I TELL YOU MY DEPORTATION
© Ferdinando Valletti
(Lecture given in the meetings with the student-bodies of the secondary and high schools in Milan to sensitize the boys on the crimes of the Nazism)
Dear boys and girls,
I am here with you because I have welcomed with pleasure the invitation of your kind teacher and the National association Displaced Men to speak to you about the horrors of the Nazism; I will do it using simple and clear words so that you can deeply understand what has happened to me and million of innocent people. I will tell you about the tragedy of the extermination camps, starting from my personal story, because I am sure that, in this way, I will be able to acquaint you with my emotions, my suffering and a hope that has never abandoned me: coming back home. I bear witness with difficulty and omitting the bloodiest aspects of my imprisonment. For years I didn't want to speak, or better, I could not speak about what happened to me, so much was the horror that I had seen and the pain that I had felt.
My name is Ferdinando Valletti, I was born in Verona in 1921 and I arrived in Milan in 1938 to attend the Alfa Romeo School . In that factory, which has been the pride of our town, I have almost been working for forty years, I had been engaged as Art Master and I have finished my career as executive of the logistic sector.
Those were difficult years, the Fascism reigned and Italy would have been dragged only in a tragic war few years later. Despite this, in November 1943 I got married, I was only 23 years and my bride was 22; the house where I lived with my mother, in Via Mola, was razed to the ground by a bomb and we moved to an attractive small villa in Via Ajraghi, not too far from the Alfa Romeo. I brought my wife in that house.
I was a young man with ideals and desire of liberty, for this, when in February 1944 I was approached by a group of activists that asked me to help and organize the strike on 1 st March (against the Nazi) inside the Alfa Romeo , I accepted with enthusiasm and I did it without thinking too much about what could happen to me. When one is 23, one cannot even imagine that a person that you call “friend” can betray you and instead this is really what happened. The same individuals that involved me in the organization of the strike, they sold me to the Fascists first and to the Nazi then, to save their skin. I have always known the name of whom had reported me, but I have never thought about avenging. Having come back home had repaid me of everything: when you have seen in face the death every day for 18 months, coming back to a normal life it is the only thing that you desire.
The evening on 2 nd March, they rang the bell of my house, I went down to open the gate, wearing my slippers, and I didn't imagine what it would have happened to me. There were three persons in front of me that I had never seen, they told that I should have followed them just to give some information, I asked to reassure my wife and my mother, they granted it to me, I followed them. I didn't see my family anymore up to August 1945.
On 1st March 1944 the workers of the factories of the regions of Italy , occupied by the Germans, went on strike: for a week the Italian trade stops and the production for the Germans is suffering. The focal point of the big movement of struggle is the towns of Turin and Milan , where the worker condition is at the end of the survival. Hitler immediately threatens a hard repression: it needs to deport the 20% of the strikers and place them at Himmler's disposal for the work service. But the struggle doesn't stop: the organization of the strike gets the support of the CLNAI and to the economic claims, the political ones immediately support against the war and the neo-fascism occupation. Despite the arrests and the deportations of thousand of workers, the strike actually lasts till 8th March, when the work starts again, according to the directions given by the Committee of interregional unrest.
During the general strike, 1 million and 200.000 workers have stopped working. It was, in Europe , the first and only big general strike under the dictatorship of neo-fascist occupation and it marked the Italian specificity in the context of the European Resistance: the organic presence, close to the partisan formations, of the social struggle and particularly of the factory. (A.N.P.I.) .........
Please buy this book
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Displaced person I 57633 Desire not to die A displaced person to Mauthausen and Gusen and his persevering struggle for the life. English translation by Antonio Siclari "This book with its precious content, also photographic, is addressed to the students, to their teachers and all those people that will want to know the tragic experience of a man that didn't feel like dying when twenty-three years old and that fought hopelessly to come back |
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The emotions of the boys of the Gentileschi after the meeting
