Ferdinando Valletti: I TELL YOU ABOUT MY DEPORTATION

"If you will remember what I have testified you and you will draw teaching of it, I won't have suffered in vain! "

I TELL YOU ABOUT MY DEPORTATION
©Ferdinando Valletti
(kept relationship in the meetings with the students of the middle and High schools of Milan to sensitize
the boys on the crimes of the Nazism)

Dear boys,

I'm here on invitation of your Teacher and the Aned to tell you of the horrors of the Nazism *, I will do it using simple and clear words because, you that you are the new generations, you have to well understand what is happened to million of innocent people. I will tell some tragedy of the caps of extermination speaking to you of my personal story; usually the lived of a person is how much of better as testimony of tragic facts can really be offered happened because close to the narration of events strorici, will find emotions, memoirs and hopes. I make not this testimony without pain and omitting the bloodiest aspects of my imprisonment.Per years I have not wanted to speak or better I have not been able to speak about my experience, so much was the horror that I had seen and the pain that I had tried.

My name is Valetti Ferdinando, I was born in 1921in Verona, I have arrived to Milan to enter in the school of the Alfa Romeo 1938 and I h become Teacher Of art. Those were difficult years, the Fascism reigned and Italy would have been dragged later only in a tragic war in a few years. Despite this, in November of 1943 I got married, I was only 23 and my wife 21, we went to live in a little house in Street Caesar Airaghi, nearby to the Alfa Romeo, a beautiful cottage that we shared with my mother.

I was a youth height of ideal and desire of liberty, for this when in March 1944 I was approached by a group of communists that asked me to help them to organize a strike against the Nazism inside the Alfa Romeo, I accepted with entusiamo and I threw myself in the enterprise without thinking too much... I didn't know that these person would have to sell me to the Fascist before and then to the Nazi to save their skin. Then I have known always the names and the last names of the people that have reported me.

An evening of that same month, people played to the gate of my house, I gone down in slippers and I found three people, they told me that I would have had to follow them to give some information , I asked to be able speak to my wife and my mother, it was me granted, I followed them. I didn't see my family anymore up to 1945 again.

I was summarily questioned in a place of police, I was translated then to St. Vittore and subsequently, with the V Trasporto, departed from Milan March 11 th 1944, I reached the KZ of Mathausen, on March 13 th 1944. I traveled with other 100 deporteds on a wagon livestock, without food of it water, had hoard as animals. My greatest worry was to tell my family. For this motive I had succeeded to leave to fall from the cracks of the wagon livestock tickets in every stations in which the convoy stopped him: I informed my wife that I was to be deported and that I didn't know my destination. To my return in Italy I have known that some of that tickets had been delivered.
To the station of Mauthausen we were welcomed by the S.S., they put us in line and we began to walk for around 6 kilometers among insults, spits and beats. We climbed on a hill and appeared us a reddish wall with towers to the sides on which waved two flags, one it was the hooked cross and the other that black of the pirates, the aspect was that of a fortitude medioevale. Inside the fortitude they were seen some great constructions.

I was interned in the Camp of Mathausen as political deported, they deprived me of all that I had and above of my name that became a number: I had a red triangle with it initials - country of origin - on a lines blue jacket and I was the displaced person number 57633. After having suffered a shower and an integral trimming, I was started to the quarantine and I was hardly me with other companions of imprisonment arrivals, in a hut surrounded by jailers and criminals that checked us on behalf of the SS.

The Camp of extermination of Mathausen is found in Austria to around 20 east kilometers of Linz and was open from 1938, remained under the command Franz Ziereis up to the arrival of the Americans. The field was used as cap of extermination (KZ initials means Konzentrationslager) it was composed from 32 blocks or rather huts in wood, 24 were for the prisoners, other huts for the quarantine and for the setup of the sick.

I know that people esteems that the people deported in this camp , one of the most terrible Nazi Lager, have been 200.000, around 100.000 of them found the death for the inhuman conditions of detention and job. Italians deported here were more than 8.000.

I shortly explain you what they intended the Nazi for concentration camp and of extermination.

During the Third Reich institutes different fields of extermination came, in which have found the death million of people of religion or Jewish origin, besides gypsies, Jehovah's witnesses, homosexuals, carriers of physical or psychic handicap and opponents of the nazismo.Dentro these fields the prisoners still held profits were employed in particularly heavy jobs. The bad hygienic conditions, united to a scarce feeding they quickly brought to the inability and therefore to the "uselessness" with consequent killing, that happened in gas rooms or for shooting or other methods.

When Italian arrived we also found many Russian prisoners.
After 10 months of permanence to Mathausen I was transferred to the minor camp of Gusen. In both the fields life was really hard, we had hoard in the huts, we slept on wood tables and we had little food, almost always watery soup.
I still have in front of the eyes the physical and psychic atrocities that we suffered in the lager: we often woke up at night and ducts in the gases rooms and then brought in the hut with the solo purpose of it stuffed to live in the terror, the lack of vitamins had provoked in many of us the dysentery, we tried to hide the sick from the Kapòs , but when these poor persons were discovered were still thrown in the crematory ovens you live, the showers frozen in the heart of the night served for experimenting our resistance to the cold and then the hard labor.
The morning, the alarm clock was at five o'clock, after that we were brought to work to it gets by of stone for twelve, thirteen hours per diem. We ate few and badly: an admixture of water and vegetables and a piece of bread to be divided in six.
The cruelty of the watches didn't have limit, they had a good time seeing to transport in single file also us rocks of 50 kilograms for a whole day and scommettavano on who of us it would be fallen under the weight of the rock also dragging in the precipice many other companions. Along that accursed 182 stairs of the it extracts, that sadly became known as him "the death's stairs", it is calculated that they died during the years a million people.
Recapitulating, the methods that were used for eliminating the prisoners were these:

the gases rooms

the gases mobile rooms, through a truck with the turned exhaust pipe inside the vain back of the vehicle that transited along the journey between Mauthausen and Gusen

shooting of mass

you experiment physicians

hundred prisoners they died bled and their bodies were sent on the Oriental Front

hanging

starvation, every week more than 2.000 prisoners they starved

My physicist started to hear some difficulties, but I didn't dare to say that I was badly for fear to be eliminated, I had seen many my companions to go to the infirmary and not to make return anymore. When I was freed by the Americans I weighed 39 kilograms.
After 10 months from the arrival to Mathausen I was transferred to Gusen at few kilometers. Gusen was formed from 30 huts and two constructions in stone, that was extracted from it gets by. The conditions of life were the same, the job was the same, but to Gusen he also worked for custruire you arm for the German army.

You will ask you as I have been able to withstand . The only things that helped me to survive were the faith and the love for my family.
I have never surrendered, I have always had in the heart the certainty that I would have succeeded in returning home to see my wife and the child that she was waiting and also my mother, has had always so much faith in the providence. and the providence didn't abandon me.

One day happened that the watches had organized a game of kick between them and that a player missed, they asked to us if someone were a good ball playe, I said that I had played in the A.C.Milan, they immediately put me in team and they were satisfied of my game, so much that every time was called for playing. From that moment I succeeded in having some food in more because they started me working in the kitchens, food that I divided with my companions, I hid the peels of potatoes in the clogs to overcome the search before reentering in the hut and so I give a help to more unlucky people.

In May of 1945 we realized there that anything was changing, SS told us that the field had to demobilize and the German soldiers, more nervous than the usual one, didn't do anything else other than to burn dead bodies, the air was unbreathable for the typical sharp odor that came from the crematory ovens. On May 4 hundreds displaced persons were killed with the use of the gas Zyklon-B in a hut turned into gas chamber.
The morning of May 5 we warned that anything was about to happen, we were terrorized because we knew that would also be been our turn to enter the gas chamber, instead suddenly the watches went and we saw to come in front of the gate of the field an autoblindo and a jeep with on board of the American soldiers that shouted us: "You are free! ". These soldiers went down from the means and they looked around him with dismay, mountains of dead bodies it was to the edges of the field. The Americans tried to reassure us, they gave us food and water, they lent us the first cares and they told us they would have helped us. Then they started to bury the dead bodies.
It was everything ended.
The heart bursted me from the happiness, I looked for my companions, I loaded my friend Romanoni, almost dying, on a child stroller and we crossed the gates of the field of Gusen toward the liberty.
Those of us that needed cares remained with the American contingent for 3 months. I was taken care of and put again in strength, the imprisonment and the difficulties had given me some pulmonary infiltrations. I immediately told my family that I was alive and that soon I would have returned.
I returned in Italy in August of 1945 with another "Alfista", Paolol Crippa, all the people of the street where I lived had gone down in the street for it stuffed party, my wife for error embraced Crippa, then she saw me.... than she conducted me to meet a very beautiful child that 10 months old, and that didn't know his dad yet. So I met for the first time my daughter Manuela.

Here is this is my history.
I have returned home, but I can never forget the horrors that I have seen, I have lost so many companions of imprisonment, I have shared with other men an experience that doesn't have anything human, but I don't nourish feelings of revenge toward anybody. They are only here for remembering you that violence is the pleasure of the fools and is the last resource of the wise man that uses by law only her in defense of what it is up to him.

Dear boys, remember that if you can now go to school, to make some sport, to be free, owes in short it to young people as us that in the dark years of the fascism and the Nazism have believed in the liberty and in the value of the man. Remember to make honor to the fallen ones for the liberty is a civil and moral appointment of every new generation, a tribute to whom has given the life because us today can be been free.
Those people who know the barbarities served as the Nazi, and now you know, they will certainly be aware of the pain that these involve and they will act accordingly for avoiding that in expectancy similar calamities can be repeated. Only knowing the past will be possible to realize a future of peace. I pray you therefore, not forget what I have told you. . You are the hope of the human kind, you are also my hope.

Before finishing I want to remember with you with so much affection the Prof Carpi, grat italian painter and for years Manager of the Academy of Brera, that with immense gratitude has thanked me on its book "Diary of Gusen" to have helped him in many occasion, all of my companions that don't have succeeded and that they will stay forever in my heart.
Prof. Carpi has realized a lot of sketches on hisr period of deportation and just reentered to Milan. Who wanted to see here them , please click here

Now I am ready to answer to your questions......

The images of the deportation

The oath of Mathausen

The emotions of the boys of the Gentileschi after the meeting

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