Antonietta Losito

The Cost of Surviving

The war and the barbarities of Nazism and Fascism deprived my uncle of the divine and condemned him to the purely material dimension of existence. Once, when his memories were still quite clear and precise, he told me: "The regime did not forgive any form of dissent. Behind the lines, the reaction to the partisan fight was ruthless. Survival was determined by a purely statistical fact: not being on the path of a bullet." The Church inside him became nothing but a pile of rubble, the world a scenario of cardboard that could be collapsed at any moment.

grandma’s house
everybody had his own tree
to look up at the sky