The story of Virginia Macerelli

«In November, the Germans started coming.

They said we had to run away because the country had to be destroyed.

They took all the men for the war, even my father and two other brothers of mine, the older ones.

After that, Pietransieri was displaced, because they were bombing the village and setting fire to the houses.

We went to the farms, to Limmari. My mother with six children went to Limmari and we stayed for two nights under a tree, with a tent. We had all made tents.

The Germans came, interrogated us, bombed the village and took all the animals, pigs and what they found.

On November 16, they took my brother first. They took him to Pietransieri with the pigs and killed him. Then they took my other brother and killed him in a grove.
We stayed under the tent for another five days.

Then, on November 21, the Germans came again and said they had to kill everybody.... Then a German came, he was good, and he told us that we had to run away, because the SS would come and everyone would be kaputt. With his hand he waved: everybody kaputt. We started running towards Castel di Sangro...

After half an hour the SS arrived and they rounded us up.

There was a tree trunk and they made people sit around it. Then they set a mine, the size of a flowerpot, and blew it up.

After the mine had gone off, the Germans started killing the wounded with machine guns. I was standing under Mama's arm. I was the youngest of the children. It is known that when there is danger, the mother holds all her children close to her.

I was the youngest and so she hugged me. My mother had a shawl on her shoulders and when the Germans fired machine guns she fell and died instantly.

I fell under my mother and stayed there, my mother's shawl had covered me...

Everybody was screaming. The first time they started to kill, what screams you could hear!

Then it was just silence. You couldn't even hear the birds anymore. Nothing! Nothing could be heard. The whole world was silence. I stood there under Mama, silent, not talking.

I was full of holes, I'm full of holes. Holes going from side to side. After a while I started to move, but I saw that there were only dead people. One on top of the other, all dead.

I had looked up when I was still under mom and saw my brother standing next to me. He said to me, Virginia, did mom die? I answered him yes. She was dead on the spot, I had her dead on me.

My brother had a hole made with the machine gun. A hole through and through that went through his eye.

Then, after I had answered him, he lowered his head and died too...

The Germans had gone a long way, killed and left. But after a while they came back to see if the dead were really dead.

They went with their guns in their hands, and with their feet they moved people around. Then I lowered my head under my mother's shawl and so they didn't see me.
 Those who were still moving were shot in the head. I stayed under those bodies for two days and two nights.

Then, after all this time, I saw two women from Pietransieri coming nearby. So I called them, because I recognized them and asked them if they could take me away. They lifted me from the dead and took me near a stream of water.

Then they said to me

"Now let's see if there is anyone from your family, so we can send for you. You wait here".

They could not take me away, because everyone was trying to run for their lives.

I stayed by that stream another night, together with a boy who had saved himself. This boy was worse off than me, his hands were badly injured and then he could not walk.

That night, those two women put us inside a manger in a farmhouse, where the animals were.

It was late at night and the Germans came again. This time they set fire to the farmhouse. All the wooden beams in the ceiling fell down. Big coals were falling on us.

I said to the boy whose name was Flavio:

"If the Germans didn't kill us, we don't have to die burned."

so we jumped down from the manger. Then we both rolled on the ground and got out of the farmhouse. We went near a stream of water. We both lay on the ground.

The next morning, the Germans were still going around with rifles in their hands. So I said to Flavio:

"These people bark like dogs, so they are not Italians. They're coming back again".

Maybe it was God... We were lying on the ground as if we were dead, and as the Germans came they were pointing their rifles behind our backs, and with their feet they were moving us to see if we were dead.
Nothing. We didn't move. Neither Flavio nor I. They said:

"ja, ja, kaputt, kaputt"

and they left.
Later in the morning, my grandmother arrived and she was alive and had been at another farm. Those women who had seen me had told her I was staying there.

I could hear her screaming. She would call and call for my brothers, my sister and my mom, but she knew they were dead. She would do it in desperation.
Then she would call to me:

"Virginia, Virginia".

She had come with another woman. They came up and they had a pizza made out of bread. Those are children and they must be hungry, they thought. But I couldn't eat after eight days either. That boy instead took the pizza and ate it. My grandmother couldn't take that boy. He was hurt worse than I was. When my grandmother took me under the legs I would scream, if she took me under the arms the same.

My grandmother would say:

"How can I carry you, let alone Flavio".

Then he took me by the shoulder, where I had less pain, and loaded me onto himself. That boy stayed there, they couldn't carry him.

They took me to a farmhouse where there were many people from Pietransieri, who had been saved.

When they saw me I was a pot of blood. Clothes had stuck to me, I was without shoes.... They didn't know where to put their hands.
They were saying:

"What are we going to do now?"

They couldn't touch me because the cloths had stuck to me; after those days the blood had soaked through. So they prepared a cauldron of water, put it in a tub and lowered me into it for quite a while. Then a woman from Pietransieri, who is now dead, began to slowly cut my clothes with a scissor. When they took everything off me and saw all those holes, all those wounds, they screamed for me.

I have five holes, in my arm, in my chest and in my legs. Finally they washed me all over and disinfected my holes with something made of linen. Then they wrapped me in a sheet, without putting anything on me, and put me in that farmhouse. Water and salt cured me...

The women who had cured me went the next day to get Flavio, to save that other soul of God. That's what the women said at the time. But no one had gone to get him. He had walked a long way because they found him in another farmhouse. He was dead.

Afterwards, from Pietransieri, my grandmother and I went to S. Demetrio, where we stayed until the end of the war...»