Southbound Train: Part 6 from "My Italian Secret"

Transcript

Speaker 1

You know.

[Speaking in Italian]

Speaker 1

It was different.

Speaker 4

Virginia, Virginia, the man who helped us is Mercedes’s father. Say say. After a time, the dio thought it was getting too dangerous for us in Cicciano. So Mercedes, her father, my parents and I started on a long journey by foot.

Speaker 4

Linked Mercedes and her father left. And we proceeded on to where the allies were. And we were delivered to them. And only years later did I find out about what Mercedes's father went through. He was picked up by the Nazis. And for three days he was tortured. And he did not live long after that.

Speaker 3

Strangely enough, I'm looking for an empty tomb. It's the tomb of my grandmother. My father for a long time, they didn't know what had happened and went on looking for traces of her. After the war, some letters arrived. Sent from this camp called Fossoli, my mother burst into tears.

Speaker 5

June 14th, 1944. We arrived 4 weeks ago last night, weak from hunger and lack of sleep. We are in low spirits. Physically, mother is declining. This is my greatest sorrow.

Speaker 3

And then they were sent from Fossoli to Auschwitz. People knew about, you know about camps by then, but it was unimaginable. My father, he used to go to the railway station in their own after the war, waiting for the trains of this few people coming back. And one day found one relative. And she was a survivor from Auschwitz, and he said, please tell me what happened to my sister. And she said she was lucky, and her mother were lucky because they were selected immediately and sent inside a gas oven almost at once. So they were spared in a way, the horror of the rest. So this is the tomb of my grandfather Kabur. Here is my grandmother. No qui le sponge mortali djema Vitale servedio. Valentino disperse confuse Meori de Campi di Auschwitz. Accusa, the Tanta, Tragedia Humanae Familiare. Papa told me when I was quite young what had happened to my grandmother and to her mother. I started hating everybody, which is I overcame the cause and I felt great injustice or an unnecessary martyrdoms of all these people. But I must say there were also good things because there is a side of the Italians, which. Which is warm, which is which saved, which took pity, risking a lot. And that I always remember.