He escaped the horror of Sant’Anna di Stazzema only by chance: she was also in the group that the Nazi officers entrusted to a very young and isolated soldier. He had to kill everyone, that was the order. He, left alone with the rounded-up people, commanded (with gestures) the small group to shut up and run away. They had already moved away when they heard a burst of machine gun fire behind them. They turned: the soldier he was shooting in the air. Among those survivors there was also Ada Battistini, who died yesterday at the age of 92. At the time ofSant’Anna massacre – in which they died 560 women, children and elderly people – he was 13 years old. In the early 2000s she testified as witness in the trial which was held in Spice and that led to the condemnation tolife sentence Of ten SS officers. Among other things, he said that in the massacre wanted by the Nazis in which the fascists of the area participated, his father and many other family members were killed.
There Journal of Viareggio he fished out his account of that episode in the book by Oliviero Toscani Sant’Anna di Stazzema. Children remember. “After, I don’t know how long, a kilometre-a kilometer and a half, they made us stop and put us there all piled up with a young man, very young, blond, who never spoke, leaning in front of us with the machine gun. And when all the soldiers had passed, he waved to us with his hand, as if to say to stay calm. He never spoke. I heard him, I remember him, I heard him speak. And instead of shooting at us, towards us, he turned, turned around and shot up into the mountain. There were three or four sheep, he killed those, shot them”.
There were in that group that was saved from death Enio Mancini who told how, in disguise, there were also Italians, or rather Versilians, among the troops. “They shot the cow – he told A ilfattoquotidiano.it a few years ago – ‘Bad show, don’t you want to die’?’ they told her in Versilia dialect, they had covered their faces with camouflage bands. They translated the orders from German to me and my group: ‘Come, hurry, go towards Valdicastello‘. They were orders in perfect Italian. Two sisters also said that they heard people speaking in Versilia. Another survivor, Maria Luisa Ghelardini, she even mentioned the names because she was older. She recognized them.”
Ada Battistini had the heart to continue living in Sant’Anna, in the locality Coletti, until 1958 when he went to live in Strettoia, a hamlet of Pietrasanta. “He was a very good person – remembers his son-in-law Vittorio Tommasi – who dedicated his whole life to his family and to Sant’Anna di Stazzema, because when he could and in the summer he was always in his Coletti’s house. In fact, Ada had also taken care of her brother, looking after him for a long time.” Ada had been suffering from an illness for a long time which had not spared her further suffering until Saturday. The funeral mass will be celebrated tomorrow (Monday 17 June) at 3pm in the Strettoia church. The family received condolences from the Municipality of Stazzema and the Martyrs Association of Sant’Anna di Stazzema.
