PRISONER OF WAR
Diary of my first four months.

Giovanni Notte (1923 - 1985)

Foreword

Giovanni was born in Frosolone, Region of Molise, Italy.
On his 20th birthday, while student in the Arts Faculty of the Rome University, he was called to service in the Navy and sent to the Naval Academy for non-career officers in Brioni (an island near Pola).
Why would a mountain man choose the Navy, since he could not even swim well, is beyond me.
The fact is that he was called to service just 3 or 4 months before the Armistice (which was declared in early September 1943), while those who had chosen the Army never were.
This was our mother's reproach to him, to which he refers in his diary. She had good reasons for it. I had already spent over two years at war. Our father had been three years fighting in the trenches during the First Wold War and could never resolve to mention the word WAR again.
The diary was written in a very minute agenda. This accounts for containing the diary of just 4 months, also how it could escape the very meticulous, many searches of the very methodic Germans.
The rest of the diary notes was written in a copybook, which was stolen together with the few earthly possessions that my brother was carrying when released from the concentration camp. He was then already in Italian soil. What the Germans had been unable to do, the Italians did, too well.
Giovanni took his degree in Rome in 1947, taught in Perugia, Instambul and Madrid in the local Italian High Schools (he knew Latin, Greek, German, French, Spanish and a smattering of Russian).
Eventually he became principal of the two largest and most troublesome High Schools in Italy, the Parini of Milan (where students had published a scandalous school paper called "La Zanzara") and the Giulio Cesare of Rome (where politics reigned sovereign).Without any doubt this stretch of duty contributed to his early demise.
Giovanni died prematurely in Rome, in a city bus, of heart arrest.
His diary was found by chance in January 1995. None of his relatives, myself included, had ever been told of its existence, perhaps because deep inside Giovanni always tried to forget his horrible experience.
Now I publish it in Internet to add another voice against the pervasive inhumanity of man towards his brothers.
Michael Notte, Canada
PS - I did not make any changes to the original text, in order not to destroy the impact of the feelings of the moment. Being these just notes for himself, the writer was not concerned with syntax or structure. Some brief remarks contained in [ ], and in italics, are mine to explain things to the reader.
To continue reading, go to the 1st instalment. Se preferite leggere il testo italiano, andate alla prefazione.