The Massacre at the Fosse Ardeatine. History, Myth, Ritual, and ...

were already buried, there should be a monument built on top of the burial site in
commemoration. But the relatives – the wives, mothers, daughters – protested. This is how
Vera Simoni, the daughter of an Air Force General who was killed there, describes her
mother’s reaction:
And so this is where my mother steps in. My mother said ‘No’, because otherwise
we’d still be waiting for our father to come back.
She said, ‘No, I want each of them
to be recognised’.
So she talked to the officers, and they said, ‘Madam, we’d like to
do what all you ask, but it’s impossible.
It can’t be done.’ So mother and I, and my
sister, we went to see General Pollock, who was the Head of the Allied Forces, and he
received us right away. And my mother said, ‘Look, we’ve come to ask for this.
We know you’re going to make this monument, and we refuse to accept it.
We want
recognition, body by body’.
So the General looked at us, and he must have thought,
‘My God, I’m looking at people who, perhaps, pain has deranged them a little bit’.
So he says, ‘Well, it’s going to be difficult’. But my mother had already spoken with
Dr. Ascarelli, who was a pathologist, and Ascarelli had gone to the place and he said,
‘It’s a crazy idea, but it all can be done, and especially if the desire and the need is so
strong’. So my mother said, ‘No, it can be done, because we spoke to the Professor,
it can be done’. So General Pollock said, ‘Well, listen, let me think about it’. So he
took us to the door and I said these words too, as well as my mother, ‘Look, we don’t
give up. We don’t want anything.
We want nothing for ourselves. We just want
them to be identified, because all the other families are in the same situation as us’,
and, in English, ‘We don’t give up’”. [Vera Simoni, b. 1922, daughter of General
Simone Simoni, killed at the Fosse Ardatin; int. April 5, 1998].
Such a situation highlights the difference between putting someone under the earth and really
burying them, having a ceremony where their death is recognised and somehow passes into
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