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

These disintegrating bodies had to be unburied in order to bury them again; and they had to be
identified. They had been there for months. They were killed in March; the disinterment
began in July, and went on until the end of September.
The bodies as they were uncovered
were heaped on top of one another, because there wasn’t enough room in the cave.
The
later victims had been made to climb on the bodies of those who had been killed before them,
in order to be shot.
And the stories … I have more gruesome stories than this one, but this is Giuseppe Bolgia’s
story. His mother was killed in an air raid by the American or British Air Force in Rome, and
his father was killed at the Fosse Ardeatine. I asked him who he blamed, and he said, “Well, I
blame the Germans for my father, and the Allies for my mother. They did their share”. When
he was 12, he told me, he had to identify his father’s body.
And it’s something I’d better not describe. No one can understand this, only those
who….
It was no easy thing, because this heap that they’d made, of two heaps of
dead bodies, one on top of the other, a row of six, seven corpses, one on top of the
other. And I went, and my sister, in the autumn, under those ugly caves. It was a
negative experience to me.
Now, 53 years later, it still stays in my mind as if it was
yesterday, seeing all these slaughtered men
I remember a crate filled with skulls
and skeletons everywhere, and those you couldn’t recognise. So we recognised
Daddy’s corpse. He was headless. Many of them were headless, because they were
shot in the back of the head, you know. So we recognised Dad through his clothes,
and then he had a German watch that they issued to railroad workers … From the
transcript, it’s hard to tell where this quotation ends – could you check I’ve got it right?
Yes. Also I’m not sure if the suspension points indicate passages the transcriber
couldn’t hear, or if they’re there for expression.
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