It could be God

Mario Marsili is 86 years old today, but he will always be one of the children of Sant’Anna di Stazzema. That handful of lives escaped from one of the most serious Nazi-Fascist massacres that occurred in our country. It was August 12, 1944, 80 years ago. Sant’Anna was a handful of mountain villages on the slopes of the Apuan Alps, a place of refuge for hundreds of displaced people: the Gothic Line nearby, the last gasps of a war now destined to end, the abyss of man cloaked in strategic reasons. Because it was an abyss: 560 civilians, mostly old people, women and children rounded up, machine-gunned, finished off and then set on fire by the German SS and Italian collaborators.

Mario would have met the same fate, if it had not been for his mother Genny, who at the time was just 28 years old. The Nazis had locked them in a stable with other civilians. The entrance and exit doors were closed and hay was everywhere: the rest would be done by machine guns and flamethrowers. And so it happened, but Genny had the lucidity to protect Mario, who today in an interview with Il Tirreno recalls: «Behind the entrance door of the stable, high up, there were two protruding stones on which the farmers rested their tools. He lifted me up and sat me down there. “Don’t move,” he told me, “stay here.” I stayed there for eight hours».

«The Germans began to arrive with rifles, pistols, flamethrowers. People tried to escape from the stable, but they held them back inside. I saw my mother with a head wound, she was very close to where I was. She was afraid that the Germans would notice me and so, with the only weapon she had, she drew attention to herself: she took off a clog and threw it at her executioners. They shot her immediately: I saw her collapse and die, without being able to do anything». In a few minutes, the Germans killed everyone and then set fire to them. «With my own eyes I saw the bodies burn, until the fire reached me too: I suffered third-degree burns on my neck, arm and back. The pain was excruciating: at a certain point I could no longer even scream, to ask for help. But in the evening some of the locals, who had come to see if there were any survivors, heard my moans. I was still on those stones. They took me».

It seemed like a hopeless case, and yet Mario is still here today with the strength of his testimony and a moving story. Genny, by will of the President of the Republic, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, received the gold medal for civil merit as a "noble example of maternal love pushed to the extreme sacrifice".

Genny and many examples like her are lights in the abyss of history. Perhaps faint, apparently insignificant and overwhelmed, almost a constant. Yet, they indicate a much larger dimension. Genny could be God who does not stop hoping, who does not give up in the face of barbarism, who continues to love without measure with a mother's heart. Always and in any case. Because God is made like this. And as Renato Zero writes in one of his little-known songs, he does not live on the Moon, but in this earth that trembles.


Matteo Spicuglia
NP August / September 2024