My Lecture notes from the presentation at the North York Central Library - HEW, November 2015

HEW - North York Public Library - Nov 3rd.

....But before I begin, I would like to thank the North York Public Library for inviting me here to spend some time with you during the Neuberger Holocaust Education week, which this year focuses on the aftermath of war - Liberation: Aftermath and Rebirth. Thank you to Mary Siklos Operations Manager SARAH AND CHAIM NEUBERGER HOLOCAUST EDUCATION CENTRE and to Arla Litwin from Litcom, for all her support and attention to detail regarding this presentation. And to Michelle Melski, Marketing and Promotions at Second Story Press and to Margie Wolfe for allowing my mother's voice to be heard.

My name is Edy Graziani and I am a teacher with the HWCDSB. I am also the author of three published works - Alice of the Rocks, a YA romance novel with Part II, hopefully on bookstore shelves next year sometime as well as Jess Under Pressure, a women's fiction eBook novella. And, of course, War in My Town, which is my mother Bruna's memoir about her WWII experiences in a small Tuscan village, occupied by the Nazi's during the dying days of the Second World War.

In order for us to understand War in My Town, and the Italian experience in the war, we must first frame it in the context from which my mother's memoir springs.

**Read From Chapter 1 to end of Italics**

Everyone makes mistakes. Perhaps even recently you've backed into a parked car, messed up a recipe, or forgot your mom's birthday. Most of us atone for these mistakes - we, hopefully, leave a note on the car or apologize effusively to our mothers.

Italy made a mistake in the early part of the twentieth century when it allowed the rise of fascism and rallied behind Benito Mussolini, who turned the Kingdom of Italy into his own personal dictatorship. However, with the defeat of the Axis powers and the death of Mussolini after WWII, Italy had a chance to move forward in a different direction.

Let me explain:

After the First World War, Italy was in chaos. There was much unemployment, poverty and bitterness in the country and many citizens faced bread lines, strikes and riots. Benito Mussolini seemed to offer change as he made promises of a better life to the workers, farmers and businessmen. He was a strong speaker and he took advantage of this chaos in Italy. He created the Fascist Party, that promised a better life for the Italian people. After Mussolini was elected, the Fascist party combined violence and bullying to force them to the forefront of Italian politics. Any critics of Mussolini were beaten up by his supporters, the "Blackshirts." Newspapers who didn't support him were shut down and political rivals who criticized him were intimidated by his armed Fascist thugs: one very outspoken rival was murdered.

Fascism and Benito Mussolini rose to power in Italy in the mid 1920's and he began enacting laws to make all other parties illegal. Mussolini also made criticizing the Fascist party a crime and swiftly created a campaign of propaganda upon which a generation of Italians were raised to believe that he was a benevolent leader and protector of the Patria or the Fatherland. Children were taught to glorify war and reject peace, told to protect the Fatherland and Il Duce, boys were to be soldiers and warriors, girls were taught to be good mothers and to have many children. He continued to oppress and brainwash his people and as his control increased, there was another ominous force preparing to sweep to power in Europe.

Germany was in economic disarray after the First World War, as well. They mimicked Mussolini's Fascist government and before long, in 1933, the National Socialist Party also known as the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler took power in Germany. Hitler's fascism however, would systematically and mercilessly begin a campaign of genocide that resulted in the murder of some 6 million innocent Jewish men, women and children by the war's end.

Mussolini's fascist party allied itself with the equally fascist regime of Adolf Hitler in Germany. After that, the anti-Semitism characteristic of Hitler's Germany also became present in Italy, where Jews were barred from holding office and further Jewish immigration into Italy was prohibited. When WWII broke out in 1939, Mussolini's government resolutely stood with Germany and declared war on Great Britain and France in 1940. Regardless, by July of 1943 Allied troops were invading Sicily and the Italian peninsula. What local support remained for the totalitarian Mussolini evaporated, and the Allies were largely welcomed by everyday Italians. In April 1945, not long before the end of the war, Mussolini was discovered attempting to escape near the Italian-Swiss border and he was executed by Italian partisans. Shortly thereafter on May 8 of 1945, victory was declared over Europe.

War in My Town, my mother's memoir, begins before Mussolini's declaration of war in 1940, in a small town in Tuscany, Italy called Eglio. Though war in Europe had begun long before that, in Eglio, it was a peaceful, innocent time in a place untouched by the turmoil occurring in the rest of the world. But all things change, and for the citizens of Eglio, change would come slowly but surely in the form of the war. The Nazi's would come to Eglio, take over homes. They were threatened at gunpoint, women, children, the elderly and sick, and subjected to slave labour, forcing them to dig anti tank trenches, bunkers and forcing the women to cook for them and wash their clothes, to use them as human shields against the Allied forces in the valley below.

**Read From April 1945**

The first major post-war political decision in Italy took place in June 1946 when Italians voted to abolish the monarchy in a popular referendum.

Italians also elected a Constituent Assembly in 1946 tasked with creating the Italian constitution. The new Italian constitution went into effect January 1, 1948, and set Italy's first open parliamentary elections for later that year.

With U.S. help, the Christian Democrats won nearly half of the popular vote and received a majority of the seats in Italy's first republican parliament. With a pro-Western government in charge and U.S. aid secured, Italy rapidly became an economic powerhouse in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s. At the end of the WWII, Italy was a largely rural, agriculture-based society, but with the influx of U.S. cash Italy rapidly industrialized and gained important trading partners throughout the world.

As a consequence of the war, the Allies created the United Nations, a new global organization for international cooperation and diplomacy. Members of the United Nations agreed to outlaw wars of aggression in an attempt to avoid a third world war.

Changes due to war, would affect everyone, but perhaps the thing that would change the most would be the role of women. Before the start of the Second World War, women were expected to be 'housewives' or to do certain 'women's jobs', such as nursing or being a domestic servant or shop assistant. The war changed the world of work for women forever. In fact, my aunts, who held employment as domestics in Livorno and Pisa, would eventually work in factory jobs once held by men. When men went to fight, women were called upon to fill their jobs, and this included many jobs that were previously thought of as unsuitable for women, in factories and building shops, to assume roles as heads of households, and to take on farming and agriculture. Some even worked in the Italian resistance, at first delivering food and supplies to the Partigiani or Partisans, as they were not held to as much suspicion as their male counterparts, then eventually as messengers, spies and others even as snipers. Over one quarter of the participants in the Italian Resistance during World War II were women, approximately 55,000, many acting as couriers on bicycles, crossing German lines to accomplish their missions. Each time, they ran the risk of discovery, which they knew could result in torture or death. After the end of the war in April, 1945, Italian women began to participate in the politics of their country in unprecedented number. Fifty percent of the women elected to the postwar Parliament had a partisan background. The resistance marked not only the end of fascism and the birth of democracy in Italy, it also marked the beginning of a new era of greater emancipation, which the many thousands of women in the Resistance, won for postwar Italian women.

War in My Town chronicles the strength of the women in my family - my mother, Bruna was little more than a child, but she remembers the strength her mother and sisters displayed during the darkest days on the Gothic Line - she drew her strength from them and was able to survive and pass these stories down to her children. But War in My Town is also about a young girl coming of age in an impossible situation, of maturing during the worst of times, and finding happiness in the most unlikely of places.

It is a difficult legacy indeed and one that Italy still has trouble accepting, as it has undergone what one would call a 'crisis of conscience' about its role in the Second World War. It’s easy to pass judgement on Italy and Italians now but to live through those turbulent years – and to experience danger, oppression, hunger and cold like they did – was something few of us today can really appreciate. To educate adults and children alike and to focus on the everyday person struggling to overcome hardship we can only imagine, the child in a village seized by Hitler's Nazi forces and forced to labour for them, the single mother trying to keep her family together in the worst of conditions, of the Italian partisan underground, fighting alongside the Allies and of mortal sacrifices by the most insignificant of persons never brought to light, these sacrifices helped to take down a nation of oppression and to build a democracy. This is what War in My Town hopes to accomplish.

My mother's and family's experience can in no way compare to the horrific experiences of the Jewish people in WWII. To the systematic murder and torture of 6 million innocent people and to the murder of all others that Hitler considered inferior to his so- called 'superior' Aryan race, such as Roma people and the disabled people. And although the history of the Second World War tends to focus on the Western European campaigns, the horrors involved in the hardships of Italian villagers situated in the area of the Gothic Line are not nearly as well known. It is my hope that War in My Town, succeeds as a testament to the strength of family and community under extraordinarily oppressive circumstances, and as a tiny window into a little-known fragment of the Second World War. It is my hope that the message of hope, in the rebuilding of a better and more accepting Italy will be conveyed.

My mother's battle with Alzheimer's Disease inspired me to record this little piece of history for future generations. In turn, I hope it inspires you, the reader. These stories of a long-ago war are a testimony to human resilience and the will to survive in the face of extraordinary times – the triumph of the human spirit over terrible adversity most of us can only imagine. It speaks to all of those who as well, ventured out into the world and put down new roots in other nations, in search of rebuilding and rebirth and a better life for their children. Many of our grandparents or great grandparents were such people, and we are their descendants, those who must take up their legacy, learn from their mistakes and triumphs and continue to build a better world. To conclude, this true story about my mother, Bruna and her family, about their hardship, sacrifice, survival and ultimate rebirth in a new and better democratic nation is a tribute to everyone in the village of Eglio, those who died and those who survived the Gothic Line occupation.

I would like to end this portion of my presentation with some words from the end of the book - this is Bruna speaking, the heroine of the book and my mother: Read from Pg. 177 to end...Thank you for your attention..go to slide show