This is an incredible story. It begins with a postcard that arrives from the hell of Kefalonia, eighty years later. A small rectangle of paper which, suddenly, after eight decades, comes to pierce the veil on the dramas, horrors and residual hopes of a young Italian soldier, my father, who – as an artilleryman of the “Acqui” Division – was living in the terror unleashed by Nazi massacre on the Greek islands of Kefalonia and Corfu, starting in September 1943.
There are eight lines, written by Battista Alborghetti, originally from Ambivere (Bergamo), who left for war in September 1942, just nineteen years old, who landed on New Year’s Day 1943 in Kefalonia, where the following September, after the armistice, the Nazi Army unleashed the end of the world. Only eight lines, but due to an incredible game of bounce between past and future – after having been buried in the silence of the archives of military files – they find the light again today, like a sort of “message in a bottle” that the waves of time have carried for decades, up to the present day.

The incredible “Postcard for the armed forces” – as it is printed on the front, reserved for the indication of the sender and recipient – was never delivered, ending up in the whirlpool of darkness of the Nazi bureaucracy, careful to block the spread of news and every form of external communication. Now, thanks to a search among the archives, it has surprisingly resurfaced, dragging us back in time, to those terrible months lived by the Italian soldiers of the “Acqui” Division, held in prison (and in terror) by the Nazi army on a small island in the Ionian sea, scene of the largest massacre committed in the Second World War.

The writing is dated 8 January 1944. That is, in the most dramatic months following the violent and bloody repression carried out by the Wermacht which, on Hitler’s orders after the armistice of 8 September 1943, killed over 3,000 Italian soldiers, as documented by the more reliable research. My father also sees death pass by him several times. Arrested and forced to do forced labor, he also underwent a period of isolation in the Argostoli concentration camp, as I described in the text “My father in the hell of Kefalonia”, published in 2006.
Of the 130 members of his Battery – the Second of the First Group of the 33rd Artillery Department of the “Acqui” Division – only five will survive with him, all from Bergamo (Lombardy): Manenti, Gibellini, Bertocchi, Cavenati. And it is to the latter’s sister, resident in Carvico, that my father Battista writes the postcard. It is a greeting, a message of friendship for “Miss Ottavia”, perhaps known before leaving for the front. Those words, read now, after eighty years, appear as a desperate sign of hope, an irrepressible sign of life, an imaginary bridge to the future, a reaction to the unspeakable horrors that my father and his regimental companions were experiencing on a daily basis.

And so, after eighty years, the postcard sent from Kefalonia has come out into the open, to tell of those terrible years. It is probable that, like other correspondence, it was seized and diverted by the Wehrmacht soldiers into some archive, found and acquired by the liberation forces (from USA and Great Britain) when they landed on the island in November 1944. The Germans, the month before, had hastily abandoned Kefalonia, because, recalled to other fronts and in their escape, they had perhaps forgotten to eliminate the “lighter” documentation, the least compromising compared to the brutal and arbitrary actions carried out on the “Acqui” soldiers.

The postcard of Battista from Kefalonia is a precious element that recalls a dramatic page of history. It honors the victims of the Nazi massacre and its survivors. It concretely connects us to people who, like Battista and Giacomo, have been deeply affected by horrendous crimes against humanity. Giacomo and Battista are portrayed together with four other comrades, all from Bergamo, in a historic photo – published in the pages of “My father in the hell of Kefalonia” – taken in Kefalonia in November 1944, also eighty years ago. The image shows them smiling. The Nazis had already left the island. And they, the survivors, every day, every hour, scanned the horizon of the sea, waiting for a ship that would take them back to Italy, far from a place that will never be forgotten.

© Roberto Alborghetti

ITALIAN NEWSPAPERS ARE DEVOTING GREAT ATTENTION TO THE NEWS OF THE POSTCARD FOUND AFTER 80 YEARS