You all know by now about my Nonna Valenti. She's the 92 year old woman in this picture:
Yep, that's her teaching us to knit while I was here on my mission. She adopted me as her grandson, and almost every day she calls me to say "come and visit me! Come eat lunch with me!" Just like a real grandma!
Like I said, she's 92 years old. I never realized what that meant, until one day, she made a casual comment about the time she met Mussolini. Whaaaaaa??? Yeah! I realized that she's living history, that she has seen firsthand the things I've been studying in books! I decided to go to her house after church on Sunday with my computer and record and interview with her. For the first forty minutes of the video, she tells me all about her mission at the Swiss temple, and shows me pictures. Then, I start to ask her about WWII.
She is from Sassari, a little village on the island of Sardegna, which is an island to the west of the main Italian peninsula, where Italian is secondary to the main language, Sardo. She told me all about how she grew up rising through the ranks of the Fascist version of boy scouts and girl scouts. She told me about when she achieved the ranks of Wolf Cub, then Little Fascist girl, then finally to Young Fascist Woman. She grew up in a numerous family with lots of siblings. One day Mussolini came to Sardegna, and they threw a parade for him. She was in her uniform, and he passed by and pinched her cheek, and told her she would do great things in life. Mussolini rewarded a silver medallion, a sack of rice, and 1000 lires to her family for having lots of kids, because a good fascist family was to have lots of kids to grow the population and glory of the homeland.
She told me about when all the men and boys went off to fight in the war. When the time to harvest the grain came, the women and girls had to do their best to do it without the men. Oftentimes, one girl would hold the sickle while the other girl would hold the wheat stalk straight for cutting. Oftentimes they would just pick up the fallen wheat off the ground, because they couldn't harvest it all before it went rotten. They passed through a lot of hunger that year, because there was almost no wheat. Only the potatoes grew in abundance that year.
She told me about how in the middle of the night they would hear bombs going off, of the Allied bombers bombing the cities and villages around them, and they would have to run off into the mountains in the middle of the night and hide. One morning they came back to their village to see that the train station had been destroyed by a bomb. Trains had to stop out in the countryside and people had to walk into town, because the train track was all destroyed.
She told me about the horrors that they suffered at the hands of the German soldiers. How many people she knew that were kidnapped and tortured in horrific ways by the nazis. Her cousin, who had just taken vows as a priest, was kidnapped one day by German soldiers, and never heard from again. She told me how, because Jesus tells us to forgive our brothers, she forgives the Germans for their sins, but that she can never love them for what they did.
She told me that, all in all, ten men and boys came back to their village. The rest had all been killed. When it came time for her to marry, she had to run off with a Sicilian navy sailor who was docking in their village. Her parents were so angry with her and wouldn't speak to her for a long time. She and her husband moved to Bari together to start their life, and she's been here ever since.
I'm very glad that I got the chance to capture that living testimony of this nation's history.
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