Original subtitles

June 1941. Nazi Germany invades the Soviet Union

Italy aligns with the Reich Forces.

in July the first Italian soldiers leave for the Ukrainian front.

At the very same place where another war is being fought today.

The war had been raging for years.

A soldier on leave sat down to rest on the banks of a wide river.

He had his violin with him, and he started to play.

As if from nowhere, the devil appeared disguised as an old man.

“Stay with me. Be my guest for three days,

and you can teach me to play the violin.”

So the soldier accepted, and he had everything he desired.

Then he climbed aboard a carriage with the devil,

and the horses took off at a gallop.

Once More Unto the Breach

The dawn light wrests me from my sleep.

I thought I was at home.

But I’m on a train, headed towards another front.

My eyes sting, and I can't keep them open.

One last glimpse of the Alps before leaving Italy.

The wagons smell of coal, leather and wine.

In this infernal heat my uniform clings to me.

The train stops in Austria, they give us our rations.

I look around in search of familiar faces.

I see not one, they’re all younger than me.

All smiling, as if we were going to a party.

All of them convinced that we’ll be in Moscow in a month.

My superior is a vulgar man.

The soldiers try not to look him in the eye.

With me he is jovial, comradely,

maybe because we are both veterans.

When the German officers arrive, he makes a point of introducing me.

He says that I speak Russian, that I’ve fought in Africa,

that I know how to interrogate people.

In his broken German he praises our alliance.

But they look at me with suspicion.

As if they can see right through me.

I haven't spoken Russian in years.

It was my mother’s language.

And of the country she fled.

A language which is not mine, but of my dreams as a child.

The language of fairy tales and ghosts.

We cross the Danube,

there is no going back.

The Germans say that this will be the last war in Europe.

A war to end all wars.

Peace will reign.

Our peace.

I grasp at other thoughts blocking out that which awaits me.

The Hungarians are more exuberant, more like us.

The Romanians are more composed.

''Dumnezeu să Te ajute''

shouts a man dressed in goatskins.

“May God help you”.

Maybe in Russia they really are waiting for us to come and liberate them.

We spend a day and a night in Borsa,

a village in the heart of Transylvania.

The villagers, dressed for a festival, offer us food and a bed of straw.

It is the night of Saint Elias.

We lie down, drunk with sleep.

The reflection of the fires in the puddles.

The bones of the animals slaughtered for the feast in the grass.

The men whisper as they write letters to the women they have left behind.

Only I can’t think about Isa.

In my dream I swim with my comrades under a burning sun.

I recognize the landscape of Ethiopia.

On the bank, the clothes are not dry,

they’re soaked with blood.

After a year of forced leave, I was called up again.

The orders are clear.

Interrogate civilians and prisoners.

Neutralize the Soviet partisans.

They desperately need Russian speakers.

The Ukrainian plains.

This is my mother's land.

This land should speak to me.

But for now it pushes me away,

as if asking me to go back.

The Jews in the station have yellow armbands on.

They wander along the tracks, gathering rubbish.

Their faces are tired, ill, dazed.

The women, on the other hand, are sturdy and at ease.

I think they are Ukrainian.

They don’t look away.

When the German guards move away, they say:

“Italian, crackers, comb, bread ...”

One says something to me in German, I answer her in Russian.

I manage to make myself understood.

She asks me if I have a wife back home.

She tells me about her husband, the Nazis took him away.

“They’ll do the same with you Italians, when they don't need you any more”

she says to scare me.

The railway goes no further.

After the German bombardment, the Russians destroyed everything.

Amongst the shells of trains, the smell of burnt wood and diesel.

I see war raising its head once more.

My legs almost buckle.

It’s early morning.

From here on, we can only continue in vehicles

on dusty, potholed roads.

My destination is Kirovo, the Italian headquarters.

It’s nearly 1.000 km away.

In this flat endless country, the horizon seems out of reach.

When the wind changes, it feels like you’re choking.

Refugees moving from house to house.

Lines of prisoners, dirty and badly dressed.

The Soviet Union seems to be in chaos, about to collapse.

But I don’t delude myself.

Every twenty kilometres, the trucks stop

with their wheels caked in mud.

The road is a quagmire.

We proceed at walking pace.

An old man sitting under a tree offers us some sunflower seeds to chew.

“This is the road to Moscow”, he says.

He laughs toothlessly.

His eyes betray madness.

Exhausted from the journey, we stop to rest.

The resting soldiers look like conscripts on leave.

“The peasants gave me this cow”

says one with a sly looking face.

Camped out in the middle of nowhere,

thousands of kilometers from home,

we laugh to conquer our sense of unease.

“What will you do when the war is over?” they ask me.

Have a hot bath.

And a big meal:

wine, pasta and figs.

And then dive into bed,

a real bed,

and listen to the bells ringing.

Corporal Major Guerrino Grigoletti.

It is the first Italian grave I’ve seen in Ukraine.

Corporal Major...

your name sounds familiar.

Who knows if someone was waiting for you?

Who will tell your children, your wife?

The fields of wheat are slowly rotting,

while underground the dead put down roots.

A few hours away, near the river,

is a prison camp for Red Army soldiers.

I’ve been assigned a small escort.

I have to interrogate some officers,

before transferring them to the Italian command.

I’ve heard some strange things.

Each soldier is different from the next.

Some have Mongolian faces,

some eyes as blue as sapphire,

others are clearly Semitic.

How can you keep such a disparate country together?

Resigned and battered

and yet they do not cry,

they do not lose their cool.

My Russian is still faltering,

but when I speak they understand me.

They soften, and become ever more melancholic.

One prisoner tells me about mysterious presences,

spirits who rove at night and won't let them sleep.

Like the ones from my mother’s fairy tales.

En route to Kirovo.

The prisoners are calm.

A Jewish officer tells me about Italian deserters,

who have fled into Russian territory.

Why would they do that?

''Maybe they are communists as well”, responds the officer.

Then he begs me not to hand him over to the Germans.

He must have been trying to talk his way out.

But for a moment I’m struck by doubt.

At midday we reach the city.

Life seems to have resumed, there’s even a tram running.

Decrees in Ukrainian and German

are nailed to telegraph poles, threatening the population.

The Italian soldiers come and go from two brothels which have just opened.

At the command I report the rumours about deserters.

They don’t seem shocked.

I ask if there is any mail for me.

Nothing, they say.

At the market, there are mostly women, children and old people.

The men are all at war. Or already dead.

They sell the most random objects and knick-knacks.

Trumpets, rubber overshoes and records

which are mostly broken.

They barter more than buy and sell.

People are surprised at my Russian.

They speak highly of us, out of opportunism, I believe.

An old man with a white beard looks at me with hostility.

He talks about reprisals and mass shootings.

I struggle to understand him.

Jews, he says with a grimace.

Taken into the forest,

made to lie down still alive in mass graves,

and killed with machine-gun fire.

The survivors left there for the night, their legs frozen in the mud.

And finished off the next day.

The miles flew by. In a flash, the devil and the soldier had arrived.

“Do you recognize this village?” asked the devil.

“Of course, this is where I was born and grew up.”

The soldier got off the carriage and ran towards his house.

But he found no one there.

Neither his wife nor his parents.

He thought he had been the devil's guest for three days,

but three years had passed.

His leave had long expired.

Now he was a deserter.

One autumn morning, an urgent message arrives:

we are preparing for a big offensive.

The order is to transfer to a village to the east,

where our troops have established an outpost.

A lancer on horseback shows me the way.

He’s vain.

I imagine him at home playing the big hero for the girls.

With uncertainty, I mount a horse for the first time in years.

But it’s like with my Russian, even if you wanted to, you can’t completely forget.

The Italian command has reopened the local church, closed by the Bolsheviks.

An Orthodox priest blesses our soldiers as they head off to the front.

A company of cossacks has abandoned the Red Army and joined us.

Their sabers gleam in the sun.

I talk to the priest.

He confides that he met some Italian soldiers,

fleeing towards the enemy lines, beyond the Don.

“They’ll find nothing but a godless hell!” he says almost shouting.

Then his expression darkens.

''The cold is coming.''

''Winter will give you no escape.''

''Go home soldier”,

he whispers.

Before getting back onto my horse, I spot a line of women.

They are carrying a wooden crate, a child's coffin.

No one cries, no one sings, no one talks.

The bodies, burned with petrol, look like warts on the ground.

Gas masks float in the flooded trenches.

Everywhere the smell of rotting meat and piss.

Sometimes, when we’re sleeping, we are woken by sinister noises.

“Partisans?” some shout.

They seem more like strange animals to me.

Or tortured souls, wandering in search of rest.

I feel only pinpricks of a thousand sensations.

I too am exhausted.

My lips are dry and bitter, and I am thirsty.

Familiar faces shine in the flames of the oil lamps.

Close to me is Isa's face.

My Isa.

Like a methodical torturer, Africa now torments me every night.

After two years in Ethiopia, I was but a broken shell.

The army doctors talked about a breakdown and fleeting visions.

Once back in Italy I’d be my old self again.

But that didn’t happen.

The abyss that I unearthed down there consumed my whole life.

First my dreams, then my waking life.

And finally Isa too.

The life that we had built together crumbled with me.

The cold came a few days ago.

Behind the front line, boredom, hunger and corruption fester.

The lice are back, and we are all suffering from intestinal infections.

The command blames the water.

Drink less, they say, and the infections will disappear.

Disturbing news comes over the radio:

we are no longer advancing.

We barely manage to push back the Russian counter-offensives.

We will have to wait for spring.

But what spring?

The cold gnaws my bones and penetrates my brain.

Like a woodworm burrowing into me.

I spot General Von Kleist.

Smiles and handshakes.

But life with the Germans is tense,

fights break out over nothing.

They look down on us.

They say that we are only good at reopening churches and brothels.

The local people are against us now too.

Not even my Russian can get me close to people anymore.

The command has sent for me, I have to head to the city of Stalino.

There are rumours of Italians deserters marching beyond the front lines,

maybe in collusion with certain Soviet partisans.

I finish writing a postcard home.

Maybe the last.

“I am in good health. Hugs and kisses to everyone.”

The good health of a man who is about to drown.

I proceed in a little postal wagon, but who knows towards where...

A handful of soldiers are with me.

In a large green clearing I see a wooden house. It’s like an island of peace.

At length I contemplate a dream which strangely causes me no humiliation.

A dream which I like.

Deserting.

Next to the railway we meet a group of refugees,

they are little more than children.

We stop them.

There is an abandoned factory, a few hours’walk from here.

They have seen some men sleeping there at night.

Against the snow, the trenches stand out like unfair cuts in the earth's flesh.

My men and I advance through the snow, now isolated,

as if disbanded.

It’s evening when we reach the factory, but there is no one there.

We decide to sleep there.

When we wake up, the weather has worsened.

The worst of snowstorms.

I decide to set off,

driven by a sudden, unstoppable instinct.

I have to get over the Don, behind enemy lines.

Far from this war.

My men hesitate,

one drops to the ground,

but we cannot stop.

Through the swirling snow the sun dimly glows.

We vomit from the cold.

The cold rips my fingernails off one by one.

My nose withers, my cheeks peel away.

I take off my boots and three pairsof wool socks.

My toes are so devoid of feeling, I can’t recognize them as my own.

Yet, even stronger than the cold,

is the thought which enters my head,

of everything that never was, and now will never be.

Like a good omen, the weather is already breaking.

Suddenly it is almost pleasant, like spring.

On the horizon no soldier, no civilian.

Only fields as far as the eye can see, and the odd animal.

Maybe I can still go back to Italy.

It will be a long journey,

I will pretend to be a civilian.

But I can do it.

Now the wheat is ripe in the fields.

The light of the sun blinds me.

How I wish none of this had ever happened.

To close my eyes.

To go back home.