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

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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 10
value, as Ernesto de Martino says, it acquires a meaning. Before this, the families did not know what had happened; in a situation where many people were deported or disappeared, they could not be sure what had become of those they had lost. And it was the women who started going around and asking questions, trying to track down the missing; it seems that the men, the fathers, had such a crushing sense of failure in their role that they became useless. A colleague of mine, in my department, tells this story: I think my mother went with some friends of hers, that very day, [i.e. the day after the liberation?] to the caves. Of course, in the state they were in … and there are very physical impressions of smells, the smells, and this is distorted in time. But my mother always told me true things, without distortions. And she says one of things that … wounded her most, and shocked her most, was these SS who were laughing. Maybe they were anxious. Who knows? And then the next day, they formed a sort of procession of women [which is a religious image]. She went, and I think Pilo Albertelli’s wife went” – Pilo Albertelli (my own mother’s philosophy teacher in high school) was one of the heores of the Resistance, and a major influence on a generation of young antifascists. Gabrieli goes on: “And the other women, and she went. And Lia Albertelli, Pilo Albertelli’s wife, wrote a poem about this.” The poem says: ‘We’re walking, groping, under the heavy roof. \ The greasy air fills our mouth \and chokes our breath. And we support one another, \ holding hands.\ We are a few brides,\ and with us is a sister and a mother.\ rises a tall heap. \ We climb,\ and the earth breaks under our feet.\ And at the end of a cave, And from the broken clods, \ the heavy breath hits us stronger, stronger. \ One picks up a strand of hair cluttered with blood, \her desperate scream throws us to the ground.\ They’re underneath, and we’re treading on our feet, \upon the fathers of our children’. As this is a poem, should it be set in lines? Where are the line breaks? 11
Page 1 and 2: The Massacre at the Fosse Ardeatine
Page 3 and 4: Now, this is not the way it happene
Page 5 and 6: moment of the attack; but as there
Page 7 and 8: So this is what is at stake in this
Page 9: unarmed. According to the German Co
Page 13 and 14: So the bodies were recognised throu
Page 15 and 16: They didn’t; but their heterogene
Page 17 and 18: It never happened. They didn’t wa
Page 19 and 20: So what do young people see there?

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

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