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The other "resistance", 600,000 Italians who said 'no'

Events in Krakow focusing on military internees in Poland

05 February, 19:55
(ANSA) - KRAKÓW - They fought a war that was not their war, they had been betrayed by their leaders and then persecuted by their former allies, and finally they were neglected by official history and remembrance. On the Italian military internees (since September 8, 1943) the mark of shame remained for too long, whereas they should have been celebrated in the same way as those who sought redemption from fascism and the lost war by taking up arms. They were both part of Resistance, but two double standards were used for the story told in Italy.

The city of Krakow, in Poland, pays tribute to the Italian military internees (IMI) imprisoned in the concentration camps of the General Government, through an exhibition commissioned by Diego Audero Bottero, in collaboration of Katarzyna Kurdziel, and hosted in the premises of the Italian Institute of Culture directed by Ugo Rufino.

Behind the barbed wire of the concentration camps, about 650,000 soldiers were brave enough to say 'no' to the strong pressures to join the ranks of the fascist army and be faithful to the alliance with Hitler's Third Reich. That 'no' was paid with hunger, cold, sickness, deprivation of all kinds, in the concentration camps of occupied Poland and Germany, suffering contempt, harassment and violence of all kinds.

This rediscovered history, little known to young people, not only Polish, was the focus of a conference hosted in the Schindler Museum's conference room: the former pot factory which became famous all over the world thanks to Steven Spielberg's film 'Schindler's List'. Speakers: the exhibition's curator, Autero, Treblinka Museum Director Edward Kopowka, Violeta Rezler, director of the Documentation Centre for Lambinowice War Prisoners, Tomasz Owoc, director of the Cracow Historical Museum, the Italian historian Marco Patricelli, expert on Poland and World War II.

For the Poles, this was an opportunity to reappropriate a page of history. The Nazis did not recognize the recognise the prisoner of war status for these Italian soldiers and made them object of all sorts of violence since they were considered 'traitors' and because in the overwhelming majority they refused to return to fight for Mussolini. Housed in dilapidated shacks, exposed to the cold eastern winds, they were given very low food rations, no Red Cross parcels, no medicines. Exposed to extremely low temperatures, they died in droves from hunger, cold and disease. Those who did not return home at the end of the war, were buried in the Warsaw cemetery where the bodies of the Italian prisoners during World War I were also buried. The exhibition on Italian military internees can be visited until the end of the month and has a bilingual 244-page catalogue edited by Audero, with a rich set of images and testimonies that come from foundations, private archives and even very recent acquisitions supported by the same author.

Alberto Guareschi, son of the well known writer and caricaturist Giovannino Guareschi, who was one of the 600,000 soldiers who said 'no', provided the exhibition with historical memories and heirlooms.(ANSA).

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