Today, January 24, high school, "Virgil" Mercato San Severino reminded of. Re-enactments, readings, songs of hope, reflection and image rights still denied. Active and conscious participation of the students involved in this initiative.
"The first Russian patrol came in sight of the camp about noon on January 27, 1945. We were the first to Charles and I see her: we were carrying to the grave Somogyi's body, the first deaths among our roommates. Reverse the stretcher in the snow corrupt, that the pit was now full, and gave no other burial: Charles took off his cap, to greet the living and the dead.
were four young soldiers on horseback, proceeded cautiously, with shouldering machine guns along the way that limited the field. When they reached the barbed wire, they stopped to watch, exchanging brief words and shy, and turning his eyes bound by a strange embarrassment on the decomposed corpses, the shattered cabin, and we just live.
We seemed admirably and real body, suspended (the road was higher than the field) on their enormous horses, between the gray of the snow and the gray of the sky, motionless under the gusts of wind damp threatening thaw.
There seemed, and so it was, that nothing full of death for ten days in which we will wander off like stars had found its solid core, a nucleus of condensation, four armed men, but not armed against us, four messengers of peace, from the crude and childish faces under the heavy helmets of hair.
not saluted, not smiling, seemed oppressed not only by compassion, by a confused restraint, which sealed their mouths, their eyes and compelling scenario funeral. It was the same shame we know so well known, the one that engulfed us after the selections, and every time we touch attend or submit to an outrage: the shame the Germans did not know, what the test right in front of the wrong committed by others, and the remorse that has been irrevocably introduced into the world of things that exist, and that his will was good Little or nothing, and has not won a defense.
So for us, even the hour of freedom rang serious and closed, and filled our souls at a time of joy and a painful sense of shame, so we wanted to wash our consciences and our memories the ugliness that lay: and sorrow, because we felt that this could not happen, that nothing could ever be as good and pure to delete the our past, and that the signs of the offense would remain in us forever, and memories of those who attended, and in places where it happened, and stories we would have done. Because, and this is the tremendous privilege of our generation and of my people, no one has ever better than we understand the intractable nature of the offense, which spreads like a contagion. It is foolish to think that the extinction of human justice. It is an inexhaustible source of evil breaks my heart and soul of the drowned them out and makes them vile, dating as infamy on oppressors, as hatred is perpetuated in the survivors, and swarms in a thousand ways, against the very will of all such as thirst for revenge, as moral failure, such as denial, as weariness, as renunciation.
These things, then ill-distinct, and only as reflected by a sudden wave of deadly fatigue, accompanied us to the joy of liberation. So few of us ran towards the rescuers, just fell into prayer. Charles and I and stayed standing at the pit filled with bruised limbs, while others broke down the fence, then went back with the empty stretcher, to bring the news to his companions. "
Primo Levi, The Truce .
