memories that flow with clarity while looking down on the sheets gives vent to his passion for writing, developed a few years. Paul Ferri is the typical average Italian, born in 1923, with wrinkled face and hands slow but precise. He was one of the young men called to military service at that particular moment in history when the German army suddenly became an ally to fight the enemy. Captured near Florence is filled with other fellow soldiers on a train load of people, so begins his long journey towards Burghausen, where he will spend long months of captivity. The concentration camp was built at the foot of a hill that sloped gently down to a lake, today is a quiet town who wanted to erase his past history also destroying the structure of the camps. Yet those who have lived there does not store memories that time will fade, memories are tinged with the shouts of fear and pain reviving the weight of experience that marks forever.
The profound disturbance not evident while the lilting voice of Mr. and quiet. Ferri fills the air with scenes difficult to imagine otherwise. Tells how he experiences the journey of flash and then stay "train someone had raised a number of wooden planks that made up the floor of the car, you glide at night between a binary and the other along the railroad groped for the flight despite the rear of the train guards to the ground riddled with bullets at the slightest doubt. " On the train there were no benches and even the toilets, there were those who wept and prayed, while the wagons, men and women at each station were becoming increasingly crowded. It is certainly worth emphasizing that for many this was a one-way trip.
"After days of travel we arrived at a station where there was the first selection for women and men who are too sickly and the children were tested or taken away. There remained relatively few and mostly men, mostly Italians, even if of different religions and different backgrounds. I came for the processing of heavy metals in a factory that once stood there. They spoke in German, did not bother us to know, they pull faces and strict and we were just strangers, sad ... and slaves. When I opened my eyes in the morning I felt pain everywhere and every day was getting worse. " "There came a time when I could not further pursue this type of work, you probably noticed it, but before you take me away somewhere, looking for other ways to make the most." He was brought together with others in a village green, where he was again put in a row "The owners of the lands and farms located between the valleys were waiting for us, we would choose between those who would work their fields. I have been chosen as a farmer and a factor for the farm of a wealthy family. "
button is the memory of hunger, that in such a context is no longer a 'simple' feeling, something that is confined to the body, hunger, there becomes a feeling, a fixed idea. "We ate potato peelings and bread, a small amount that we do not only fed and allowed us to drag us from day to day, while our 'masters' throwing large amounts of leftovers and did not think to allocate something to us. We had to work hard anyway, even when we were sick, when we crossed the heart of the discomfort and could not take it if someone was being taken away. " In this condition of slavery, Mr. Ferri has spent two years. "When it came time to go home I could not believe it. During the period of slavery, I thought many times to Italy, the paradox of the move from citizen to slave. I thought a thousand times to the faces of my loved ones, to my house and even to war, that should not exist. I thought many things, and everything the opposite of all those long months of pain, I thought I would never get back. "
Instead Mr. Ferri is back, he is one of the survivors of a Nazi concentration camp. In Italy it was rebuilt a life, marrying a strong woman, Maria, but he never forgot the long months of pain, discomfort and frustration. The evil of war, some men try to keep it in the heart of why it should not hurt others while knowing that the sleep of reason produces monsters is to understand that the talk does not heal the hurt, but create, moment by moment, a new wound. For 87 years, Mr. Ferri is the last one left among the comrades who were captured in Florence at that never-too-distant World War and is the same man who now still gets excited for those small precious things in the lack demonstrate their uniqueness.
Published on the number of Mezzoeuro No.3 on sale from January 22, 2011
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