President Sergio Mattarella on
Saturday marked the 79th anniversary of the World War II Nazi
massacre in the Tuscan village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema, when
560 unarmed people including 130 children were murdered.
In a message Mattarella said Sant'Anna di Stazzema is one of the
"symbolic places of the tragedy of the Second World War" that
has become an "emblem of civil redemption, of rebellion against
the most ferocious and inhuman violence, of solidarity, of moral
and social reconstruction".
"It is a duty for our community to remember what happened
seventy-nine years ago in Sant'Anna and the other hamlets of
Stazzema, when Nazi SS soldiers, supported by local fascists,
carried out one of the most heinous massacres of the conflict,"
said the president.
"It was a massacre of innocent lives. Women, old people,
children - well over five hundred - were mercilessly killed. So
many bodies were burnt and rendered unrecognisable," he added.
"Europe touched the bottom of the abyss [...] but it is from
that abyss that the path of the Italian people and of the
European continent resumed," continued the head of state, adding
that it is "up to each one of us to preserve and hand over the
witness of memory to the younger generations so that they can be
conscious protagonists of a responsible future in which the
values of the human person are no longer put at risk".
The August 12, 1944, massacre in Sant'Anna di Stazzema was the
second worst WWII Nazi atrocity in Italy after the September
1944 Marzabotto massacre which killed over 770 people.
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