ROME LETTER:In Marzabotto, people will not forget that it was Berlusconi who 'rehabilitated' the ex-fascist MSI
IT IS a beautiful sunny October morning in the little village of Marzabotto, in the Apennines close to Bologna. Something is clearly happening since traffic police are on duty, directing cars either into the village or onto the main road for Pistoia. If you did not know better, you might think that some version of a farmers’ market or a local football derby was about to take place.
However, this gathering is about the past. “Ricordate E Meditate Il Nostro Sacrificio” (Remember and Reflect On Our Sacrifice) says the inscription over the sacrario or war memorial in the centre of the village, a building that recalls one of the worst Nazi/fascist atrocities of the second World War.
As German troops fought desperately in the summer of 1944 to defend the so-called Gothic Line against the US 5th army led by Gen Mark Clark, those small rural communities which found themselves behind the front line often paid a heavy price for their thinly disguised sympathy and support for the Italian partigiani.
Thus it was that 771 civilians – men, women and children – from the village and surrounds of Marzabotto were killed over the course of a grizzly week that began on September 29th, 1944.
We had travelled to Marzabotto both to pay our respects and out of curiosity. It was a good weekend to visit the village because we witnessed the formal commemoration of the 67th anniversary of the atrocity. My wife was wearing a black blouse and as we walked into the main square, a man suggested to her that “a little bit of red would go very well with that blouse, Signora”. Black blouses or even worse, black shirts, are not welcome at Marzabotto, and for a good reason. This was a day to wear your Stella Rossa red scarf, in memory of the local partigiano brigade of that name.
For, while this is always remembered as a Nazi crime against humanity, it was one in which black-shirted Italian fascists played a significant and crucial part. In 1946, Lorenzo Mingardi, the fascist commissario prefettizio or town prefect in charge of Marzabotto in the summer of 1944, was sentenced to death (later commuted to a life sentence) for his part in the massacres.
Mingardi, a fascist militant who had taken part in Mussolini’s 1922 “March On Rome”, was tried in Bergamo on charges that he had systematically supplied information to the Nazi SS, naming and indicating the whereabouts of partigiani and their families in the Marzabotto area. Many of those fingered by Mingardi were shot immediately, while others were deported to future death in Germany.
As we walked around the memorial, we noticed an elderly man with a family group, recalling the horrific experiences of his father at Marzabotto in 1944. At the end of a summer when the SS had been viciously active, word had gone out on the morning of September 29th that the German forces were about to do a “round-up”. Many people immediately ran for the hills where some of them already had prepared makeshift hideouts.
Given that it was raining hard, Maria Macchelli opted to wait in her house in the townland of San Martino, along with her children, six-year-old Cesare, nine-year-old Rita and 12-year-old Luigi. Her eldest son, a partigiano fighter, like many others was hiding in the hills. As he walked around the crypt, the man recalled how his distraught father (that son), hiding at a close distance in the hills, had to watch his entire family being shot by the SS.
Or there was the trauma of Pietro Zebro, who spent the rest of his life pained by the memory of that day in 1944 when he and his father, informed that the SS were on the way, opted to run for the woods. Pietro’s 19-year-old sister Bruna, heavily pregnant, shouted down to her father and brother that she would flee with them too. Pietro told her to stay where she was, convinced that the SS were interested in young men to send to work in German factories: “The SS arrived and told everyone to prepare for a long journey. Everybody put on their best bib and tucker and they assembled in the farmyard. They were all shot, the young, the old and children and Bruna was killed twice because they ripped the child out of her stomach and stuck their bayonets into it” (Bruno Zebro, “I Bambini Del’ 44)
As we said, black shirts are not welcome in Marzabotto. Nor frankly are representatives of the Berlusconi government. In these parts, people do not forget how it was Berlusconi who “rehabilitated” the ex-fascist MSI, former members of which are now part of his government.
In Marzabotto, as one speaker recalled last weekend, Mussolini and his black shirts are no colourful folk memory, rather they bear co-responsibility with the Nazis for a disturbing list of crimes against humanity, including the Holocaust.