2023-04-29 20:45:45
Between 1945 and 1948, tens of thousands of children afflicted by poverty were welcomed by better-off families in other parts of Italy: with the newspaper, a book reconstructing the rescue initiative
In 1946 Indro Montanelli, in an article for the Corriere d’Informazione, used the word
besprizornye
to indicate the large mass of abandoned and dangerous children who roamed the streets of Italian cities. The Russian word refers to the orphaned and derelict childhood that appeared in Soviet society after the Great War and the October Revolution without the pervasive communist control system being able to deal with the condition of children without families.
War and children are realities and humanity that don’t seem to belong to each other or at least shouldn’t meet. an illusion. Yesterday Today. In Ukraine, children are killed and kidnapped by Vladimir Putin’s soldiers. Childhood by nature is the future of a people, a nation, a community. And if with the First World War the phenomenon of children who became orphans, poor, refugees imposed itself on the world, with the Second World War the scene of violated childhood was repeated. A 1948 UNESCO report states that there were 60 million children in Europe who needed assistance, but the limited funds available to international organizations made it possible to bring food aid and medical intervention to no more than four million children. for a period of six months.
The help was dutiful and in solidarity, there is no doubt; but before that it was necessary because without rescuing abandoned children, one could not even remotely think of being able to rebuild dear old Europe who within thirty years had set fire to the world for the second time. The civil future of Europe depended on the care of children. And, however, as the Grand Inquisitor says
The Brothers Karamazov
by Fdor Dostoyevsky; Feed them first and then ask them for virtue.
Who thought of those Italian children seen and reported by Montanelli? The Trains of Happiness. A rescue operation of thousands and thousands of children which in the immediate post-war period, between 1945 and 1948, the Union of Italian Women and the Communist Party, together with a whole series of national and international organizations, secular and confessional, state and private, conceived and implemented by transferring tens of thousands of boys and girls from poor families from different parts of Italy, first from Milan and Turin, then largely from the South, bringing them to areas, environments, families where living conditions were better.
To reconstruct and tell this exemplary popular story Bruno Maida’s book Reception trains. Childhood, poverty and solidarity in post-war Italy 1945-1948on newsstands with the Corriere della Sera. Emilia-Romagna was the region that welcomed the largest number of children, but a large part of the national territory was involved in a special operation designed to meet the poorest children and allow them to face the winter season warmly and with a good daily meal. However, not infrequently the children stayed with the families who welcomed them for a longer period or they returned to those who opened their home and arms to them or they stayed forever in their new home and in their new country.
The formula of the Trains of happiness was coined by mayor of Modena, Alfeo Corassori, when he saw the first convoys arrive from Rome loaded with a humanity that was both sad and hopeful, if not happy. It was – says Bruno Maida – an action of integration and very often of replacement of the State, absent in both concrete and legislative terms, and for the most part incapable of imagining new policies towards childhood after the twenty years.
Bruno Maida, who is a professor of contemporary history at the Department of Humanities at the University of Turinhas already worked in the recent past on the binomial war and childhood: first with The Children’s Shoah. The persecution of Jewish childhood in Italy and then with
Childhood in the wars of the twentieth century
(both published by Einaudi). And, in fact, not only is his text well documented but it shows how in the operation of the Trains of happiness or hospitality there is a historical continuity with the aid for the children of workers on strike, with the brotherhood trains that brought the children Viennese in Italy after the Great War or with the arrival of Russian children in Turin to save them from famine after the revolution and, again, with the children of Fiume who arrived in Milan and Turin. But, even if the experience of the Trains of happiness remains unique, there will be historical continuity in support for children throughout the twentieth century up to the reception of Ukrainian children after the Chernobyl disaster.
This continuity tells us a fundamental thing that the historian, in fact, tries to say from the first line of his book: the history of childhood care and rescue does not only concern the past but also and above all the present. It is no coincidence that in the book – and with great wealth of details that cannot be reported here but it should be easy to guess – four issues are intertwined with which we still have to deal today: poverty, the southern question, female protagonism, childhood.
Yet, beyond the questions, what characterizes the story is the child. Who are these kids really? All the events done by the adults and the little ones are referred to as infancy. Children take on a face – Maida rightly says – in cinematographic fiction: Bruno di bike thievesPasquale and Giuseppe di SkisPasquale of Paisexhibit of Down with misery. However, the departure, the farewell, the parting, the train, the journey are not fictions. history. Very human. So, here are the children’s memories — Dina, Enzo, Ugo, Paola — and the scenes of hunger, disease, danger but also of gambling that they carried with them for a lifetime, leaving Ciociaria, Naples, Pozzuoli and getting on a train that took them to a another life or rescued them from misery and death welcomed by an Italian family.
April 29, 2023 (change April 29, 2023 | 20:26)
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