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

It never happened.
They didn’t warn us. They didn’t post any bills. They put
them up afterwards, after they’d already killed them”.
This wrong memory, which is how the city chose to make sense of what happened, is also a
way of exorcising her, of refusing to share her pain.
The visibility of the widows brought other troubles too. In 1944, women weren’t supposed to
go out to work; these women going out into public space, were assumed to be defenceless.
Having no man, they were fair game. Many were subjected to sexual harassment, something
for which they didn’t even have a name at the time, on top of what they had suffered. Several
of these women have this kind of stories, and it tells you a great deal about what male culture
was at the time. There are also stories of mutual aid. For instance, a woman who had lost her
brother tells how she would go to her sister-in-law’s house, and secretly put a soothing pill in
her sister-in-law’s soup; later she realised that her sister-in-law was putting a pill in hers. And
then there are the stories of children growing up in orphan homes, or growing up surrounded
by the pain of their parents.
“It was a strange grief”, a woman who lost her father says, over
and over. “It was a strange grief”.
She describes calling her mother, in the mid-sixties, and
asking, “Mum, what are you doing?” Her mother replied, “I’m weeping”. “What are you
weeping for?” “I’m weeping for your father”. And the daughter said, “Now?”
Her
mother answered, “I didn’t have time before, because I had to work. I had to keep three jobs,
keep house, raise four daughters, now I’m retired, I can weep”.
Some children grew up in
orphanages; those who could stay at home were surrounded by this trauma, which has passed
on through generations.
Finally, there is the question of symbols. One of the things I did was to interview young
people.
When you say you interview young people, older people’s first response is always,
“Oh, they don’t know anything.
They don’t have any historical memory”. In some cases this
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