For most of us in the West, the war between Ukraine and Russia was a shocking downpour, sudden as a summer storm, dripping with anguish, fear and a strong feeling of helplessness in the face of politicians masquerading as pacifists or warmongers .
The problem is that, unlike a summer storm, whose footprint in terms of time is limited, here the duration and the waste that will remain in the social fabric of the populations involved are not perceived.
In reality, for all those who study history, war is a tragic consequence of a path in which stupidity, arrogance and delusions of omnipotence have been repeated with a cyclical and nefarious ritual for thousands of years.
We all think we know which side the bad guys and the good guys are on and almost always in a war man likes to draw up the ranking of victims and perpetrators, without questioning whether even the so-called brutes are really convinced and motivated to be or perhaps they are just pawns blown by the wind of a dictator towards this forced destiny.
As a boy in a school essay, I sang and discovered the beautiful song by De Andrè, La Guerra di Piero, which narrates with profound simplicity the horrible sensations of being a soldier. Today more than in any other moment I have rediscovered the profound truth of that song.
The Russian prisoners prove it these days, young kids often in tears and certainly not with the bearing of an invincible warrior.
But this war certainly has a different ingredient, far removed from all the conflicts of the past.
What changes in this war is the use of a word that seems to have become fashionable or the “narrative” (or narrative) of the war.
A storytelling of war that goes primarily from images and videos to opinions and maps with the names of the most unknown cities.
Listening to the news, special services and opinions of geopolitical experts or retired generals (who have replaced the virologists) we absorb sentences, opinions and arguments even of people with very little significant skills that apparently make “authoritative”< /em> talk shows and TV lounges.
But someone is making the difference in this narrative task and I connect directly to wars that seem very distant to us, without actually being so.
I'm talking about those who saw this war live and recount it on a daily basis, because the impression is that seeing a conflict up close can convey sensations that cannot be erased.
I'm talking about war correspondents who have never found space on TV, radio and newspapers as in the first weeks of 2022.
Words can be more penetrating, profound, sharp than images and I have experienced tangible proof of this with a leap in time that I have experienced these days.
In recent weeks, I have repeatedly listened with interest and amazement to some stories of Lia, my mother-in-law, who was a little girl during the Second World War.
Lia told me, because she remembers them clearly, the problems of the dramatic search for food, hunger takes war by the arm and we are learning this these days.
Dramatic anecdotes narrated by Lia, some of which struck me as a story featuring tins of canned meat that were hidden underground to hide them from German soldiers and recovered periodically when needed.
Another story relating to the recovery of a large sack of sugar, which has become extremely precious, which was collected in the rubble of an industry destroyed by a bombardment by German soldiers, who, although enemies, helped some Italian women to load the sugar onto fortune carts.
But among Lia's memories, there are also those of the fear of bombs, makeshift shelters, of planes flying over the Romagna plain around Lugo, where my mother-in-law's family lived, memories that merged into the vision of American soldiers and British who liberated our country.
Many years have passed, but the memories of that war have remained in the eyes of that Italian little girl today marked by a few wrinkles, but whose memories can make us understand how topical those times are.
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