Parliament has chosen January 26, the day of the battle of Nikolaevka, to commemorate the Alpine troops. The author of the “Sergeant in the Snow” veteran of the Russian campaign would have been perplexed
There is a one-word song in the hearts of all Alpine troops: Nikolaevka. No verse, no verb, no other term: only Nikolaevka and a chorus of pain: «Nikolaevka Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!”. It was composed many years ago by maestro Bepi De Marzi, the most famous “unknown author” in the world who, one evening in 1958, created that miracle of Lord of the peaksthe magical and poignant hymn now widespread throughout the world, from California to Japan, to the point of earning the reputation of “popular song” born who knows when and where thanks to an anonymous genius.
He himself, Commander of the Republic wanted by Sergio Mattarella, is an Alpine. And very proud of it. But the date chosen for the Day of memory and sacrifice of the Alpine troops, that of the battle of Nikolaevka fought on January 26, 1943 and obviously destined to clash with January 27, the Day of Remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust, he is not happy at all: «There are those who are gradually stacking up days for this or that anniversary and ends up confusing people. In fact, I wouldn’t want this to be the design … “
More: he is convinced that his friend too Mario Rigoni Stern, if he hadn’t gone years ago, “He would have strong doubts about the choice”. Because sure, not a day went by when she didn’t remember The Sergeant in the Snow and the steppes and the Return to the Don where he had found «two old women who, knowing that I was Italian, pointed to the hens with their finger. They pecked at the feed in one of our mess tins. I took it, looked inside, felt my legs go limp. On the bottom was a sketch of a heart with a girl inside: it was poor Marangoni’s mess tin ».
However, in the Rai Teche there is a precious gem, a TV7 report on Nikolaevka on February 3, 1963 which raised a crawl space even then. To the point that a rare summary book was born, kept in the library of the Municipality of Asiago.
Huddled around a fireplace with other friends who survived the retreat, the writer who perhaps best knew how to tell that tragic epic he rebelled against the idea of narrating the defeat as a heroic poem. And if a voiceover recalled how a bulletin of the Russians themselves (a somewhat disputed bulletin) had recognized that “The Italian Alpine Corps is the only one among the invading armies that must be considered undefeated on Russian soil”, he and other veterans told coats unsuitable to protect at 40 degrees below zero, gliders that supplied the Germans but not the Alpine troops, hunger: “Who was thinking about your supplies?” “Eh! the Eternal Father! ” “We used to steal a few chickens, a few goats, a few pigs … In short, we made do.”
More still, though, the memories of the mass of disbanded Italians were very uncomfortable who could not take it anymore and had thrown their guns and surrendered to the cold and were just waiting to be saved, making the situation even more complicated for those who tried to break and attack to pull everyone else behind. Voiceover: “Is it true that you had to shoot at the stragglers?” And the Alpine troops: «Against the stragglers». “At a certain moment…”. “It happened, it happened.” “At a certain moment the stragglers created such chaos that one had to shoot to clear the way …”.
It was the war. The goddamn war. The National Alpine Association but he took it very badly. And he set up an “Investigation Commission on the television program TV7 (battle of Nikolaevka)”. Where he accused the “arcane veterans” of having aroused “a vast echo of protests” from many Alpine troops annoyed by the tone of the transmission, so to speak, not hagiographic. And here is attached an agenda of the Ana who complained that she had not been informed by Rai, expressed “the deepest indignation” for the interview “subtly prepared and conducted” and marked “by a proven disloyalty” that could have ” provide a pretext for political speculation “… In short: why had Mario Rigoni Stern dared to say that many Alpine troops,” who had managed to escape the Germans from deportation “ended up” with the partisan brigades up in our mountains “?
Giulio Andreotti, Minister of Defense, promised in a letter that at the next meeting of the Alpine troops, Italian television “would find a way” to be forgiven. Post Minister Carlo Russo and Ettore Bernabei reassured and everything seemed to end in a mutually blessing way. Only he, the writer from Asiago, held out. It’s at Ettore Erizzo, the president of Ana who accused him of the “very unpleasant impression” received by so many Alpine troops and wanted to know how and how much it had been distorted, replied harshly: “I have seen and listened to the transmission in question and it does not seem to me that the spirit of what they had intended to say has been distorted. the interviewees “. On the contrary: it was “real and human”. Rather, it is he who complains that “the” Alpino Hero “is being lost as it happens for” L’Alpino-fiasco-di-vino “and that everything that happened following the broadcast was a great hype (perhaps electoral) of the most backward and rhetorical right ”. How did it end? For years and years, his son Gianni Rigoni Stern recalls, “my father stayed on his behalf and only in the last few years did he mend relations”.
What would you say today about this choice on January 26th contested in conspicuous delay by the left in the Chamber (only Erasmo Palazzotto tried at the last moment to change it with an amendment that was immediately rejected) and then passed without problems to the Senate despite the fact that the Alpine troops themselves and their own magazine “l’Alpino” had kept to the wide of the stubborn stubbornness of the Lega and the Brothers of Italy, making it known that the date of October 15, 1872, the day of the foundation of the body, exactly 150 years ago, could have been fine and perhaps better? What would have kept together the relief efforts on the site of many natural disasters and the reconstruction of the Bassano Bridge and many other examples of generosity? Dunno … Impossible to say.
Certainly it is, however, even beyond the sacrosanct objections of Liliana Segre and many others, from Tomaso Montanari to Miguel Gotor, around the obvious conflict with the date in memory of the Shoah, that certain rhetorical tones declaimed in Parliament to exalt the date of Nikolaevka Alpini such as Nuto Revelli, Mario Rigoni Stern, Bepo Novello or Paolo Monelli never used them. Suffice it to reread All young in their twenties. A history of the Alpine troops from 1872 to today by Marco Mondini o the courage to say no where Giuseppe Mendicino collected a series of extraordinary interventions from Stern.
Above all, perhaps, this: “In my books I never use the word enemy or enemies. I always use “them” or the “Russians”, because they weren’t actually our enemies. These men who I later found in the concentration camps were people like us, equal to us, who had the same problems as us, with some more reason than us: they defended their land. We were in the wrong, not them. Indeed we had to apologize to him for having entered their house to bring war “
April 22, 2022 (change April 22, 2022 | 10:07 pm)
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