COVID-19 depletes keepers of Europe’s historic memory
ROME» For years, Gildo Negri visited schools to share his stories about blowing up bridges and cutting electrical wires to sabotage Nazis and fascists during World War II. In January, the 89-year-old made another visit, leaving his nursing home outside Milan to help students plant trees in honor of Italians deported to concentration camps.
But at the end of February, as Europe’s first outbreak of the coronavirus spread through Negri’s nursing home, it infected him, too.
Shut inside, he grew despondent about missing the usual parades and public speeches on Italy’s Liberation Day, grander this year to mark the 75th anniversary. But the virus canceled the April 25 commemorations. Negri died that night.
“The memory is vanishing, and the coronavirus is accelerating this process,” said Rita Magnani, who worked with Negri, at the local chapter of the National Association of Italian Partisans. “We are losing the people who can tell us in first person what happened. And it’s a shame because when we lose the historical memory, we lose ourselves.”
Time and its ravages have already cut down the lives and blurred the memories of a generation that saw close up the ideologies and crimes that turned Europe into a killing field.
The virus, which is so lethal to the old, has hastened the departure of these last witnesses and forced the cancellation of anniversary commemorations that offered a final chance to tell their stories to large audiences. It has also created an opportunity for rising political forces who seek to recast the history of the last century in order to play a greater role in remaking the present one.
Fascist motifs
Throughout Europe, radical right-wing parties with histories of Holocaust denial and Benito Mussolini infatuation have gained traction in recent years, moving from the fringes and into parliaments and even governing coalitions.
The Alternative for Germany is looking to capitalize on the economic frustration the coronavirus crisis has triggered. In France, the hard-right National Rally had the country’s strongest showing in the last European Parliament elections. And in Italy, the birthplace of fascism, the descendants of post-fascist parties have grown popular as the stigma around Mussolini and strongman politics has faded.
Italy is especially vulnerable to the loss of memory. It has endured a severe epidemic and has the oldest population in Europe. It is also a politically polarized place where areas of consensus in other countries are constantly relitigated, with recollections of Nazi and fascist atrocities countered with retorts of summary executions by Communist partisans.
In the three-quarters of a century following Italy’s defeat and de facto civil war with Mussolini’s shortlived Nazi puppet state in the north, the people who lived through the war and fascism have offered a living testimony that shined through the muddle. That generation was to get a final close-up and megaphone on the 75th anniversary of the war’s end, in Italy and throughout Europe.
To mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, Germany had spent more than a year booking flights and hotels and organizing wheelchairs and oxygen tanks for 72 survivors and 20 American soldiers who liberated the camps. For five days starting April 29, they were to meet one another and tell their stories. The pandemic made that impossible.
Instead, only four officials took part in the event.
Passing the baton of remembrance
“Many survivors had been living for the day,” said Gabriele Hammermann, who runs the Dachau concentration camp memorial and was one of the four participants. “In these times of change in which fewer and fewer survivors are able to come to the memorial site, it was of particular importance that the baton of remembrance be handed to the next generations.”
On May 8, Victory in Europe Day, the BBC broadcast parts of Winston Churchill’s speech 75 years before (“We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing”), and Prime Minister Boris Johnson lamented the lack of parades but said that fighting the virus “demands the same spirit of national endeavor” as the war effort did.
In France, Geneviève Darrieussecq, the secretary of state to the minister of the armed forces, said regional ceremonies were canceled “especially as former fighters and flag bearers are particularly exposed.”
In Russia, which lost tens of millions of soldiers during a war that forged its national identity, President Vladimir Putin had planned a major military parade for May 9. Instead he made phone calls of solidarity and rescheduled the event for June 24.
In the meantime, as the virus upsets all of modern life, it is also severing connections to the past.
In Spain, José María Galante, 71, suffered during the regime of dictator Francisco Franco and spent recent years trying to bring his torturer, Antonio González Pacheco, a policeman known as “Billy the Kid,” to justice. But in March, Galante died of the virus. Weeks later, the virus also killed González Pacheco, 73.
“It’s a huge loss for all those who believed that Spain should not silence its past,” said Galante’s longtime partner, Justa Montero.
Gerontocracy
In a gerontocracy like Italy, proposals to encourage the elderly to stay inside would mean shutting away much of the political, academic, industrial and business elite.
At the beginning of March, the leading health official in Lombardy asked people over the age of 65 to stay home, a suggestion echoed by the national government in a decree.
Grandfathers published open letters to their grandchildren, urging them not to stash away the protagonists of the 1940s as “useless burdens.”
“Who can make a society without models taken from the past?” said Lia Levi, 88, an Italian writer who is Jewish and suffered under Italy’s racial laws as a child. She said that many of the partisans who fought the fascists simply lived their lives and told their children and grandchildren what they saw.
“I can tell you when I was kicked out of school and that I couldn’t understand why; that humanizes historical facts,” she said, adding, “We see each other.”
Unlike Germany, which has forced itself to look unflinchingly at its crimes, Italy has often looked away.
In May, Giorgia Meloni, a rising star on the Italian right and leader of the increasingly popular Brothers of Italy, the descendant of Italy’s post-fascist parties, paid tribute to a rightwing politician who once avidly supported Mussolini’s racial laws.
The deaths from the virus of those who fought fascism have gotten less attention.
Piera Pattani worked clandestinely as a trusted confidante and liaison for local resistance leaders around Milan during the war. She helped allies escape from fascist Italian guards and watched the German SS take her comrades away.
Into her 90s, she told her stories in classrooms. But in March she was infected with the virus. She died in the hospital at 93.
“The virus did what fascism couldn’t,” said Primo Minelli, 72, the president of the Legnano partisan association and her friend.
That mattered especially now, he said, because of a political climate that he found threatening. “Firsthand testimony is valued over indirect testimony,” he said. “There is already an attempt underway to remove the history of resistance. That effort will be sped up when the witnesses are gone.”