by John Keahey
—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)
ARES, THE Greek god of war, is seemingly insatiable. He cannot stop harvesting lives. As one myth goes, the first army sprang up like rows of corn when the teeth of Ares’s descendent, a dragon, were sown across a field.
Of course, myths, in the days before science, often grew out of humans’ inability to explain how certain things happen: why we have seasons, what causes the sun to rise in the east day after day, why humans continue to kill fellow humans.
Such thoughts are on my mind. It is a humid, cloudless June day, the sky appears almost white, and the sounds of unseen birds filter through abundant vegetation. At Pietrasanta station, I board a small provincial bus for its once-a-week, three-mile journey high up into the foothills to Sant’Anna di Stazzema, a place of serene beauty tagged forever by an unspeakable horror. With me are five elderly women, each carrying shopping bags overflowing with flowers. I surmise that they must make regular jaunts to the village to decorate the graves of family members and friends.
The road, not built until twenty years after the end of World War II, is full of sharp, blind twists. Before 1965, ancient mulattiere, or mule tracks, connected the village with the coastal area far below and its nearby clusters of houses and farms. Some of these dirt trails are widely known, while others take the form of secret paths that travel beneath the great canopy of trees, through narrow canyons, and from heavily forested hill to hill. Only those who grew up in those mountains know such paths.
The bus driver, at the sharpest curves, sounds a loud klaxon to alert oncoming traffic to our approach. The frequency of these horn bursts escalates the higher we go. His final stop, only twenty minutes out of Pietrasanta, is just short of Sant’Anna’s small cluster of buildings, including a tiny church.
The large parking lot, for cars and the tour buses that bring thousands of visitors here throughout the year, is empty. Other than a few locals gathered around the doorway of the village’s only business, a small bar next to the church, the five flower-bearing women and I are the village’s first visitors of the day.
Sant’Anna is where director Spike Lee shot a few brief, hard-to-watch scenes for his movie Miracle at St. Anna, but the film is not why I am here. This, my first visit alone to the tiny village, is one of several trips I would eventually make there during five months in 2012. My plan is to spend a day, without distraction, exploring Sant’Anna, and then walk down one of the ancient mulattiere to the valley below.
It was in and around Sant’Anna where, on August 12, 1944, members of the German army massacred at least 560 villagers (or perhaps more) within three hours: elderly men and women, some younger men and women with children, teenagers, and infants. Most of the area’s able-bodied men, tipped off the day before that the Germans were coming, had already escaped into the hills. They figured they were the ones the Germans hunted following a spate of attacks by Italians known as partisans—groups of men and women who fought the occupying Germans after Italy surrendered in September 1943.
“After all, what kind of threat are old people, mothers, children, to these Germans,” one survivor said to me. In a time before anyone in these isolated villages had any inkling about what was going on elsewhere in Italy or the rest of Europe, to think these innocents would be attacked was incomprehensible to peasant farmers and sheepherders in an out-of-the-way place such as Sant’Anna.
* * *
The village sits on a heavily forested hillside with a stunning view of Pietrasanta and coastal Tuscany, just a few miles below. On a clear day, from a spot just above the village, an observer can see the sweep of the Ligurian coastline, from Pisa in the south to Portovenere in the north—a distance of fifty-three miles.
Before sunrise on what would be a hot August day, German soldiers arrived in the village. They were members of the Second Battalion of the Thirty-Fifth Regiment of the Sixteenth SS Grenadier Armored Division. It is widely believed that local Italian fascisti, still loyal to Mussolini and his Germany-backed breakaway government ensconced in Italy’s far north, led the solders from four, perhaps five, directions through the thick forest along those narrow, hidden trails.
The soldiers were based in at least three locations, including Pietrasanta. Some were housed in the cloister where today Pietrasanta’s library, or biblioteca, is located. In addition to the cloister, several hundred soldiers lived in houses they confiscated from Italian residents; top officers occupied luxurious villas in Pietrasanta and the surrounding area.
During the late night of August 11 and the early predawn hours of August 12, the troops had been transported in trucks to their four or five departure points. From the west one group left Valdicastello Carducci, a small enclave on the outskirts of Pietrasanta and located at the foot of the mountain, three miles downhill from Sant’Anna. They moved up a narrow, steep trail that starts at Valdicastello’s northeastern end. This was the trail I would walk down twice during my time in western Tuscany.
From the northwest, a different group traveled toward the remote village along another trail that starts at Capezzano Monte, a tiny cluster of houses, a few shops, and a church on a mountainous flank high above Pietrasanta. I took this trail to Sant’Anna once. Today, tourists sitting in Pietrasanta’s Piazza del Duomo and looking uphill to the right of the castle can see and admire lovely Capezzano Monte.
From the north, the Italian Fascist–led Germans walked toward Sant’Anna from the village of Ruosina. Local historians speculate the Ruosina troopers may have split into two groups, with the second one leaving from nearby Gallena.
From the east, a squad left Farnocchia, whose residents four days earlier had been ordered to evacuate into the hills while Germans set fire to the village. Some of those residents, along with their parish priest, sought refuge in Sant’Anna, perhaps a two-hour walk away.
The soldiers were armed with .50 caliber machine guns, flame throwers, small arms, grenades, and other gear carried by local Tuscan men and boys forcibly conscripted from Valdicastello and Capezzano Monte. The soldiers targeted the village of Sant’Anna with its four hundred residents and its small clusters of houses. These clusters, separated by woods and small plots of land growing vegetables and fruit, are known as borghi or the even smaller casolari. There might be four or five families in a borgo and two or three families in a casolare. Sometimes the houses are joined together in a single large structure with each family having its own section. People would live on two or three floors, with cows and sheep housed at ground level and the families directly above.
These clusters of homes and tiny farms went by names such as Pero, Vaccareccia, Case, Moco, Coletti, Ai Franchi. All are less than a mile from Sant’Anna. One, Ai Franchi, is only fifteen hundred feet from Sant’Anna’s center. A visitor standing in the square in front of Sant’Anna’s church can see this casolare to the south, its four joined houses comfortably nestled on a hillside.
The soldiers swept through the tiny satellite clusters, either killing residents on the spot or herding the confused civilians, many in bedclothes and still rubbing sleep from their eyes, down into Sant’Anna proper.
There the elderly and the mothers; some fathers who, for a variety of reasons, had stayed when most of the other working-age men had left the day before; and the babies, toddlers, children, and teens, were packed together on the square in front of the church. There 136 of them died; the rest that made up the official tally of 560 were killed in or around their homes.
* * *
The stories about what happened that morning, told by a few survivors who were able to hide, are bone-chilling. During a subsequent visit to Sant’Anna in the summer of 2012, I met with seventy-eight-year-old Enrico Pieri, who as a ten-year-old witnessed the unimaginable—the deaths of members of three generations of his family and more than a dozen other people at his home in Ai Franchi. We talked with the help of Ilaria Violante and Cristina Zappelli, two Tuscan friends who acted as interpreters.
“Questo
é molto difficile [this is very difficult],” Enrico said as we began the nearly four-hour conversation and tour.
About seven o’clock on the morning of August 12, 1944, a neighbor pounded on the doors of the four houses in Ai Franchi. The man alerted Enrico’s family and members of a refugee family staying next door in Enrico’s grandfather’s house that the Germans were coming. Enrico’s father, the refugee father, and the grandfather pondered whether to hide out in the hills, certain that the Germans were only after the men. But they decided to stay. Why? The day before, they had slaughtered a cow, whose carcass was hanging in a ground-floor room below the living quarters. Such a home-based slaughter of an animal was illegal at the time, Enrico explained, and they did not want the Germans to take the “crime” out on the women. So they stayed.
An hour after the neighbor pounded on the door, family members caught glimpses of soldiers coming down the hillside behind the complex. Enrico heard occasional shots and bursts of machine-gun fire in the distance. The two families quickly gathered inside the Pieri household. There were Enrico, his parents, his grandfather, and his two sisters. His mother, Irma Bartolucci, was four months pregnant. The other family, the Pierottis, included the parents, three sisters, an aunt, and at least one toddler son.
The two families sat around the table in the grandfather’s kitchen, which the Pierottis also used as a communal bedroom. Without warning, a squad of German SS soldiers burst into the room, loudly ordering the families outside and forcing them down a narrow path in the direction of the church at Sant’Anna.
“We had walked—they were constantly pushing us, shouting ‘Schnell! Schnell!’—perhaps [three hundred feet] when, suddenly, they decided to take us back into the house. This all happened in maybe ten minutes.”
The Germans crowded the Pieri and Pierotti families, along with other people collected from around the compound, back into the room the Pierottis had used as their bedroom and kitchen. Perhaps twenty people were crammed into the small space. The Pierotti father tried to speak to the Germans but immediately was shot in the head at close range. Then, the Germans “started firing their guns” at the group.
In the chaos, a fourteen-year-old Pierotti daughter, Maria Grazia, was able to crawl into a small walk-in cupboard under the stairs. From there, she motioned to Enrico to join her. This all happened in a few brief seconds, and the soldiers did not see them.
“She saved my life,” Enrico said, dry-eyed after all these years but speaking in a voice breaking with emotion.
After a few moments, the firing stopped and the houses were set ablaze. Four or five families had been wiped out in a matter of seconds.
When the hiding children smelled smoke, and it sounded as if the Germans had left, they crept out of the cupboard and into the smoke-filled room, which was red with slaughter. There, beneath a cluster of dead and dying, Maria Grazia found her thirteen-year-old sister Gabriella pinned beneath bodies and physically unwounded.
The girls’ mother was still alive, barely, and was pleading to be taken outside, away from the smoke-filled room. With ten-year-old Enrico, they tried to move her but couldn’t. Eventually, unable to breathe in the heavy smoke and emotionally devastated by the carnage of their loved ones, the three children made it outside. By then, all those left behind were dead.
* * *
Near the house, just a hundred feet away, were small terraces that were rich in carefully tended vegetables.
“We hid there among the bean plants for a few hours,” Enrico said. At one point, they could hear mouth organ music being played by a nearby German soldier. They continued to muffle any sounds of their fear, their anguish, their emotions—all the while listening to the crashing sounds of roofs collapsing into the burning houses.
Finally the mouth organ music drifted away. The Germans, including those who had slaughtered the hundreds of other residents in the church square fifteen hundred feet from Ai Franchi, were long gone. Gabriella, Maria Grazia, and Enrico crept the hundred feet or so from the bean field back to the houses, hoping to find someone still alive. No one was. Three houses were destroyed, with just the outer walls still standing; strangely, the flames had already nearly died out in the house belonging to Enrico’s family, leaving it fairly intact. The remnants of the fire were still generating large amounts of smoke.
Enrico could not bring himself to enter the room where the seventeen bodies were heaped in a ghastly tangle.
The three survivors, still fearing that Germans might be in the area, returned to the bean field and huddled together until early evening, when they decided to head for the tiny borgo Vallecava, near the top of a hill that today holds a forty-foot-high monument and the ossuary containing the bones of most of the victims. Near there, they encountered a group of people the Germans had missed. Surrounded by people they knew, the children finally let their emotions run free, crying and mourning for their families.
In the early evening, Enrico walked back to Ai Franchi alone. He didn’t enter the kitchen/bedroom, but hauled water from a spring more than fifteen hundred feet away, to make sure all the fire in his family’s home was out.
Then he went to his grandfather’s house. “I just grabbed something. [To this day] I don’t remember what.” Then he returned to Vallecava.
By this time, it was growing dark. The trio bedded down with other survivors in the nearby woods. At three o’clock in the morning, Enrico was awakened by his forty-year-old uncle—his father’s brother, Duilio Pieri—who, when the Germans came, had been hiding in the mountains. He had rushed back to Ai Franchi to find his family dead and to witness the aftermath of the widespread slaughter in nearby Sant’Anna. A survivor had told Duilio about his nephew and where he was sleeping. The two, uncle and nephew, were all that remained of the immediate Pieri family.
Duilio led Enrico along the narrow trails down the mountain into Valdicastello, where members of their extended family took them in. Duilio returned a day or two later, burying the remains of his family and the Pierottis a few dozen feet from the house.
* * *
Following my first bus trip up the mountain, I walked into Sant’Anna’s small bar, where a young lady sold me a bottle of water and answered my general questions about the village. I also asked her to show me the start of the footpath that leads from the village down to Valdicastello in the valley below, as one of my goals during this visit was to skip riding the bus back down the mountain. I wanted to walk the three miles to Valdicastello, down that steep, rocky trail—perhaps to confront for myself those Nazi/Fascist ghosts. From Valdicastello, it would be an easy walk of a mile or two back to my apartment in Pietrasanta.
But before I left, I visited the fully restored church, passing the holy water font badly chipped from machine-gun bullets, dropping a coin into a small box to pay for candles, and lighting one in memory of the hundreds of innocents who died just a few feet away. One of the women from the bus was placing flowers around the altar. We acknowledged each other with a quiet “buon giorno.”
I then headed over to a wall of photographs—head-and-shoulder shots of infants to teens, complete with names, ages, and home villages. They were arranged in pairs and trios, or more, grouped together as siblings. One family, Tucci, lost eight children, ranging in age from three months to sixteen years. Most were from Sant’Anna, but I was surprised that some were from Pietrasanta. Others were from far-flung places in Tuscany and Liguria, such as Capezzano Pianore, Pontestazzemese, Piombino, La Spezia, and Castelmare di Stabbia.
Parents had sent their children to the mountains from their hometowns and villages, thinking they would be safer there. For example, La Spezia, a major seaport, was a scene of heavy bombing, and the Germans had taken over Pietrasanta. In some cases, the Germans ordered villagers to abandon their homes, while others had already left.
Pietrasanta and surrounding villages were within the cross-country sweep of the Gothic Line, Hitler’s demarcation in Italy where he hoped the German army would stop Allied troops from
entering the Po Valley. Many families within that zone closed up their houses and businesses and went elsewhere, becoming sfollati, or refugees.
The segment of the Gothic Line in western Tuscany, from the Serchio River to the coast and between Pisa and Carrara, was declared terra di nessuno, or no-man’s-land. And it is where some of the most brutal fighting in western Tuscany, between American troops and German soldiers, took place.
As I am taking all this in, looking through faded photographs into children’s eyes, I felt a tug at my sleeve. The elderly woman began to tell me about the twenty-day-old infant.
“I am her aunt,” she said, speaking in soft Italian. I asked her name. “Siria Pardini. Her mother was my sister.” The sister was Bruna, age twenty-six when the Germans shot her.
The story spilled out of Siria. With my basic Italian, I caught only bits and pieces, but I didn’t stop her. I got her full story weeks later when, on another bus ride up to Sant’Anna, I met her family, including her nephew, Claudio Lazzeri, whose excellent English helped me to fully understand the story.
During that first conversation in the church Siria’s dry eyes bored directly into my eyes, which were doing their best to stay dry. She pointed to photos of two other Pardini children, her cousins, Orietta and Sara, ages fourteen and nine, killed along with their mothers, grandmothers and grandfathers, and more than five hundred others.
“I was nine years old,” Siria said. Now age seventy-seven, she pays her respects by traveling up that mountain nearly every week, loaded up with bunches of flowers, to dutifully decorate the altar.
On that tragic day, with the men in her family hiding in nearby mountains, Siria, her sisters—Adele, five years old; Lilia, six or seven; Cesira, eighteen; Bruna, twenty-six—along with their mother, and Anna, Bruna’s twenty-day-old baby, remained in their home in the tiny borgo of Coletti, a cluster of two or three buildings perhaps a ten-minute walk from the heart of Sant’Anna.