AND On a Sunday in March 1995, or perhaps from 1996. After a family lunch, Uncle Franco told the grandchildren: “Now I’ll show you where I was born”. He brought them through the narrow streets and the sunny squares of Umago, the town overlooking the Istrian coast where he was born and raised.
And from where, then, he was gone: Uncle Franco was one of the approximately 300 thousand exiles Giuliano Dalmati That, after the Second World War and the assignment of Istria and Dalmatia to Yugoslavia, left everything they had across the border to come to Italy.
That Sunday of March, Greta Sclaunichtoday very good journalist of Corriere della Serahe was 13 years old and attended middle schools. “I have not studied the double drama of the sinkholes and the exodus neither then nor, a few years later, at high school. Of these themes, however, in my house he spoke of it all right: I was born and raised in Villesse, in the province of Gorizia, and the events of Venezia Giulia are part of my family history ».
Aldo Cazzullo (photo by Carlo Vangi Gilbert).
From the memory of that Sunday of March his book starts The sinkholes explained to the boys (ed. Piemme), who collects ten stories of people who have experienced the nightmare of the sinkholes and then the difficulties of the exodus.
There is Erminia, who at 15 years old loses a dear friend of family in the sinkholes and risks ending up herself. Graziano, who was thrown into a foiba and miraculously managed to get out of it but never managed to forget that night.
“The sinkholes explained to the boys” by Greta Sclaunich (ed. Piemme)
And then Anna Maria, who escaped from the titini on a boat with the oars wrapped in the rags; Claudio, who survived the massacre of Vergarolla; Fabio, who of childhood in a refugee camp recalls the cold and the tears; Andra and Tatiana, Auschwitz survivors who never could go homemeanwhile ended across the board.
To keep these stories together, the story with a capital S: The book was designed as a compendium to the school manualin order to understand and deepen these events that are still often leaving out.
But remembering is instead a duty to be able to implement reconciliation Designed by the President of the Republic Mattarella in the ceremony at the Quirinale of the day of memory.
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All articles by Aldo Cazzullo.
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