«I remember my father’s greeting, who left the house at dawn to go to the quarry he managed at the foot of the hill. He wanted to hide an engine that he feared the retreating Germans would take away from him. He looked into my room and whispered ‘Hello magpie’, my little girl’s nickname. But I was sleepy and almost didn’t hear him. Then my mother also went out to go to the first mass, the seven o’clock one. I stayed in bed, I was happy, we were waiting for the Allies to stop at Trasimeno from one day to the next, I thought our war was about to end.”
Instead, shots woke her up. And again, Ida thought: “Here they are, they are the English, they are liberating us.” She left the house half undressed but immediately realized that the Germans had arrived: her neighbors were running away and shouting at her to flee: “They’ve come to get us, they’ve come to take revenge.”
Because the story of Civitella is not only that of a shameful massacre, but also that of a divided country. On 18 June the partisans raided the after-work club and killed two Germans, a third died shortly afterwards. «We had all fled to the countryside – Ida recalls – fearing reprisal. But ten days later we thought we had escaped. The town had become populated again the evening before. Then there was the massacre”. After the massacre, many accused the partisans of having triggered the massacre, while the partisans suspected people and always carried out raids.
«There has been mutual resentment for decades – explains Ida – In particular with Edoardo Succhielli, known as ‘Renzino’, leader of the gang of the same name, who had led the raid on the after-work club. That same evening he had come to my father to ask him for money for the Resistance and he had given it to him, 10 thousand lire, a nice sum at the time.” Peace came 66 years laterin 2010 during a commemoration in Gebbia, one of the hamlets affected by the massacre, in which the priest asked for the sign of peace.
«That day in ’44 is an indelible mark. We all gathered in the church but the Germans blew up the doors and then divided us: men on one side, including my father, women and children on the other. The men were then gathered in the square and led to their deaths five at a time, with a shot to the back of the head. Don Alcide offered himself as a sacrifice for everyone: ‘My people are innocent’. But they didn’t listen to him and killed him among the first. In the second row there was a young seminarian, Don Daniele Tiezzi. When he saw the parish priest’s body he understood that that was his fate too and managed to escape, chased by the gunshots. They wounded him but with a leap he threw himself into the brambles and saved himself. The others were all murdered. Then the German band began to play among the ruins of the smoking town and the corpses.”
