Mommy covered my eyes with her black shawl, but I saw. I saw the German with the machine gun looking at us with no expression in his eyes. He was about to kill, he didn’t laugh nor cry.
Memories are vivid, detailed, raw. Just as this one, from the only survivor in the slaughter of Pietransieri, in the Abruzzi. These are memories of people seeing with their own eyes, escaping death miraculously, the carnages during the German occupation in Italy between 1943 and 1945. Thousands of harmless citizens, mainly women, children and elder people, in hudreds of different places. Trials against accountable people have been first stopped for the sake of diplomatic balance, and then held and ended with life sentences that nobody wants or is able to implement.
Io ho visto (I saw) takes shape not to loose memory of those horrific events, to deliver to history and to future generations the tales of people taking us back with their own eyes to those moments, those instants when everything changes. Short, basic tales, presented along with a picture of the people living them taken by the author. Personal, private stories, of people being just one step away from death. With involving details. And describing the complex cohabitation everyone has with their own memory, their own future, and forgiveness.
Winner of the Premio Sandro Onofri 2013
Pier Vittorio Buffa published with Franco Giustolisi, Al di là di quelle mura (Rizzoli, 1984) and .Mara, Renato e io. Storia dei fondatori delle Brigate Rosse (Mondadori, 1988). He’s also author of the novel Ufficialmente dispersi (Marsilio 1995, later Transeuropa 2010) and the powerful essay Io ho visto (Nutrimenti 2013).
