"The knee of a naked woman up to 20 years, I had never seen the girls were covered with long skirts and black stockings of cotton. The first time I saw him was in the concentration camp at Dachau when Ss made us strip it all together: men, women and children. We had just arrived after traveling for three days and three nights crammed into cattle cars. " Ermando Wall, 88, is a former financier escaped Nazi horror, "I have a duty to speak, I swear," he says on Holocaust Memorial Day. His testimony as a survivor is also entrusted to a video on Youtube. Ermando Wall managed to resist the Nazis in his home in Pescara holds the certificates of presidents, beginning with a document of Sandro Pertini, countersigned by the Minister of the Interior John Spadolini. Wall, recalls the first day at Dachau? "After a round in Udine, we were thrown into cattle trucks and it took three days and three nights to get to Dachau: still standing, piled up like animals. We did not know where we were going no one knew anything. When we arrived, they made us get off the train and we heard a strong smell of burning flesh: we thought that the Germans were doing the roast meat. Then we realized it was human flesh: it was not smell, that smell was. There were seven ovens, run 24 hours a day. It's amazing what happened next: we have gathered in a large room and we were forced to strip all together, men, women and children. All naked, to see whole families without clothes was indecent. There I saw for the first time the knee of a naked woman before the women wore long skirts and wore black cotton stockings. Nylon did not exist: he arrived in the fifties with the Americans. " For her, Dachau was the climax of horror. Before 1944, what happened? "The armistice of 8 September 1943, we found four days later by a priest Slavic: there were no phones. I enlisted at 20 years in the financial police and was sent to fight in Yugoslavia. After the armistice, I joined the partisans to return in Abruzzo but Cimadolmo (Treviso), I was captured and held in a dark cell in the basement of the prison of Udine. From Udine, the start of the journey to the horrors of Dachau. A 10,362 Italians were deported to Dachau. Of these 9,958 were shot and burned in crematoria. The survivors were 404 and among them are too. " Upon arrival in Dachau what happened? "After the indecent spectacle of naked bodies, the Germans were divided, men on one side and women on the other. Children? They were torn from their mothers and those who have tried to keep them tied to them were killed with a gun. Under these conditions, we were half-naked for days until we have delivered a pair of pajamas. Our uniform: a striped jacket. Then they grabbed the documents and have them burned. " He lost his name and became a number? "I was the number 142,192 men, I have written on his arm. A brand that once back home I decided to remove. But Dachau was lost not only the name the Germans created the Dead without leaving anything to chance. The exhaustion of forced labor, fear of going still alive in the mouths of the crematoria, the arrogance of the Kapos, the ominous shadow of the beasts Ss: Everything that makes man a mere number to be added or subtracted to the board of death. We spit in the face: we did not understand the numbers shouted German soldiers and took it with us. Then began the hard labor: I was assigned to adjust the rail, remove the spans of iron damaged by bombs and make new ones. We worked with the wooden shoes on your feet, even with the snow and slipping and those who do not get up was shot point blank, you killed a person at all and I never understood why. For Italians it was worse: we were considered "en", Italian traitors. " The days were all alike and terrible? "Wake up every day at 4 and ate the gruel with his hands, once in the morning and another in the evening. Was directly from oil cans, whatever you managed to catch with your hands, put it in the mouth. During the hard labor, eating the grass that grew along the tracks: it was milky. But I had to do it in secret or I would kill him. Megaphones to the Germans said, "Do not go out of here alive, you will pass by the crematorium", "None of you will be able to break free." Italians in the province of Bolzano we translate the entries. So many people were going to kill by throwing himself on the barbed wire with high voltage not make it any more. Others live firing. I never understood why when a person could no longer stand being beaten to death, but what is? Once, during the forced labor, were all chained and the person next I slipped and did not get up: he was shot. I remember that the organic matter of his body to me is over him. " She has been subjected to scientific experiments? "I went into a room and saw a person I do not know whether alive or dead. You could not even ask. I was immersed in a tub with ice. It was a test to check to what temperature the body can withstand. When I woke up I was naked on the floor, and I could not even to get dressed. I was frozen. In that moment I said enough: I'm going to clout as well myself. " Have you thought about killing yourself? "I started to walk with those rags in hand, thinking only about how to get it over: if thrown on the barbed wire or go out to the crematoria. Then, I thought back to my father to a fight when I wanted to send a soldier because he said so I was going to die. I've been thinking and I said: why should I kill, I die when I die. And I gave up: people thrown on the ground to resist asking me to tell everything. " She was found in front of a firing squad. What did you think when they were about to shoot him? "They were six in the evening of April 29, 1945 when they took me to the shooting. I felt the tremors from all parts of the body and still feel today: I thought if I felt pain, I wonder where I would hit, whether in the face or chest, if I'd be dead now or not. There was also the draining of blood: how many times I had to clean the blood chilled. Instead, it is not got a shot. Then here's a jeep with American soldiers. I ran and I hid myself: I was afraid that, from the towers, the Germans would open fire with machine guns. Instead, the party is not even a bullet, the Germans surrendered and let themselves be killed. On the ground there were piles of dead bodies: a square of dead and live together. " He thought of a miracle? "On April 30 came the Cardinal Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, who told us that there was no chance for the Italians to return and we had to stay in Dachau to wait. Montini was to send a telegram to my family for about Abbateggio I was still alive that I still have the telegram. " He decided to return home on foot? "On May I set off without knowing what direction to take. A journey of 37 days and 36 nights sleeping leaning trees. At the border the Americans gave me bread, chocolate, chewing gum. Then in Italy, nothing more: no one wanted to help, people you drove away. I remember when I arrived in Pescara, was in June I saw the sea but there was nobody on the beach. I missed only one night's journey, it seemed incredible: I fell asleep and woke up sunburned. When I arrived in Abbateggio I weighed 29 pounds and seven hundred grams: my hair was cut in half, a long beard, cut his nails with his teeth. I have also photos in that state, but my mother has burned because they were horrible: I would like to get them back today, I would pay who knows how to show to young people. Just got back, it gave me something to eat: two doctors told me that if I ate I would have died. Put a couple of eggs in alcohol, and when the shell broke, I did drink the liquid. The next day he rested? "The next day, from Abbateggio, I went back on the way: my mother had made a vow, so I went with her, walk to the shrine of the Holy Face. In 1985 I returned to Dachau with my wife, Assunta, who died recently, and with my son Donald. " Since then she tells the horror. Why? "I swore to my friends at Dachau: I was told" you're young, you have to resist. Salvati and tells everyone the hell out of here. " And so do I: it is a mission, the duty to remember. When I go to school, the boys almost get angry with the teachers: they tell me studying Julius Caesar, but know almost nothing of what happened during the Second World War. It is moving to embrace them and talk to the boys. " The horror has not abandoned it? "It's been more than sixty years, but I have to sleep with a light and, sometimes, even a plane hurtling into the sky makes me wake up with a start and I think someone should shoot. "
taken from The Centro.it 27.01.11
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