When I was young, every year, on the twenty-fifth of April, I would go have lunch with my grandmother.
That’s something that happened often, roughly weekly, in every month of the year, but April 25 was different. April 25 is Liberation Day. It’s the day Italy marks the end of the Nazi occupation and the fall of the fascist state.
On April 24, 1945, CLNAI, the paramilitary organisation coordinating the Italian resistance for Northern Italy, sends a telegram to all the local commands:
A TUTTI I COMANDI ZONA Comunicasi il seguente telegramma:
ALDO DICE 26 x 1 Nemico in crisi finale stop APPLICATE PIANO E 27 stop Capi nemici et dirigenti fascisti in fuga stop Fermate tutte macchine et controllate rigorosamente passeggeri trattenendo persone sospette stop Comandi Zona interessati abbiano massima cura assicurare viabilità Forze Alleate su strada Genova-Torino et Piacenza Torino stop.
To all local commands, receive the following telegram: Aldo says 26 x 1. Enemy in final crisis. Execute plan E27. Stop all cars and carefully check all passengers, detaining all suspect persons. Interested local commands should have maximum care to ensure passage to Allied Forces on road Genoa-Turin and Piacenza-Turin.
That message was the signal to start the partisan insurrection that ended up with the capitulation of the invading German army, and marked the end of the war for Italy.
When I was young, every year, on the twenty-fifth of April, I would go have lunch with my grandmother.
She’d be wearing good-looking clothes, and she would cook something special. We celebrated. Then I would meet friends and go celebrate with them. I still meet those friends on April 25. Now that we have kids on our own, we celebrate with them.
Decisions
That telegram is one of the most significant pieces of writing I know.
It’s not elegant. It’s bureaucratic and abrupt and full of “stop”. But it is beautiful because of what it was, and what it cost.
By April 24, 1945, the Italian Resistance had been operating for nineteen months. Since the armistice of September 1943, when Italy switched sides and the King fled and the Germans turned an ally into an occupier overnight, some Italians had been making a very specific decision.
A decision to walk to the mountains and fight.
A decision to hide a Jewish family in their attic.
A decision to carry information or false papers hidden in the frame of their bike.
Around 50,000 partisans died. Tens of thousands more civilians were killed in reprisals. Whole villages burned. Sant’Anna di Stazzema, where the SS murdered around 560 people, mostly women and children, in retaliation for partisan activity. The Fosse Ardeatine in Rome, where 335 men and boys were taken to a quarry and shot in the back of the neck, ten Italian civilians for every German killed by partisans, all in a single night.
A family matter
When I was young, every year, on the twenty-fifth of April, I would go have lunch with my grandmother.
Over lunch, she’d tell stories, always the same, like a traditional epic.
There was the story of how her father (a railway engineer) took seawater in Genoa and boiled it on the engine to have salt to exchange for other goods arriving in Piedmont.
There was the story of her cousin and uncle, both conductors (she was from a family of railway workers), who were working on the same train when a British airplane decided to strafe the train. Her uncle was fatally hit, fell on his son, the dying body protecting him.
There was the story of her brother who was 19 when the Navy ship he was on was torpedoed and sank taking him with it.
There was the story of when they had to leave the city and go to the countryside, and they hid a fugitive partisan in the attic, only to have the next day German troops moving in the house for a week, eating and sleeping there while they all held their breath hoping the partisan in the attic didn’t sneeze.
There was the story of her childhood neighbours she played with as a kid, who became early leaders of the Resistance and were captured and executed.
There were more stories, and they felt universal and important.
The stories told me, in the only way that mattered, what April 25 was for.
Every year, in good clothes, she set the table for celebration. Not for solemn remembrance. Not for grief. For celebration. As if to say: We are still here. We get to do this.
A state matter
I am a reserve Navy Officer. I’ve sworn an oath of allegiance to the Republic, and to its Constitution.
The Constitution that was derived from the principles of the Resistance. Those are not just left-wing principles. Centrist catholics, Republicans, even fully right-wing monarchists, took part in the writing of it.
I’ve had people get really confused about how I could be part of an armed force, while also being on the right side of history. But that’s been true for many people: Salvo D’Acquisto, Ferruccio Parri, Giovanni Maltese, the list goes on.
The Resistance was not a faction. It was a country, the part of it that had decided. Liberals and Communists, peasants and priests, conscripts and aristocrats, monarchists and republicans. They disagreed about almost everything except the immediate question. On the immediate question, they were unanimous. Not because they had agreed on a manifesto, but because each of them, separately, in their kitchens and their barracks and their chapels, had decided this was not their country anymore until something changed.
The Constitution they wrote afterwards is the only durable thing I can think of that was built out of “people who otherwise wouldn’t speak to each other agreeing on one specific thing”. That is rare.
When I put on my uniform, I am not betraying my ideals. I am working for them. The state that pays my reservist salary is the state they died to make possible. The Constitution I swore to defend is the one they wrote.
There is no contradiction. There is only the same Republic, doing different jobs.
A personal matter
When I was young, every year, on the twenty-fifth of April, I would go have lunch with my grandmother.
Today, I meet friends, and their kids play with my kids. We play music, eat springtime foods, drink wine. The children play ball, then come and sing Bella Ciao with us grown-ups.
The kids are starting to know what we’re doing.
Not because we explained it. Because every April we go to celebrate somewhere. Because we tie a kerchief in the colours of the Italian flag around their neck, because we wear shirts with partisan words.
Eighty-one years ago, six words went out from Milan: “ALDO DICE 26 x 1.”
We are the world those six words were trying to make possible.
The least we can do is dress up for it.
Now and always
In 1947, Albert Kesselring, the commander of the invading German forces, was tried for war crimes and sentenced to death. The sentence was soon changed into a life sentence, but after less than five years, for health reasons, he was set free and returned to Germany, where he led Bavarian neo-nazi groups until he died.
Once he returned home, he declared smugly that he had nothing to reproach himself for about the Italian occupation, and that in fact Italians should have raised a monument to him.
Piero Calamandrei wrote an epigraph in 1952. It is in the lobby of the town hall of Cuneo. It goes like this:
Lo avrai
camerata Kesselring
il monumento che pretendi da noi italiani
ma con che pietra si costruirà
a deciderlo tocca a noi.Non coi sassi affumicati
dei borghi inermi straziati dal tuo sterminio
non colla terra dei cimiteri
dove i nostri compagni giovinetti
riposano in serenità
non colla neve inviolata delle montagne
che per due inverni ti sfidarono
non colla primavera di queste valli
che ti videro fuggire.Ma soltanto col silenzio del torturati
più duro d’ogni macigno
soltanto con la roccia di questo patto
giurato fra uomini liberi
che volontari si adunarono
per dignità e non per odio
decisi a riscattare
la vergogna e il terrore del mondo.Su queste strade se vorrai tornare
ai nostri posti ci ritroverai
morti e vivi collo stesso impegno
popolo serrato intorno al monumento
che si chiama
ora e sempreRESISTENZA
You’ll have it, comrade Kesselring, the monument you ask from us Italians. But what stone we will build it with, we shall decide.
Not with the smoke-blackened stones of helpless villages torn apart by your extermination; not with the dirt of the graveyards where our young men rest in peace; not with the virgin snow of the mountains that for two winters challenged you; not with the springtime of these valleys that saw you flee.
But only with the silence of the tortured, harder than any boulder. Only with the rock of this pact, sworn between free men who voluntarily gathered for dignity, not hate, determined to redeem the shame and the terror of the world.
On these roads, if you wish to return, you will find us all at the ready, dead and alive with the same commitment. One people gathered around the monument that is called,
Now and always
Resistance.