Agostino Beraudo: capture and captivity in the Soviet Union

Agostino Beraudo, then 21 years old, from Boves (Piedmont), was a soldier in the XV Battaglione Guastatori (15th Sapper Battalion). This account comes from La strada del davai by Nuto Revelli, a collection of accounts of former Italian POWs in the Soviet Union. Unlike most other Italian prisoners in Russia, Beraudo was not captured during Operation Little Saturn in December 1942/January 1943, but in a smaller action in August 1942.

 

"On 19 August [1942], at noon, we receive order to leave for the frontline. The “Sforzesca” [Infantry Division] has caved in. We eat hurriedly, we pick up our weapons, we rush towards the frontline on the Lancia Ro trucks, a thousand men. (…) The following day, at dawn, we are on the frontline. (…) We are deployed at seven in the morning. The terrain is slightly uneven, many little mounds all over the horizon. We are armed with Carcano Mod. 38 rifles, with three magazines and six SRCM hand grenades. Unit weapons consists of four submachine guns for each platoon. No machine guns. The flamethrowers, we left in the depots in Voroshilovgrad. Our little artillery fires, and we attack. The Russians are many, three times as many as us, armed with parabellums and scoped rifles. One of our aircraft flies fast over the battlefield, we will never see it again. Behind us, nobody. (…) I see a corporal, a Sardinian, rise suddenly, shout “Savoia”, and jump forward. He is mowed down by a burst of machine gun. A bullet hits me in the knee, I lose a lot of blood. At 12:30 our battalion is ordered to retreat. At 14:00 our line is withdrawn by a couple of kilometres. I take a look around, I only see dead bodies. I am alone, surrounded by silence. I lose more blood, I pass out. At 16:00 I wake up. I leave my rifle behind, I start crawling towards a Red Cross car and some trucks stopped not far from me. I crawl for about 150 meters. Then I see two Russian soldiers standing next to the trucks, less than a hundred meters away. The Russians fire one shot, it grazes my helmet. I lay motionless, until five [Soviet] soldiers and a sergeant come. I raise my hands. They ask me: “Italianski?” and I answer: “Da, da, Italian”. “Davai”, they shout, and I uncover my blood-soaked leg. They ask me how many Italian divisions are there on the frontline, I answer “Nisnaju”. The sergeant, a thirty-year-old man, slaps me in the face. But he immediately regrets it. He offers me a cigarette, he orders two of his men to escort me towards the Don. Two more Italian prisoners, not wounded, also come. They carry me, we start walking. [We walk for] three hundred meters, then we come across an Italian who has been badly wounded in the back, lying among the scrubs. The two Russians of our escort order him to get up and walk. The wounded soldier, a young man of about twenty-five, gestures that he is unable to walk. They finish him off with their SMGs.

We walk for two kilometres, with brief stops. On the Don I meet a small group of our soldiers, Genoese Second Lieutenant Luigi Pierani who has been wounded in a knee by a splinter, Second Lieutenants Antonio De Paola and Corrado Bruno who are not wounded, and about twenty enlisted men from my battalion. The barges that reached this bank with boxes of ammunition take us across the river.

Night falls. We are grouped around a few homes. Russian women come with eggs and boiled potatoes. The soldiers of the escort don’t want them to give us the food. But then they relent. The next morning they take away everything we have – mess tins, spoons, clocks, money, photographs. An officer questions us. They find a photograph of a friend of mine from Rivoira, born in 1923, a soldier in the *Milizia Confinaria* [Border Militia: tasked with guarding Italy’s borders, this was one of the many branches of the MVSN, aka the Blackshirts]: they see the fasces, the black shirt. They point a pistol to my face, they shout “kamarad fascist”, and it’s a miracle that they don’t kill me.

The unwounded prisoners are put into a column and leave. They load us wounded on a horse-drawn cart. With a Russian soldier as escort we travel all day, we reach an empty stable. We receive a bowl of schlop, a piece of bread. (…) After a week, on a rainy day, always piled up on the cart, we leave. A disastrous night, people who die of starvation, then we reach a kolkhoz with two or three barns inhabited by Italian, German and Russian wounded. They treat us as good as they can, with what they have. There’s a Milanese medical officer with Russian officers and nurses. My leg is now swollen up to my belly. They make an incision, pus comes out, I feel a bit better. “One more day and you would have died”, says the Italian medic. We are resigned, we say among ourselves: “Farewell, Italy”.

At the end of September we leave with a cart column. In a great city, we occupy a two-story building. In my room there are forty Italians. There is some help, I am medicated another time. But soon German air raids, in the dead of night, force the entire population to leave the city. The poor civilians go to the railway station with us. I see old men and old women with babies in their arms, elderly infirms dragging on with their crutches. Looking at the civilians, we feel pain in our heart: and they look at us with pity. We understand each other without talking. For sure all Russians hate Fascism. Fascism, according to them, is a beast. Italians are criminals who want to conquer the world, make war, mistreat others. They say: “Fascists are worse than stink bugs”.

The wagons look like the ones that are used for convicts, two of them are already loaded with anti-Communists headed for prison. The anti-Communists are shabby, gaunt. The soldiers of the escort mistreat them. They place us forty Italians on a single wagon. Displaced civilians fill the remaining seventeen. We travel for two days, a bit at a time, three hours of travel and six stopped on dead-end tracks to give the right-of-way to troop trains. Then us Italians get off, the rest of the train continues towards Siberia. In a jail, an old fortress full of anti-Communist civilians, fifteen in each cell, we go through hell. On the floor there are two or three centimetres of water. Only a small window, fifteen centimetres per side, lets some light into the cell; and even this small hole is barred by an iron grating. Only in the morning the guard opens the heavy door; he changes the bucket, hands out a ladleful of white broth in which a dumpling made of flour and one made of meat are floating, and a nice piece of bread, 400 grams. We have to take turns sleeping in the water, as there isn’t enough room for everyone on the planks, placed on stilts. One of us, older than average, in his 40s, from Pola, a blackshirt, becomes all swollen until he dies.

After a week of living like this they take us out in the courtyard for two or three hours. I see the political prisoners, shoeless, in rags, wearing a shirt and underpants, all in their 20s and 30s, walking in a circle. Long beards, gaunt, morale in the dumps. Our Russian escorts point at them, they tell us they are opposers of the Party.

In early November we leave the fortress-prison. Our healthy companions carry us on their shoulders. At the station, a freight train is waiting for us. We cross the Volga, in four days of voyage we receive barely any food, only a herring and a piece of bread. Finally we reach a hospital, in a former school, where we meet another three hundred Italians. The cold came all of a sudden, we are below fifteen degrees. There are German, Hungarian and Romanian wounded, too. Altogether, we are about one thousand. Heated rooms, stoves in the corridors. Nurses. The food is still scarce: three hundred grams of bread (from 100 kilograms of flour they get 180 kilograms of raw, watery bread, which gets moldy after a day), two 200-grams rations of boiled water with potato skins and pieces of cucumber, and a cup of slightly sweet tea in the evening. Aleksandra, a good nurse in her 40s, always answers our questions saying that sadly the war will not end until 1945. Every day, someone dies: one day two men die, another day, fifteen. With our wounds, the dysentery and the insufficient food, we waste away. I am all skin and bone, I weigh 35 kilograms. We tell each other: “Farewell Italy, nobody will come back”. We watch the children playing with the sleds in groups. “Lucky them – we think – they are free, healthy, they play. We at 20 are already old, finished, and one day or another…” We don’t think about home. They’ll learn that I am missing, they’ll make do as they can. One day in December the Russian guards kill a pig, our schlop gets a bit tastier with some bones. It’s Christmas [1942]. German prisoners keep coming in, the dead are replaced by the living.

At the end of January 1943 the nurses tell us that the Russians are advancing. One day, all of a sudden, five hundred Alpini and artillerymen from the three encircled divisions arrive. Poor people. Long beards, feet that lose frostbitten fingers, rotten fingers in their hands, frostbitten noses and ears. The feet, the feet of almost everyone are gangrenous. They don’t understand anything anymore, they are ghosts, out of their mind, they have been left to themselves for over a month, suffering from cold and hunger. Few speak, they tell incredible stories, they cut the flesh from their dead companions to eat something. With this column of human wrecks, four female doctors, specialized in frostbite, have arrived as well. On the following day, they start operating. But as soon as they lose a little more blood, the Alpini die like flies.

Walking on all fours, I crawl from one room to another to inquire whether there is anyone from Boves. I meet Dedominici from my sapper battalion, a factory worker in the paper mills in Terzuolo. He’s a bit frostbitten, but he walks without problems. It’s like meeting my father or my brother, we cry, our words are the same: “Look the state we’re in, how we have ended up”. He explains to me: “That day in the summer we pulled back one kilometre to reorganize. Then we received reinforcements, we re-established the frontline. 150 of you did not answer the roll call, the command considered you as missing”. The Alpini, too, tell of the harsh life they endured. They are all a bit strange. They talk about the decent life they lived at the frontline, with the essentials, some food and the mail they received from home. Then the commands blundering, the Russians pushing on the flanks, completing the encirclement. The harrowing retreat, always marching and fighting. Finally the POW trains, no food, many frostbitten, too many dead from starvation. The bergamaschi [people from Bergamo: evidently these Alpini hailed from that region] have done what they could: without weapons, without ammunition, they fought with knives and bayonets, desperately, day after day. And sadly they did not make it. Nearly all of the Alpini die in a few days. Perhaps a hundred survive. They were too far gone. They bury them outside the hospital, naked, in mass graves, twenty in each ditch, after writing down their names. More Alpini come, also in a bad way. Of us, Carlo Barengo from Novara dies, having wasted away as well. We are in a terrible shape, gaunt, but the Alpini are in far worse shape than us, almost dying.

At the end of February [1943] almost all of my companions leave the hospital, I will never see them again. Us wounded and severely sick only leave at the end of March, four hundred men on freight carriages, sixty on each wagon, towards Siberia. The cold torments us, even if we are piled up on each other. I lost my coat last summer, the first time I was medicated. I only have my shirt and pants. Where my leg is wounded, the pants are rotten and the leg naked. I am shoeless. The trip lasts twenty days, with long stops on dead-end tracks. Us prisoners are the least of their concerns. The escort consists of a sergeant and four soldiers. For the first three days we receive no food or water. The wagons are locked. Some die. At each station the Russians pick up the dead and carry them away. Sometimes they come in our wagons between two cities, and as the train marches, they kick the dead down, along the tracks. We stare and they say: “kaput” and shrug. “Farewell” we think “we’ll be all dead before arriving”. In the stations we look at the water of the fountains used to resupply the train, we look on desperately, frothing at the mouth. Sometimes, in the stations, two prisoners run to the fountains with buckets to get some water. A man is in charge of each wagon, and he hands out a cup of water to each of us. Sometimes they give us three-kilogram loafs of bread, equal to three rations, a frozen bread that one can barely break. Soup, never. In my wagon there’s a Finn, a thirty-year-old soldier who has lost a leg and an arm. One day, when they hand out the bread, he starts eating his ration. It’s dangerous to eat a kilogram of bread, but he keeps eating, until he dies.

Sometimes I think of my capture, of last summer. I can still hear the mocking words of the Russian soldiers who captured me. They told me: “Duce, duce, he sent you all here to fight for nothing. At least the Germans live on our borders. But you were far away from Russia, and you really came here for nothing. And here Kaput, you see how you have ended”. I listened and did not say a word. I was not a volunteer, I was in Russia because they had sent me. An Alpino from Bergamo, owing to the great thirst, licks the frost-covered nails of the wagon. He curses, he screams, he licks, until he dies. We are all desperate. Some call their mother, others their father, others their wife, others their brothers.

In a great station in Siberia, we finally get off the train. Of my wagon, seven died out of sixty. The column composed of those who can walk moves towards the town, which consists of two-story buildings. Me and an infantryman from Bari, wounded in the knee, Angelo Terrone, remain sitting on the ground in the station, half-naked and shivering from the cold. Two hours pass like this, alone, without anyone looking at us. Then a sled comes and takes us to Camp No. 99, ten kilometres away.

The camp is large, the prisoners are about six thousands, Germans, Romanians, Hungarians, and about twenty Finns. We are the first group of Italians. Wooden one-story buildings, with a metal sheet roof. We sleep on the ground, piled on each other. Every twenty days, a bath and a shave. The weakest ones don’t leave the camp. The others, in squads, work in a mine. (…) Part of the able-bodied men are employed in cutting wood, the others still in the mine. The ones who mine coal receive two hundred more grams of bread and double ration of soup at eleven in the morning and at five in the afternoon. The weakest ones, like me, receive this ration: two hundred grams of bread at noon, plus a mess tin full of schlop containing fishbones, pieces of potatoes and cabbage leaves. At five in the afternoon two hundred grams of bread, a liter of broth with some flour. Water, as much as we want; eight prisoners work non-stop at the well. The ones who don’t work die at a lower rate: those who work wear themselves out. In the hospital, the treatment is better. A female doctor visits the sick every day. Four hundred grams of white bread every day, and soup with some rice and some seasoning.

At the end of January 1943 the nurses tell us that the Russians are advancing. One day, all of a sudden, five hundred Alpini and artillerymen from the three encircled divisions arrive. Poor people. Long beards, feet that lose frostbitten fingers, rotten fingers in their hands, frostbitten noses and ears. The feet, the feet of almost everyone are gangrenous. They don’t understand anything anymore, they are ghosts, out of their mind, they have been left to themselves for over a month, suffering from cold and hunger. Few speak, they tell incredible stories, they cut the flesh from their dead companions to eat something. With this column of human wrecks, four female doctors, specialized in frostbite, have arrived as well. On the following day, they start operating. But as soon as they lose a little more blood, the Alpini die like flies.

Walking on all fours, I crawl from one room to another to inquire whether there is anyone from Boves. I meet Dedominici from my sapper battalion, a factory worker in the paper mills in Terzuolo. He’s a bit frostbitten, but he walks without problems. It’s like meeting my father or my brother, we cry, our words are the same: “Look the state we’re in, how we have ended up”. He explains to me: “That day in the summer we pulled back one kilometre to reorganize. Then we received reinforcements, we re-established the frontline. 150 of you did not answer the roll call, the command considered you as missing”. The Alpini, too, tell of the harsh life they endured. They are all a bit strange. They talk about the decent life they lived at the frontline, with the essentials, some food and the mail they received from home. Then the commands blundering, the Russians pushing on the flanks, completing the encirclement. The harrowing retreat, always marching and fighting. Finally the POW trains, no food, many frostbitten, too many dead from starvation. The bergamaschi [people from Bergamo: evidently these Alpini hailed from that region] have done what they could: without weapons, without ammunition, they fought with knives and bayonets, desperately, day after day. And sadly they did not make it. Nearly all of the Alpini die in a few days. Perhaps a hundred survive. They were too far gone. They bury them outside the hospital, naked, in mass graves, twenty in each ditch, after writing down their names. More Alpini come, also in a bad way. Of us, Carlo Barengo from Novara dies, having wasted away as well. We are in a terrible shape, gaunt, but the Alpini are in far worse shape than us, almost dying.

At the end of February [1943] almost all of my companions leave the hospital, I will never see them again. Us wounded and severely sick only leave at the end of March, four hundred men on freight carriages, sixty on each wagon, towards Siberia. The cold torments us, even if we are piled up on each other. I lost my coat last summer, the first time I was medicated. I only have my shirt and pants. Where my leg is wounded, the pants are rotten and the leg naked. I am shoeless. The trip lasts twenty days, with long stops on dead-end tracks. Us prisoners are the least of their concerns. The escort consists of a sergeant and four soldiers. For the first three days we receive no food or water. The wagons are locked. Some die. At each station the Russians pick up the dead and carry them away. Sometimes they come in our wagons between two cities, and as the train marches, they kick the dead down, along the tracks. We stare and they say: “kaput” and shrug. “Farewell” we think “we’ll be all dead before arriving”. In the stations we look at the water of the fountains used to resupply the train, we look on desperately, frothing at the mouth. Sometimes, in the stations, two prisoners run to the fountains with buckets to get some water. A man is in charge of each wagon, and he hands out a cup of water to each of us. Sometimes they give us three-kilogram loafs of bread, equal to three rations, a frozen bread that one can barely break. Soup, never. In my wagon there’s a Finn, a thirty-year-old soldier who has lost a leg and an arm. One day, when they hand out the bread, he starts eating his ration. It’s dangerous to eat a kilogram of bread, but he keeps eating, until he dies.

Sometimes I think of my capture, of last summer. I can still hear the mocking words of the Russian soldiers who captured me. They told me: “Duce, duce, he sent you all here to fight for nothing. At least the Germans live on our borders. But you were far away from Russia, and you really came here for nothing. And here Kaput, you see how you have ended”. I listened and did not say a word. I was not a volunteer, I was in Russia because they had sent me. An Alpino from Bergamo, owing to the great thirst, licks the frost-covered nails of the wagon. He curses, he screams, he licks, until he dies. We are all desperate. Some call their mother, others their father, others their wife, others their brothers.

In a great station in Siberia, we finally get off the train. Of my wagon, seven died out of sixty. The column composed of those who can walk moves towards the town, which consists of two-story buildings. Me and an infantryman from Bari, wounded in the knee, Angelo Terrone, remain sitting on the ground in the station, half-naked and shivering from the cold. Two hours pass like this, alone, without anyone looking at us. Then a sled comes and takes us to Camp No. 99, ten kilometres away.

The camp is large, the prisoners are about six thousands, Germans, Romanians, Hungarians, and about twenty Finns. We are the first group of Italians. Wooden one-story buildings, with a metal sheet roof. We sleep on the ground, piled on each other. Every twenty days, a bath and a shave. The weakest ones don’t leave the camp. The others, in squads, work in a mine. (…) Part of the able-bodied men are employed in cutting wood, the others still in the mine. The ones who mine coal receive two hundred more grams of bread and double ration of soup at eleven in the morning and at five in the afternoon. The weakest ones, like me, receive this ration: two hundred grams of bread at noon, plus a mess tin full of schlop containing fishbones, pieces of potatoes and cabbage leaves. At five in the afternoon two hundred grams of bread, a liter of broth with some flour. Water, as much as we want; eight prisoners work non-stop at the well. The ones who don’t work die at a lower rate: those who work wear themselves out. In the hospital, the treatment is better. A female doctor visits the sick every day. Four hundred grams of white bread every day, and soup with some rice and some seasoning.

We are given a newspaper, “L’Alba” (“The Dawn”), with news on the Russian advances. We learn that the Italian army has been destroyed and that there are no more Italian units on the Eastern Front. I believe these news.

On 2 August [1943] about four hundreds Italians, from all branches of service, come in. They are in a bad shape, clothed with Russian uniforms. Walking with crutches, I move from one hut to another in the hope of meeting someone from Boves. I meet Angelo Risso, born in 1922, mountain artilleryman in the “Cuneense” [Alpine Division], with frostbitten feet. He says: “I was in Tambov [POW camp]; epidemic typhus caused such a slaughter! So many had already died on the train while en route to the camp, they died like flies, and they threw the dead out of the wagons, in the fields”. Passing time means chatting, talking of our companions who keep dying. One day I feel like I can’t eat anymore. Risso comes to pay a visit. “Risso, I can’t eat anymore” I tell him, and I give him my ration. The doctor sends me to the hospital. There a Romanian doctor, who speaks some Italians, finds out that I have pleurisy. They insert a stringe in my back and suck out two liters of blood and water with a little pump. Then my fever abates and I recover.

Risso pays me a visit, he says: “Hell, are you going to die too?”, and kindly gifts me his ration of tobacco. When I recover and I return to my hut, Risso is ill. He is admitted to hospital, I pay him a visit. He doesn’t eat anymore, he gives me his ration. He has tuberculosis, and on top of that, dyharrea is destroying him. One evening, in September, Risso enters his death throes. He tells me: “You, Beraudo, saved yourself. I won’t get this off me. If you return to Boves, inform my parents that I am dead”. The following day a Venetian nurse, Forno, tells me that Angelo has died. I cry as if my father or my mother had died. I see that they are carrying him naked to the cemetery, and I follow them. I watch as they bury him in a single grave outside the camp, I remain there until they place a cross on the loose earth.

In October [1943] the newspaper “L’Alba” reports that the duce has fallen, that Badoglio has declared war on the Germans, that in Piedmont the partisans are fighting against the Fascists. We tell each other: “Whatever, what matters is that this ends soon. That the Russians advance quickly, that Italy quickly frees itself of the Germans. So we will be able to go home”. “L’Alba” exalts the “Garibaldi [Communist partisan] formations” (it says that Garibaldi was a great man). It says that Boves has been completely destroyed by the Germans attacking the “Garibaldi”, only the Fontanelle Sanctuary is left standing. A photo of the Sanctuary leaves a great impression on me and leaves me perplexed. I wonder: “Is it possible that all of Boves has been destroyed?” [note: Boves was, indeed, destroyed in two separate massacres during anti-partisan operations by the SS. In the first massacre, on 19 September 1943, most of the village was burned and twenty-three civilians were randomly killed. In the second massacre, on 31 December 1943, the rest of the village was burned and fifty-nine civilians and partisans were executed. The first massacred had been ordered by SS Major Joachim Peiper, who had already committed worse civilian massacres on the Eastern Front and who a year later would be responsible of the killing of US POWs in the Malmedy massacre].

With the arrival of winter, the cold becomes unbearable. On Christmas there is a snowstorm, outside there are fifty degrees below zero. Only those in the mine keep working. The huts are warm. We have a blanket every three or four men. (…) The Russians tasked with guarding the camp are veterans, sent here from the frontline to take some rest. They have twelve wolfdogs, one wolfdog every five hundred meters of barbed wire. Every two hundred meters is an enclosed watchtower (…) there are three rows of barbed wire, of which the inner is one meter high, the middle one three meters high, and the outer one again one meter high. Signs in Russian and German warn us not to approach the barbed wire, because the sentries will open fire. When the cold is intense there are snowstorms and fifty degrees below zero, when the weather is better forty degrees below zero.

20 January 1944. They tell us: “Now that Italy is on our side, we will take you away from the cold, in better places”. We are carried by trucks to the station, we are about four hundreds. (…) In the station, we are crammed into a room at bayonet point. We spend a terrible night, locked in the room, piled up like sardines. The following day, the same story: “Now that Italy is with us we will take you to Asia on warmed wagons”. We reach the train, the doors are open, inside the carriages are two inches of frozen snow. Sixty in each wagon, locked. We start to shout, allies my ass, we are freezing. Thus we spend one day and one night. Finally on 23 January we leave. We protect from the cold with massages. We kick on the walls of the wagon until a Russian comes and ask us what do we want. One of us says: “We are freezing here”. They take him to an empty wagon, they leave him tied up for two hours, he almost dies. So we shut up.

In a station, they give us a coal stove. We plug the cracks as best as we can and we warm ourselves up. Food is always scarce, a bit of frozen bread and two buckets of water. We spend half of the time on dead-end tracks. (…) In the morning of 12 February, we get off the train at Karaganda. Nobody died during the trip. Our bodies have gotten used to having little food and resist. In a column, on foot, we reach camp 29/1, where we find another two thousand Italian and German prisoners.

We are housed in barns, on boards. Few straw beds, one every five men. We are so crammed that we have to sleep on our side (…) I go around, looking for some of my companions. But I don’t find any. We tell each other the usual stories, of the camps where we have been. No snow, the climate is mild when compared to Siberia. Some of us die of dyarrhea, one fifth of us, due to the change in climate.

We process cotton. The men in the first category have ten hours of heavy work, the ones in the second category work less, the ones in the third and “Ok” categories don’t work. During the spring we clean up the fields, we remove the plants, we cut wood for the kitchen. Then civilians with tractors come to work the land, they sow. Finally, when the cotton is ripe, we start the harvest. There’s a ratio that we must reach, civilian commissioners check it. Those who fail to reach the ratio end up in prison without food, and must resume working on the following day.

Two Tuscan political exiles, one of whom is without an arm, are tasked with propaganda among the prisoners. The amputee lost his arm in Spain, fighting alongside the Russians, then fled to Russia. They read to us some articles from the “Pravda”. The amputee tells us: “What do you want? You are prisoners. You should be grateful for the little you receive. Russia is at war and cannot give you steaks”. (…)

Some Italian prisoners, the most capable, work as squad leaders and are given command of squads of forty men. They wear Russian military uniforms, and are unarmed; on their berets, the hammer and sickle. I am “Ok” and tasked with the cleaning of the camp. In July [1944], attempt on Hitler’s life. The Russians say: “This time Hitler kaput, duce kaput. Soon the war will be over. We will get to Berlin. You will go home”.

Every month the doctor carries out a check-up. (…) A commission of generals and colonels also comes and visits the camp. We always fight with the Germans (…) On the day Italy becomes allied with Russia, the Italian flag is hoisted on the camp. The Germans shout: “Italians without a country, you are happy to lose the war so that you can go home. Italian traitors, rascals”. They insult us in Russian, and we insult them in Russian (…) We fight, until [the Russians] divide us from the Germans.

One day in 1945 a Russian woman who speaks Italian comes, beautiful, well-dressed, about thirty years old. She tells us: “The war ended on 9 May. (…) We hope to send you home soon. Japan still has to be defeated. Now Russia and America will attack. All Nazi-Fascist criminals will thus be annihilated, Europe will become free once again. We hope there will be no more wars. You are a bit down, but in Italy you will start a new life”. On the evening of 9 October, we are bathed, then they give us Russian clothes, a bit less ragged. We think they will move us to another camp. In the morning of 10 October, we leave the camp. “You are free”, they tell us. The escorting soldiers are only armed with pistols, we don’t see fixed bayonets anymore. The Russians are happy. We talk, the hatred has already faded, the war is over, what has been has been. The train carriages are not locked anymore. In each station, we wander among the homes, looking for food. Few civilians shout: “No, Fascist, go away”. Most give us the little they have, bread, eggs, milk. We all go in the fields with bins, mess tins, buckets, picking potatoes. (…)

In the prison camp we stole bedsheets and pillowcases, which now we sell to the civilians in exchange for food and rubles. Thus we are able to buy some salt. (…) We sell our coats and shoes, in exchange for worse clothes and rubles. A pair of shoes is worth 200-300 rubles. In a salt quarry we get a reserve of salt, which we later sell in exchange for eggs, milk, more food. Some sell their shoes in exchange for money, then threaten to report the Russian to the NKVD. He gives back the shoes, and remains without the money. (…)

In Germany, young civilians scornfully yell “Badoglio men” at us. Some spit in our face. We ask for food in the farms, but most Germans chase us away. Few give us something. Everything is destroyed, the cities are a scary sight. The Russians are disassembling the factories. Russian trains marching towards the Soviet Union are loaded with bicycles, motorcycles, dirty mattresses, chairs, furniture. Two Russians on a horse-driven cart come across two German women, mother and daughter, dragging a goat with them. Without much fuss, the Russians take the goat away, and the women cry. We don’t pity them. The Germans are harsh with us, and the Russians are just paying back for what they endured.

In a station one of us, a Ligurian, runs towards an empty wagon. The Russians yell, but he does not listen. He is killed by a burst of machine gun.

In Pausen [sic], Austria, we are handed over to the Americans. Inside a barracks, we are bathed and deloused with a special powder. We are 1,800. We enter Italy in the dead of night. In Pescantina [there are] countless people, relatives, hundreds of them. They ask, all together: “Did you see my son, are there many others still alive?” We answer: “Few more will return. Many have died, sadly” or “Have patience, there isn’t much else after us”. And they cry. The Pontifical Commission examines us one by one, we are asked in which camps have we been, if we have been wounded, sick. Then we are given civilian clothes, shirts, socks, shoes. We are also given two thousand lire, but they don’t tell us that these will be deducted by the military district when we will receive our final pay. “With two thousand lire we’ll buy a cow”, we think. Anybody who wants go to an hospital can, but we all want to get home as soon as possible.

We reach Milan with a column of three trucks. (…) we receive a free meal. We are ten friends in a group, with a Milanese corporal first class of the Bersaglieri. A group of young men approaches us: “You came back from Russia?” they ask us “didn’t they treat you well? We tell you long live Communism, we don’t believe your stories”. The Bersaglieri corporal assaults them, he knocks out four or five of them, until a civic guard comes and restores order.

On the train to Turin, there are about twenty of us. (…) On the freight carriages the passengers want to know many things from us. “Few are alive, we were in a bad way, few of us are coming back”, we answer. But we are tired, we don’t want to talk, we talk as little as possible. At noon we get on the train that is leaving from Cuneo for Boves. We are four or five, including Albino from Robilante and Serale from Vignolo. (…) I get off at Boves and four women, including my aunt, look at me, but can’t recognize me. Then they hug me. I walk towards home, I don’t feel like talking, I have trouble walking. I get to Rivoira on a cart loaded with lime. I hug my brother, I am soon surrounded by all our neighbours. They all thought me dead. They would like to hear me. But I feel tired and dispirited. Then the relatives of the missing start to come in. I tell everyone: “Look, few of us are coming back, thirteen thousand in all. I am from Boves, but I did not see anyone from Boves alive over there. I only saw Angelo Risso, who died”.

My brother Minetu (Bartolomeo) had been a partisan in the “Justice and Freedom” Brigades and told me his story. He told me: “I was very saddened when I learned you were missing. I took to the mountains to fight as a partisan, and I thought that I was fighting a war on the opposite side as yours. I told myself: “Whatever happens it happens, we are alone, if he dies in Russia I die here””. He too suffered, but at least he fought for something. Instead our sacrifices are forgotten. I am satisfied that my brother became a partisan, he did his duty as one should have done here in Piedmont. Had he joined the Black Brigades, I would have been disappointed.

My house has been burned by the Germans. We sleep among the ruins, we lost all the furniture, we are at rock bottom, completely penniless. I receive my pay, eleven lire per day from the day I was captured to the moment I was repatriated, for sappers one more lira than the infantrymen: eighteen thousand lire, altogether. I am in bad health, my knee is in a bad state, I am without strength. My brother is poor, too. He received a thirty thousand lire reward as a fighting partisan, but he doesn’t have a job. We are helped by relatives and neighbours. After six months of convalescence, I receive a war pension, seventh category. Then maresciallo [a NCO rank] Pio Nappi helps me, I am hired as a guard by the Boves ammunition depot. Working there I will lead a decent life".