"He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come."

(All quiet on the Western Front. Erich Maria Remarque)

My grandfather has come back!


My grandfather, PIETRO BERTOLINO, born on July 12 1889, was killed by fascists on November 1931 in Turin Italy on a city bridge.


His murderers threw him into the river.
Then, they forced his wife to testify that he committed suicide. In this way they succeeded for decades in stopping his voice, in cancelling the memory of what happened.

My grandfather had the courage to oppose arrogance, to denounce injustice.
He fought against the dictatorship and he was killed.


Already, during his youth he had experienced the violence and sorrow of war: the useless Libya-campaign against Turkey (1911-1912), the gloomy First World War (1915-1918) on the Lana mountains.

 

Always war, always weapons, always death and destruction.
 

He saw soldiers dying to satisfy the whims of powerful people, he saw his friends disappearing in the fog of the trenches of the Great War.

And, after all that: fascism, violence, tyranny and lies again.
How could he live through all this, without doing anything?


Today, his murderers have disappeared from history,
Today, nobody remembers their names,
Today, their regime is only an unpleasant page of our history.


My grandfather, instead, is back again., 

You can see him as he was, on the day of his marriage.
Everybody in the world can see him now.
Everybody can read his story.
His murderers did not succed in stopping him.

His grandson - February 2004        mailto:bertolino.pietro@libero.it   

Bed and Breakfast Villa Rosa Torino