I did not expect my material to receive such a response in the Italian press. There is such an Italian proverb: “A whole field will grow from one grain. If that grain is good.” Let’s sow.
Yuri Snegirev.
Here is an abridged translation of Italian journalist Matteo Cornieletto’s article “Remains of Italian soldiers missing in Russia: campaign for the return to the country” in the popular edition of “Il Giornale”:
Photo: ilgiornale.it;
It’s history. It is the “Great History”, which is studied in the books, where there is no place for the faces of the people who really wrote it, except for the faces of the most important rulers and commanders . That’s what (almost) everyone knows. But there is also a little story that tells of people who no longer exist and who, sometimes even for a single moment, found themselves at the center of significant events. Six Italian soldiers who fell and were finally found near Millerovo in 2021 (and their story was only told today by Rossiyskaya Gazeta), thanks to the Viktor Vasilevsky Heritage Foundation and Italian publisher Sandro Teti. They are united by cooperation with the Russian Military Historical Society. The search began after Vasilevsky told Teti that an elderly man who lived near Millerovo told him that as a child, on Christmas night 1942, he had seen 16 corps of Italian gunners assigned to an anti-aircraft battery guarding a military airfield to be buried. . Vasilevsky and Teti decided to share the tasks: in Russia to exhume the bodies, and in Italy to collect all possible information on the remains of the missing Italian soldiers in order to identify them, bury them with dignity and organize a procedure for determine their fate, as well as the fate of veterans and hundreds of thousands of missing CSIR and ARMIR.
The Italian Stefania Zini is a Russian scientist who participated in this work. Photo: Yuri Lepski
