There are stories and history all around us. We know this, of course, but do we appreciate the significance of it and what those stories can accomplish? Like little wildflowers, one seems pretty insignificant. But taken together, a whole field of them can modify a landscape.
This is Bruno Signorini. Every afternoon, his daughter pushes Bruno’s wheelchair down the street so he can sit with a group of older people who congregate to visit and watch the tourists.
Bruno in his usual afternoon spot. Like a number of the residents of Certaldo Alto, he lives in the house he was born in. His daughter lives near as does his grandson, my electrician.
Bruno doesn’t talk much. But he has a very expressive face and gentle, big brown eyes. He’s always wearing an immaculate shirt, often in a gingham print, the white checks so bright they glow. If you ask him how he is, he always answers, “Contento.” I am content.
But one day, Bruno began to talk. I’m not sure how it all started, but he was talking to me in Italian. His daughter began to translate. Bruno was telling me about being drafted into the Italian army during WWII, when he was eighteen years old. Two years later, when Italy broke away from the Nazis, Bruno was among the 710,000 Italian military POWs transported as forced labor to Germany. That’s a statistic. An old one at that. It conveys almost nothing to us. Tomorrow, Bruno promised me, he would bring things to show me.
A lot of pictures like this in picture boxes around the world. I think Bruno is the one on the back left with the ink dot on his chest.
I made sure I didn’t miss that appointment. Sure enough, Bruno had a little plastic bag. Out came a metal dog tag on a twine cord. Stalag III A. Here was his identification card issued by the POW camp consisting of a metal-framed picture of him as a young man. Here was an official passport-type document, a swastika on the front, showing to which camp he was assigned, with pages for them to note if they moved him. There were a few pictures from before he was interred, pictures of him with his Italian mates. They could have been young American soldiers but for the uniforms.
Bruno’s dog tag
There were a few letters back and forth between Bruno and his mother. She was allowed to send two packages each year. He thanked her for the food, but reminded her that it had to travel a long way and that many things wouldn’t keep, so she shouldn’t send fruit. But the figs made it, and they were delicious. He asked her to send flour and yellow flour (corn meal) because they were eating nothing but greens.
Bruno’s mother saved his letters as he did hers and now they are united in his plastic bag along with the other articles from a long-gone past. But I think Bruno’s suffering softened him into a kind soul. The look in his eyes now is nothing like the one on the face of the young Italian soldier. Bruno appreciates life and is “contento” to sit in the sun with his friends and be allowed an occasional gelato by his attentive daughter.
Letters to Mom, the I.D. card, and the inside of the identity document.
Stories like Bruno’s are all around us all over the world, and their value cannot be overestimated. Not only do they connect us across continents to those who at one time were considered the “enemy,” but just as importantly, they connect us across generations.
I believe younger generations are starved for living history like Bruno’s. I believe they long for real heroes who embody courage, justice, and that almost-forgotten word, honor. Some of my greatest memories are of sitting with my great-grandmother, who could remember her grandmother, a Civil War widow.
How the Nazis kept up with their vast number of prisoners.
But it’s not just older people who have stories to share. We all do. Even your ten-year-old granddaughter has stories. So many children are never really listened to. What they are saying between the lines is never really heard. It’s the same with all of us. Brandon Stanton, creator of Humans of New York, says that for most people, to have someone wiling to really listen to you for an hour and a half is very rare.
I challenge you to really listen to one other person this week and jot down a story they tell you. With their permission, you can share it in some way. Or maybe it will only be between the two of you. But think about how the tiny threads of that story, like little wildflower roots, reach into your heart. Like Bruno’s letters to his mom about flour. Like his “contento” reply.
Stories lift us, connect us, remind us of our fragile lives, intertwined like a field of wildflowers. Stories remind us that none of us are “ordinary,” that all of us carry a burden, that each of us is unique.
Finding our stories . . . and ourselves.
–Alison