The epilogue
The Gustav Line is broken through in the spring of 1944. The English realize that they cannot pass through these places and fall back, leaving room for silence. The snow melts in the sun and uncovers all the facts of Pietransieri and Limmari, which had been hidden for months. The dead are 109 in the four farms, plus the 19 killed in the previous days, from the 16th to the 20th of that November.
Pages of tragedy and pain that no one, for years, has told well. Legends, interpretations, confused memories and clouded recollections have made difficult the work of those who have tried to reconstruct an univocal truth. The same reasons for the massacre have been explained only by looking at the war scenario as a whole, far from the reality of the single and isolated Pietransieri.
The story of Limmari was discovered late, in 1944, and was reconstructed in its entirety only in the mid-1990s. Events that required research and effort to reach their final understanding.
On January 18, 1967 Roccaraso was awarded the medal for military valor, with the following motivation:
"Noble and generous mountain hamlet of the Municipality of Roccaraso, confirming once again the high patriotic traditions and the intolerance to the servitude of the strong Abruzzese populations, reacted with the most obstinate opposition to every invitation of the oppressor to the collaboration, suffering intrepidly depredations, lootings, fires and destructions. The killing by the partisans of two Nazi soldiers offered to the invader the pretext to make the whole population pay the price of the proud resistance, so that, in seven days, the enemy barbarously slaughtered, with inhuman and bestial ferocity, as many as one hundred and twenty-eight inhabitants, mostly women, old people and children, defenseless and hungry. The holocaust of so many innocent human lives will testify forever the high, noble contribution of sacrifice and blood offered by the population of Pietransieri in defense of honor, freedom and the future of the country. - Pietransieri di Roccaraso, 30 October 1943 - 7 June 1944."
A few months later, construction began on the Pietransieri memorial, where the 128 victims of the massacre rest today.
The lieutenant in charge of military operations is identified in 1996. He died in a hospital bed in 1993, he was never tried for his war crimes, as the story has always been shrouded in a halo of superficiality and clouded by testimonies that often do not match.
It was only in 1996 that the Municipality of Roccaraso launched an official investigation that finally shed light on all the steps. The court of Sulmona then condemns the German government to a monetary compensation of about 60 million euros for the war crimes.
For the inhabitants of Roccaraso, the administration asks for 5 million euros, to create a path of memory with the renovation of the farmhouses involved in the Limmari Massacre di Pietransieri.
