March 24:
Two storied events of World War II happened on this day in 1944: the Great
Escape from Stalag Luft III and the Ardeatine Caves Massacre in Rome.
Especially as told in the 1963 film The
Great Escape, that manoever is usually offered as a testament to Allied
pluck and ingenuity, the against-all-odds moral victory emphasized over the
fact that only three men reached freedom, and half of the recaptured
seventy-three escapees were executed.
As the Stalag Luft III POWs
were crawling to momentary freedom south of Berlin, 335 arbitrarily selected Italian
POWs, prison inmates, and ordinary citizens were being executed in Rome.
Ordered by Hitler, the executions were payback, at a 10 to 1 ratio, for some
three dozen German soldiers killed in a partisan ambush the previous day. The Order Has Been Carried Out,
one of the books in the Palgrave Macmillan Oral History series, places the
story of the Ardeatine Caves Massacre in a wide context, reaching back to the
victims' ancestors and ahead to their descendants. Below are excerpts from the
central chapters dealing with those who felt the immediate horror and
heartbreak of March 24th:
A witness to the selection
and removal of those chosen to die:
I started screaming: "Murderers!"
I realized right then that they couldn't be going to work, it was a slaughter,
not a retaliation. And all the jail echoed back: "Murderers…" The
jail called out: "Murderers!"
One of the German soldiers
ordered to shoot:
A few minutes later I saw
five more civilians escorted along the tunnel by five Germans. These civilians
also had their hands tied behind their backs, they were forced to kneel beside
the heap of corpses. …Captain Clemens then ordered us to raise our guns and
fire on the prisoners. I raised my gun but was too afraid to fire. …Seeing the
state I was in, another German pushed me aside and fired on the prisoner whom I
was supposed to shoot.
From a poem by Lia
Albertelli, wife of one of those shot, describing the search for the victims:
We hold on to one another
Hand in hand.
A few brides
And with us is a sister
and a mother.
At the end of a cave rises
a tall heap.
We climb
And the earth opens under
our steps.
From the broken clods a
bursting wind assails us
Its heavy breath harder
and harder.
One of us gathers a
blood-clogged strand of hair.
Her desperate scream hurls
us to the earth.
We are there, underground,
and we tread with our feet
Upon the fathers of our
children.
Daybook is contributed by Steve King, who teaches in the English Department of Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. His literary daybook began as a radio series syndicated nationally in Canada. He can be found online at todayinliterature.com.
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