization, and what had happened to those eight hundred children? He searched again. «1945. Selvino, a small village in the Val Seriana, in the Bergamo Pre-Alps. A large house that until a few years before housed the summer camps of the children of the fascists. Not just anyone, mind you: only good families. It is called Sciesopoli, in honor of the hero of the Risorgimento Antonio Sciesa. The building, inaugurated in 1933 and designed by the architect Paolo Vietti Violi with the assistance of the Hungarian Andreas Benko, is the pride of the regime: “the most beautiful colony in Europe”, Mussolini had defined it». And then again. «Eight hundred Jewish children and adolescents, orphans, survivors of the war and the Holocaust. Survivors yes, but like a child they can be after losing their childhood: without affection, without trust, without direction. The Jewish Brigade collected them in all European countries and brought them to Italy».
But what happened to them? Few and confusing lines even on the web. The return home, on clandestine ships. Or welcomed by childless families in that administrative chaos that was the first post-war Italy where many documents had been burned. Who knows, maybe one of those children had been in his family, but then she would know. No, maybe not. No one would have admitted an illegal adoption, it would have been dangerous. Maybe one of Selvino’s children was one of his grandparents? Perhaps, and in that case he would be a descendant. But religion? His relatives were all Catholics. But what kind of roots could a baby of a few months have had? What did he know what religion he was?
He realized that the discovery of that letter in the book had come as a shock to him. And this must have meant something. And he thought back to the many, too many coincidences. Then he became convinced that it was the book that had come to him, that had been found. But why? For what reason? Of course, to find out the truth. He thought, Matteo thought. He couldn’t take his eyes off the book and the letter written almost eighty years earlier. Stories of a distant war but too similar to the one being fought today, with a people fighting in the name of their freedom.
That thought took him away from the letter. He returned to the computer and placed the mouse arrow on the Instagram channels with matches from the war. He opened one at random. «In Ukraine there are about 100,000 orphaned children – said the freelance journalist connecting from Kiev – who live in 600 institutions scattered throughout the country. They were left without a mother and father killed in the conflict. Or maybe they were abandoned because their parents were too poor to support them. A drama within a drama. Eight hundred orphaned Jewish children in 1946, one hundred thousand Ukrainians in 2022.
December 20, 2022 | 08:36
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