by John Keahey
Twenty minutes before the Germans arrived, Siria had left to take food to some of the men hiding in the mountains. Her sisters, the baby, her mother, and her grandmother were there when soldiers came crashing through the doors. The Germans had gathered together other families living in or near the Coletti complex, and in all, thirty people were forced to line up against a wall of the Pardini house.
Here, Claudio expands on the story for me via a series of e-mails: His aunt Cesira stood against a door to the house, and when the shooting started, she pushed back, forcing it open. As she tumbled backward, with a bullet in her shoulder, she grabbed the hands of two of her sisters: Claudio’s mother Adele and his aunt Lilia. Adele had been hit, with a grazing wound in the face, and Lilia took a bullet to the shoulder.
The shooting stopped a few moments later, with the three wounded sisters still hiding inside, behind the door. Through a gap, Cesira could see her wounded younger sister Maria, lying on top of their dead mother but still breathing. The Germans set fire to the structure and, as they were leaving, Cesira decided to take her sisters and run. On their way out, she grabbed Maria.
The Germans spotted them and began firing as the four youngsters, slowed down by their wounds, ran, a bullet hitting Cesira in the leg. But somehow they were able to keep going, disappearing into the woods while the rest of the victims lay piled against the wall of the burning building. The infant Anna, who became Sant’Anna’s youngest victim, was later found in her dead mother’s arms, critically wounded. The infant lingered on for a few weeks but died on September 4. Maria died from her wounds on September 20.
* * *
The brutality of the deaths of the families and neighbors of Enrico and the Pardini sisters was just part of a three-hour, horror-filled stretch that culminated in what happened in front of Sant’Anna’s tiny church.
The priest, Don Innocenzo Lazzeri, who had followed his Farnocchia parishioners to Sant’Anna the day before, had begged the soldiers not to harm the people, proclaiming they were innocent of any partisan activity. He offered his life in order to save theirs. After he was shot, the soldiers opened fire from two machine guns set up on tripods on each side of the church’s front door.
This is the way Italian writer Manlio Cancogni vividly sums up the massacre: “The villagers were gathered in the small square in front of the church.… When the Nazis took aim against those bodies they were so close that the soldiers could see into their eyes. The villagers fell down without a chance to scream.”
The Germans, he described, then piled pews from the church on top of the bodies and set them ablaze. In the Spike Lee film, soldiers pour gasoline onto the bodies, but there were no vehicles driven to the isolated, road-less village, making it doubtful large cans of gasoline were available. It is more likely that soldiers used flamethrowers, carried there by the conscripted Italians.
“At midday, all the houses in the village were burned down,” Cancogni writes. Enrico, during our 2012 discussion, told me that the church remained standing, though the back of the church, which housed quarters for a priest, was badly damaged.
Cancogni also describes, in horrific detail that I will forego here, individual atrocities the troops committed on some of the people who missed the machine-gunning in the churchyard or the mass executions at their homes.
The Germans had finished their work in three hours with the help of machine guns, rifles, pistols, and flamethrowers. By noon, they were two and a half miles away, following the trails back to their four or five starting points and to the vehicles that would return them to Pietrasanta and other bases within Versilia.
Survivors say they know local fascisti were involved. Despite scarves covering their faces, the fascisti were heard speaking in local dialect. These collaborators were men who had grown up with these villagers, sat at their tables with them, herded sheep with them, played games with them as children.
The fascisti’s names were never officially revealed, but many locals knew who they were. Some disappeared when their cause was lost—they left before they could be tracked down at the end of the war—and never were seen again; others were sought out, a somber son of a survivor told me. Asked their fate, he merely shrugged, looking at me with a knowing smile, eyebrows raised. I got the message. Confusingly, I heard some descendants of Sant’Anna victims say that a few of the fascisti lived their lives out in the area and were never called to account for their roles in the tragedy.
When they reached Valdicastello, the fourteen men and boys the Germans had conscripted to carry their equipment through the hills were machine-gunned in a streambed that ran through the village. Villagers hiding in their Valdicastello homes reported hearing a couple of German soldiers playing mouth organ music, like ten-year-old Enrico heard while hidden next to his burning house at Sant’Anna.
The final killings of the day took place in Capezzano Monte. There, six Italian equipment carriers, like those in Valdicastello, were lined up against a wall and shot. The Germans simply did not need these load bearers anymore. Plus, they were witnesses to the brutal murders the Germans had committed that morning. Within a few weeks, those Germans would head a few miles north to defend against the eventual arrival of the advancing Americans. When the killing had started at Sant’Anna, American troops were stopped twenty-five miles away, at the south bank of the Arno River, near Pisa. They would not begin moving north, along the coast and in the central mountains, until late September.
* * *
Enrico, who now lives in Pietrasanta, stayed with relatives in Valdicastello until he was seventeen. He emigrated to Switzerland and became an ironworker in a foundry near Bern, returning to Valdicastello to marry a local woman. The couple returned to Switzerland, where their son was born, then moved back to Italy in 1983.
At the time of our conversation, Enrico was involved with a survivor organization. He tells his story over and over to groups of young people in the area’s schools. He also carries the keys to the Museum of the Resistance in Sant’Anna. In the museum, visitors can learn about Italy’s partisan movement from 1943 to 1945, its civil war between partisans and the Italian Fascists still loyal to Mussolini, as well as the massacres of thousands of Italian civilians throughout the region. Tuscany’s largest massacre, the Sant’Anna massacre, involved only innocent civilians, not partisans.
Five weeks following the Sant’Anna massacre, the Waffen SS did battle with partisans in the area around Monte Sole. This battlefield, which included numerous small villages, is not located in Tuscany. It is in Emilia-Romagna to the east, near Bologna. Like Sant’Anna, the Germans carried out reprisals against civilians there. According to James Holland in Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War, 1944–1945, 556 civilians and 216 partisans were killed in various villages there. These deaths occurred during much of the month of September. Numbers vary. Other authors say it involved nearly two thousand civilians and partisans. Either way, Monte Sole was Western Europe’s single worst massacre.
In one episode on that mountain, nearly two hundred civilians were packed into a small cemetery at the Emilia-Romagna village of Casaglia. There nearly all were machine-gunned; only a few, hidden by bodies that landed on top, survived to tell the story. Several months after my summer 2012 visits to Sant’Anna, I visited Casaglia on Monte Sole. Only broken foundations of the former town and church remain.
* * *
Italian historian Paolo Pezzino points out that in Tuscany alone, the Germans conducted 210 separate episodes of their “war against civilians,” killing an estimated 3,650 people. Of those killed, 75 percent were men, but only 41 percent of those episodes were rappresaglia, or reprisals, for partisan activity against German soldiers. The majority of the killing was done just because the Germans had the unbridled power to do it, to keep the people in line through terror.
There were perhaps one hundred survivors of the Sant’Anna tragedy, not including the men who had escaped into the hills the day before, Enrico told me. Of those men, the same number, one hundred, “ret
urned to find that they were without their families.”
Despite the horror he witnessed at a young, innocent age, Enrico’s feelings about the SS soldiers and Germans in general surprised me. “There is no hate,” he said. “When my son was ready for school, in Switzerland, I had a choice: a French school or a German school. I chose the German one. I am a European. Germany at that time was important to the rebuilding of Europe.” Whatever hate he ever felt, he has gotten over it.
The number of dead Sant’Anna civilians cited in reports is 560, but the exact number will never be known. A plaque at the monument high on the hill above the town lists all the known names. The remains of those villagers are gathered together within a crypt under the tower.
Enrico’s family and the Pierottis had been hastily buried near the burned houses of Ai Franchi. When the ossuary was established late in the 1940s, the remains of the Pieris were moved there. The Pierottis, because they were refugees from Pietrasanta, were moved to the cemetery in that town, a few miles away.
Only a couple of the houses in Sant’Anna have been rebuilt. Enrico’s family’s home has not been restored, but all four homes in that one long structure have rebuilt roofs. Only one home, at the south end, was rebuilt, its light-yellow exterior standing in dramatic contrast to the stained exterior of the other three unoccupied homes. A family lives there today.
Perhaps fifteen year-round residents live in Sant’Anna proper, a woman clearing brush from below her home told me. The village now is the center of the National Park of Peace, created in 2000 by government statute. Included in that legislation is the museum Enrico showed me. It is housed in what was once the village’s school. There was no need for the school after the massacre; only a few children had survived. In addition to exhibits, it holds a center for multimedia presentations and conferences.
Outside the museum, a handful of statues represents various parts of the Sant’Anna story, plus an ironic stone-sculpted “Ode to Kesselring,” referring to the German general Albert Kesselring. It was he who oversaw military operations and strategy in Italy. It drips with sarcasm:
You will get it
kamerad Kesselring
the monument you demand of us Italians
but it’s our turn to decide
the stone it will be built with.
Not with the charred stones
of the defenseless villages racked by your slaughter
not with the ground of the cemeteries
where our young comrades
rest in serenity
not with the untouched snow of the mountains
which for two winters defied you
not with the spring of these valleys
which saw you run away.
But just with the silence of the tortured
harder than any stone
just with the rock of this pact
sworn amongst free men
who of their free will gathered
for dignity and not for hatred
determined to redeem
the shame and the terror of the world.
If you wish to return on these roads,
you will find us in our places
dead and alive with the same commitment
a people serried around the monument
that is called
now and forever
RESISTANCE
On August 12, 2012, the sixty-eighth anniversary of this tragic day, Siria Pardini, the woman I had met two months earlier in the church, offered to show her childhood home at the casolare, or farmhouse complex, known as Coletti. A healthy, strong walker in her late seventies, she easily outpaced my wife, Connie Disney, and me along a narrow dirt road that begins below the museum at Sant’Anna and continues through the rough undergrowth of beeches, chestnut trees, and oaks.
The buildings, partially restored after the Germans set fire to them, are still owned and occasionally occupied by the family. Siria has the key and lets us inside to see the small family spaces. Outside the rebuilt door her sister had forced open during the shooting sixty-eight years earlier is a small overgrown courtyard. A marker on the wall there tells of the moment some thirty people died against that yellowish, plastered structure.
What was particularly memorable for me was meeting Siria’s surviving sisters—the ones who had been wounded as they escaped—and Adele’s son Claudio, who was visiting on the anniversary day from his home in England.
The Pardini sisters and Enrico Pieri do not want this story to die, to be forgotten. But nearly seventy years later, it almost has, everywhere but in this remote corner of western Tuscany.
Sant’Anna is not listed on my official map of Tuscany, not even on the more detailed, spiral-bound Italian Travel Club map; to my surprise, it is not even mentioned in several major guidebooks. Several histories of the war in Italy do not mention Sant’Anna or Monte Sole.
Spike Lee’s movie Miracle at St. Anna (which misspells the village’s name in the title), deals with the massacre almost in passing. It is used as a plot device to explain why a small boy befriended by four American soldiers was alone in the world and miles away from Sant’Anna.
* * *
During one of my visits to the village, I spent about an hour sitting on the low wall of stone that runs along one side of the church. A young mother was sitting about fifty feet away, watching two youngsters kick a soccer ball around the grassy area in front of the church. Earlier, I had watched the smaller one struggle with his small red bike, learning how to ride without training wheels. His eyes were alight with joy and his smile wide as he successfully traveled a few feet at a time. His unbridled happiness took me away from my growing sense of sadness.
Later on, while still sitting on that low wall, something else helped lift some of the emotional load. A group of about thirty men and women, most dressed in light blue golf-type shirts proclaiming I Vous de la Valgranda, walked into the square, heading for the church. This, I learned later, was a choir from mountainous northern Italy. The men also were wearing alpine-style hats with long feathers protruding, typical of the type worn in the far north.
The group entered in silence and, after a few moments, I heard a united choir’s voice pour forth from the church’s wide-open front doors, singing to no living audience. Life stood wonderfully still. The little boys stopped kicking their soccer ball; the young mother’s gaze shifted to the church. It seemed as if the birds high up in the tall, stately plane trees were silent.
The hymn lasted perhaps two minutes. Then, one by one or in clusters of two or three, the visitors quietly filed out of the church. Some stopped at the bar for their morning espresso, others began the long trudge up the stone steps leading to the memorial at the top of the hill, perhaps a half mile away. Still others went past the “Ode to Kesselring” stone, pausing, with grim smiles, to read it before entering the museum.
After they all cleared out, I got up and headed toward the edge of the bar and started down the stone pathway that led down the steep canyon and into Valdicastello. The day was incredibly hot. The moisture-laden air seemed to quiver in front of me as I slipped my way down the steepest part of the trail and through the thick clusters of chestnut trees, giant ferns, and Mediterranean pines. I crossed over a series of stone bridges and past a couple of abandoned, decaying structures destroyed in the massacre and never reoccupied, my shoes wet from dew as I trudged along the barely perceptible, little-used trail.
Knowing that a group of Germans had used this trail to climb into Sant’Anna and then desert the shattered, dying village, I wanted to be alone to confront their ghosts and the ghosts of the Italian Fascists who led them along it. I got my wish.
It took about ninety minutes to walk down to Valdicastello, including a brief stop to sit in absolute solitude and eat my lunch. Weeks later, with Filippo Tofani, my friend from Pietrasanta, I walked the mostly uphill trail from Capezzano Monte to Sant’Anna, past the deserted casolare of Moco with its three or four burned-out, abandoned houses, forest vines o
bscuring them and trees pushing up through the crumbled floors.
For good measure during this second walk, after a brief stay in Sant’Anna, we continued downhill toward Valdicastello. Filippo told me he had made the trip as a high school student, uphill, with his history class. Filippo knows the story well—lessons taught by a wise teacher who did not want the tragedy at Sant’Anna to fade from the consciences of his Tuscan students.
SEVEN
The War
What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine. They are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine. They are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior … jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior.
—Florence Nightingale, letter to her family from the Crimea (1855)
THE HUMAN animal, while magnificently able to do wondrous things for fellow creatures, also is capable of doing horrible, unforgivable things. Members of our species have slaughtered tens, even hundreds of millions of their kind since the earliest of times.
A visiting friend once commented that what the Germans did at Sant’Anna made them less human. I disagreed, suggesting such behavior is a human-animal trait, though it never rises in many of us.
To me, the greater mystery is how a group of men who knew they were losing a world war that likely would be over within a short time—it did end barely nine months later—could wreak such havoc on innocent people. Didn’t they know that ultimately they would have to live with the horror of what they had done?
Could it be that they were so well disciplined that they would unquestionably follow such orders? (“We are here zur Ausführung einer Befehl—for the execution of an order!”). Had they been so thoroughly desensitized by the brutality and terror of war that life had such little meaning? Perhaps these soldiers, indoctrinated with a belief in Aryan superiority, considered such people as somehow subhuman.