Tonight at 6pm in Burcei, in the context of the Feast of Santa Barbara which has been taking place for a few days, historical research will be presented on the country's soldiers who ended up in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War. A job that the children of Third B of the middle school and their teacher Michela Orgiana carried out outside school hours in collaboration with the municipal library, the ANPI section, the members of the "Isidoro Frigau" section.
The girls and boys of the Burcei school (Chiara Rosa Saddi, Sofia Zuncheddu, Federico Lorrai, Hanaah Tarik, Lorenzo Mucelli, Andrea Puliga, Daniele Serra, Gloria Saddi and Aurora Cinus), have processed the military files of the soldiers of the Royal Army: Giovanni Campus (born 1921), Luigi Frigau (born 1920), Diodato Muccelli (born 1920), Efisio Lussu (born 1921), of the Regia Marina Raffaele Cardia (born 1924) and of the Royal Guardia di Finanza: Agostino Surcis (born 1919) and Giovanni Zuncheddu (born in 1922), granted by the State Archives of Cagliari and by their families as well as the online files of the LeBi database (IMI biographical lexicon), summarizing their military events before and after 8 September 1943 and the vicissitudes that led to internment in the Nazi concentration camps of the Third Reich and forced labor under the surveillance of the Wehrmacht.
Among Burcei's soldiers, Raffaele Cardia died on 20 February 1944 in Guben in Germany, (today Gubin in Poland). His remains are buried in the Bielany crest (Warsaw). Agostino Surcis died in the Wittlich sanatorium, Marie Grünewald, on 31 August 1945. He is buried in the Italian Military Cemetery of Honor in Frankfurt am Main. The others returned to Burcei in 1945, after the liberation of the internment camps by the British, American and Soviet armies. Some old women remember their return. The whole town came to meet them. It was a great joy: Burcei was convinced that they were dead since there had been no news about them for some time.
The story is known. The Italian soldiers, captured and disarmed by the former German allies after the armistice, were crammed into cattle cars, transported to the territory of the Third Reich, interned in concentration camps and forced to work in German companies (mines, chemical and war factories, farms , shipyards, heavy and light mechanical workshops); Hitler himself coined the name IMI (Italian military internees) for them so as to circumvent the ban on forced labor enshrined in the Geneva Convention for prisoners of war, thus also depriving them of the assistance of the International Red Cross.
In the hierarchy of the concentration camps, the Soviets were treated like animals, the Italians came immediately after.
Poorly dressed, malnourished, crammed into wooden shacks with precarious roofs, freezing in winter and suffocating in summer also due to the proliferation of parasites that covered the ceilings, subject to violence and abuse of all kinds, without medical assistance and adequate sanitation , forced to work twelve to fifteen hours a day, spent twenty months in Nazi concentration camps, without being able to communicate with the families who believed them dead.
No refusal could be made to forced labor without incurring very harsh and severe punishments; there was no shortage of interventions with weapons by the guard staff.
For a mass of men tired of the war, dejected and demoralized and above all malnourished, the deprivation of food was the worst punishment implemented by companies to force them to work.
For work lasting seventy-two hours or more per week, including Sundays, they received a salary equivalent to one third of the wages of a German worker, after deductions for room and board and taxes.
