Uncle Alberto and the Balkans

I keep a nice memory of Uncle Alberto. An elderly gentleman, with a hat, always smiling who passed away a few years ago. Alberto was not my uncle, he was a dear friend of mine. For everyone, however, he was simply "uncle" Alberto. He loved books, he was always smiling and available, curious and interested, lighthearted and never over the top.

At times he left in his small car without notifying his relatives. He went slowly by car and carefully avoided the motorways because he did not feel safe: thus a journey of a hundred kilometers could last almost a day, passing through fields and byways. His usual destinations were thermal places, where he could regenerate from the aftermath of the war, which he had experienced as a mountaineer in the Royal Army on the fronts of the former Yugoslavia. Uncle Alberto talked willingly about everything, but not about the time he had lived in the Balkans. The nephews had managed to gather some generic information and on that they had tried to reconstruct his story. They were convinced that he had experienced unspeakable suffering, that he had seen tragedies that he then preferred to hide in the folds of his memory of him. Pulling them out might reopen wounds that hadn't fully healed. It seems that he had to live with death for a very long time, hunted down, at the mercy of events. He certainly suffered from hunger because his stomach was so traumatized that he had to undergo periodic purification treatments in the following years. It is known that after 8 September 1943 he came into contact with the Tito resistance and that, at the end of the war, he managed with difficulty to return to Italy.

Uncle Alberto's story is embodied in a more far-reaching historical process which is that relating to the Italian war in the former Yugoslavia. The events in the Balkans of that period are rather unknown and public opinion has a rather limited knowledge of them. Let's try to summarize some elements.

In 1939, the Kingdom of Italy occupied Albania which, after entering the Second World War (June 1940) became the bridgehead of the Italian initiative in the Balkans and - in particular - for the conquest of Greece (October 28, 1940). The Balkan front represented one of the development paths – together with Libya and the Horn of Africa – of the so-called parallel war that fascism had introduced in order to counterbalance the excessive German power and carve out areas of influence in the Mediterranean and in North Africa. But the famous We will break the backs of Greece had no effect... on the contrary... The Greek army defended itself admirably and forced our badly armed and worst commanded troops to fall back. It is in the Greek mud that the legend of the Alpine division Julia was born which, after courageously penetrating enemy territory, had to retreat because it was left without supplies.

Only Nazi intervention saved Italy from disaster (April 1941): from that moment on, our parallel war became a subordinate war. In the new Balkan order also the Italians were involved. While not reaching the peaks of Nazi ferocity and with different political-military logics from the German ally, «the repressive actions envisaged and carried out by the Italian forces are no different from those carried out by the German troops: [...] the taking of hostages, the destruction and the burning of entire localities, the reprisals on the families of simple suspects, [...] the deportation of nuclei of the local population, the destruction and looting of livestock, impunity for the excesses committed" (Gianni Oliva, La fascist war). Perhaps it is worth taking up an extraordinary document, the diary of Don Pietro Brignoli, Holy mass for my fusiliers, who was chaplain in Yugoslavia until 1942, in which – as Oliva always reminds us – «no distinction between good and evil emerges [...], with the good guys on one side and the bad guys on the other: war is in any case ferocity, barbarism, fury, beyond the projects for which the armies in the field they fight".


Renato Bonomo
NP January 2023