Remembering The Massacre of Monte Sole

It was still a little cold but the sunlight was blinding. 

 

A little after the Etruscan museum we turned towards the mountains. The road crossed over the Rhine (Reno) and then started climbing up. These were not really high mountains, they are only around 400 to 700 meters high, but winter must be tough here.

 

In Bologna, the trees are already full of flowers while here the first leaves are just struggling to burst out of wintery skeletons of the trees. The new grass has that lovely shining green colour that looks velvety. When we reached the top of the crossing between San Martino and Casaglia (pronounced Cazalia), the endless hills looked wonderful and far away, we could see glimpses of the highway with cars rushing over it.

It is very beautiful.

 

The first ruins of the church and the houses in San Martino, look like the antique Etruscan ruins. They all seemed to be white-washed, all clean and blindingly white. There were no signs of bombs that were exploded here, of machine guns that had killed so many, fires that had blazed.

 

Did they scream? Those old men and women and children? Did they ask for pity from the young Nazi soldiers?

 

Pietro, our neighbour had told me about the tragedy in Marzabotto. Around end of September in 1944, German soldiers had killed a total of 771 persons in the villages here. Perhaps they were angry and frustrated, because they were losing the war and partisans from Marzabotto were hiding in the hills and attacking them regularly. They took out their anger on children, women and elderly, who were left at home in the villages. Among the dead were 315 women and 189 children below 12 years.

 

In Casaglia, they killed the priest Don Ubaldo Marchioni in the church below. Other persons hiding in the church were marched to the cemetery near by. The door of the church was blown out by a bomb. It seems difficult to believe that all of it happened in this calm and beautiful place. The grass is bursting with tiny Margarita flowers and air is thick with smell of flowers.

 

 

The cemetery is around 250 meters from the church. It is a small and simple place, with a few broken down tomb stones and some old pictures fixed to the wall. A board outside the cemetery says:

"Hitler said, "We have to be cruel, we have to do with our conscience in peace, we have to destroy technically and scientifically."

 

A survivor of the killings said,"29-30 September and 1 October 1944 were the worst days, even if some killings continued even after these days. Early in the morning I could see 54 houses burning. There was a group of them soldiers applying fire to the houses. We had all gathered in the square in front of the church. We were told that Nazi and fascist soldiers were coming but we thought that their fight was with partisans and so we decided that the elderly, women and children could stay in the church. They broke open the door, we were all forced to come out and they beat many of us, laughing all the time. The priest was killed near the altar. We were led to the cemetery. Inside they started to fire at us. We were trying to hide behind the wooden crosses and the tombs. They were firing low so as to kill the children also. They also threw in some bombs." A total of 195 persons including 50 children were killed in the cemetery."

Afterwards we went to the Sacrario (Bone house) in Marzabotto, where the bodies of 771 persons are buried. Pietro used to come here. His sister, sister-in-law and father were buried here. The day they were killed, Pietro's 14 year old sister wanted to come away with them but Pietro had stopped her. He said that their sister-in-law was pregnant, almost in the ninth month and could need help, so he told her, you stay here, you are only a child, the soldiers won't do any thing to you.

 

"I got her killed, she could have been saved", he would say again and again and struggled with guilt and depression all his life.

As we sat in the Sacrario to remember Pietro, my mind was wandering to remember all those persons I knew and who are now dead - my friends, my maasi, my buas.

 

And, I was wondering about the killings in India, like the 1984 killings in Delhi, like the 1989-90 killings in Kashmir, like 1992 killings in Bombay, like 2002 killings in Gujarat, like the on-going killings in so many places. Most of the time in India, the killers from such massacres are never brought to jail, the persons killed are never acknowledged. At least Pietro had the satisfaction of history condemning those Nazi soldiers, some of them were brought to trials. The memory of those dead is honoured and there bodies are buried in Sacrario, this monument to those killed. The victims of the riots in India, the victims of ethnic cleansing in Kashmir, who remembers them? How do their families, their children, live with this knowledge, with this burden and pain?

 

In India, most of the times these bodies will be cremated. There is no place identified with the person who is no longer there. The person becomes invisible, and memories are only that, memories without places to bind them into. Does that has some thing to do with the way we remember our dead and we ask for justice for them?