A House in the Mountains by Caroline Moorehead

Author:Caroline Moorehead
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2020-01-20T16:00:00+00:00

One of the now familiar Fascist massacres

After Civitella, the massacres went on. In Caprara, three girls were tied to trees and stakes pushed through their bodies; not far away two pregnant women had their stomachs ripped open. In Pinerolo a young girl watched as a farmer, hoping to save his cows from the looting Germans, drove them towards a wood. Before he got there, soldiers with flamethrowers chased them back inside a barn together with the farmer and his family and set fire to it. In Marzabotto in the Appenines, partisans – of which ninety were women – had formed a band called the Stella Rossa. They attacked a barracks full of German and Italian soldiers and made forays against the retreating troops. Retribution came swiftly. This was the most brutal massacre to date. At dawn, the area was sealed off and attacked from all sides. Among the estimated nine hundred people who died were 155 children under the age of ten, as well as five priests. A woman in a wheelchair was slaughtered in the cemetery. In the days after the killings, the area was eerily silent; there were only cows, wandering about. The Germans lost seven men and twenty-nine were wounded.

One of the stories that stayed long in people’s minds was that of Cleonice Tomassetti, known to everyone as Nice. She was a 32-year-old staffetta, a brown-haired, slender woman with a flirtatious manner, and she had worked as a maid and a shop assistant in Milan until her anti-Fascist boyfriend died and she joined the partisans in Valdossola. Cleonice had not been with them many weeks when she was caught in a rastrellamento of the area. The Germans put a rope around her neck and tied it to a branch, pulling it up and down, releasing the pressure when she fainted. Later, she was taken to a barracks and put in a cellar with a group of hostages and partisans. She was quiet and dignified. When she saw the German soldiers adjusting their uniforms and getting out their weapons, she said to the others: ‘Don’t be afraid. Remember that it’s better to die as Italians, than to live as spies and servants of the Germans.’ One of the soldiers, who understood Italian, slapped her.

But what everyone remembers is the picture of Cleonice, beneath a banner with the words ‘Are these people the liberators of Italy or are they bandits?’, leading a line of forty-two men – she was the only woman – many with bloodied faces, very slowly along a deserted street. She looks calm. They walked for five kilometres. At the place of execution, Cleonice was one of the first to die. The local priest and the families were forbidden to collect the bodies. One eighteen-year-old boy survived. Later he took the name ‘Quarantadue’, in memory of his forty-two friends.

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