Italian
A day to remember, but also to reflect on the future of the community
ITALY – September 20 does not only mark the beginning of autumn. It is a date that preserves a memory often forgotten: that of the more than 600,000 Italian soldiers captured after September 8, 1943, and interned by the Germans. For them, the war did not end with the armistice: two years of imprisonment, humiliation, and forced labor followed, often without even being recognized as prisoners of war, reduced instead to mere forced workers to support the Nazi war effort.
Many of these soldiers were forced to surrender, others fought until the end and were killed, considered traitors. Some joined partisans in Italy, Greece, Albania, or the former Yugoslavia, contributing to a resistance that was not only military but also moral. This chapter of history tells of dignity, suffering, and sacrifice, and deserves to be remembered today, in a time when the word “war” unfortunately reenters current affairs.
Why remember? Why pause to reflect? Perhaps to try to answer the question that has always accompanied humanity: why war? This question was debated by two giants of the twentieth century, Freud and Einstein. Freud, a pessimist, considered war inevitable, inscribed in human nature. Einstein, on the other hand, saw it as a boil to be removed, an absolute evil to be fought, with no justification whatsoever.
History seems to give reason to both. From the Iliad onward, war has been portrayed as unavoidable, yet always accompanied by pain and destruction. And yet, alongside the horror, history also provides attempts at humanization: consider Henri Dunant, who at Solferino in 1859 witnessed a massacre firsthand and, from that vision, conceived the idea of the Red Cross. He saw women tending to the wounded on both sides and understood that even in war, if it must exist, rules must apply: the wounded enemy must be treated, the prisoner must be respected, and human dignity can never be erased. From this insight arose the Geneva Conventions, and with them, international humanitarian law.
Yet the paradox remains intact: regulating war means acknowledging its necessity, but war itself remains a crime, an offense against humanity itself. Speaking of “war crimes” is almost an oxymoron: war, by its very nature, is the greatest crime.
September 20 thus reminds us that war is not only made of battles but also of forgotten men, soldiers who no longer wanted to fight and were forced to do so anyway—in factories, in fields, in barracks, unarmed. Men who paid with two years of their lives for the illusory end of a war that, for them, never truly ended.
Remembering them means not only honoring their memory but also questioning, once again, the reason for the eternal absurdity we call war.
