Pietro Giovanni Liuzzi, Lieta Zanatta
Ed. Youcanprint
pp. 296
The story of the massacre of Italian official 103, of the 10 "Queen" Infantry Regiment, during the Second World War on Kos in the Dodecanese, is practically almost unknown.
The massacre resulted from the armistice with the Anglo-Americans. The Italian officers refused to follow the former German allies and were handed over to arms. The "Little Cephalonia" so called by those who lived it and by the few who spoke of it openly has not yet ended properly.
Pietro Giovanni Liuzzi, former Army officer, has spent all his energies for years searching for mass graves with the intention of honoring the memory of the unfortunate Italian boys. THE'Operation Lysias once in search of the 37 bodies missing from the call for repatriation, it is the demonstration that not everyone forgets and not everyone lets himself go to the oblivion of the time spent between the total indifference to the crimes committed.
The book is a travel diary told thanks to the embedded journalist Lieta Zanatta. The discovery of the mass graves crowns Liuzzi's effort, but from reading it is possible to access several levels of learning: historical, human, manuals.
The book reports the story of the children murdered by the Germans in Kos and their burial. But we also understand the human side of Liuzzi who finds himself having to fight against the scarce historical memory and the lack of sense of the homeland of many institutions, even though he finds within them also people of high moral substance who have worked to achieve the purpose.
The book can also have a certain value as an operating manual for those wishing to try their hand at search operations. In fact, the attentive reader will be able to see from the reading how Liuzzi did to reach his very difficult goal and how he managed operationally in the enterprise. It therefore ranges from the contacts that count to the sources, from the collection of funds necessary for the realization of the company and for research on the spot.
The book Operation Lysias it is not only a way of honoring the fallen Italians, but also a lesson in patriotism in holding up the value of memory in a country, like ours, which notoriously soon makes us forget everything.
