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PARTISAN REVIEW
In the spring of 1994 Priebke's television statements were brought to
the attention of Italian President Silvio Berlusconi who, unlike Priebke,
was not enjoying a clean conscience. Berlusconi was trying to explain to
the world why he had formed the first European government in history
to include neo-Nazis. Members of the National Alliance claim they have
changed since the days when as the Italian Socialist Movement (MSI),
they met up with other neo-Nazis in northern skinhead bars and traded
Fascist salutes.
In Italy, the birthplace of Fascism, teachers in postwar schools la–
bored over Roman times and discussed unification, but history seemed to
stop after World War
I.
Nothing was taught about Mussolini and the
singular event of World War
II.
All Italian school children learned about
was this friendly deli keeper's "justified" reprisal. The group "Italian
Martyrs Fallen for the Freedom of the Country," whose membership is
comprised of the the families of victims of the Ardeatine caves, claims
more than two thousand members and produces books and films about
the massacre, arranges school field trips to the caves, and bathes itself in
nationalistic imagery such as a shrouded corpse holding an Italian flag. It
is Italy's unofficial designated World War II memory.
As a young girl, Giulia Spizzichino saw the truck drive up that took
away seven of her relatives, Jews to fill the quota. Later another eighteen
relatives were deported and killed in death camps. She had never even
heard the name "Erich Priebke" until American television reporters asked
her about him. Since learning of him, the case has been an obsession for
her. In her many interviews with the Argentine and Italian press, she
demonstrated little knowledge of the case. But while chatting in her
modem Roman apartment about the upcoming Passover, she explained
in an embarrassed whisper that for fifty years she has suffered recurring
nightmares in which she sees her murdered cousins angrily accusing her of
trying to forget them. A number of her friends have told her that it is
abnormal to still be having these dreams decades later. "Maybe I am sick.
But I can't forget."
How was it possible that she thought she was abnormal? I told her I
knew Jewish people allover Europe who had nightmares like hers. She
seemed surprised. At this point I noticed that tears were glittering in the
eyes of her husband. He repeatedly said that he was· not a Jew. Then he
made the point that he was alive because he was not a Jew, but that his
childhood friend who was Jewish had been taken away in front of him.
Meeting regularly in a shabby building near the Piazza Venezia, fa–
vored by the National Alliance because it was the site of Mussolini's ral–
lies, others have the same nightmare as Spizzichino, that they might let
the martyrdom of their fallen relatives be forgotten. The son of Michele
