Attilio Gallini

Attilio Gallini was born on 17 March 1926 in Pordenone to Nella Bottos and Giuseppe Gallini. The family lived in Piazza XX Settembre.
On the early morning of 6 August 1944, a roundup was carried out in the city for the forced conscription of young men of the 1926 class; Attilio Gallini was among them.
After harsh training marked by violence, abuse, and hunger, he was assigned to units supporting the German occupation forces of the Adriatisches Küstenland, in the area of Sagrado. From there he managed to escape and return to Pordenone.
Attilio was wanted as a deserter and, in order not to endanger his family, he took refuge with friends in Casale sul Sile (Treviso). There he joined the partisan movement as a courier in the IV Osoppo Friuli Division, 15th Brigade.
In November 1944 the Fascist police went to the Gallini home looking for him and instead arrested his brother Eugenio, then sixteen years old, who was taken to the Udine prison. The distraught mother charged Attilio with seeking his brother’s release: Eugenio was freed, but in exchange for Attilio’s capture. He was arrested, tortured, and, after a summary trial, sentenced to forced labor.
On 14 January 1945 he arrived at the Flossenbürg concentration camp, and on 9 April he was transferred to the Dachau extermination camp.

Liberated at the end of the war by Anglo-American troops, Attilio Gallini returned to Pordenone in early July 1945. He was unable to return to his family because of the terrible state of health caused by deportation in a young man of only nineteen years of age.
This is how his brother Eugenio described his arrival, as he did not find him among the many deportees who had returned to Pordenone from the camps:

«I walk up to a bus and stare inside… I see only one person (or what seems to be one) waving his arms, moving his lips in a repeated motion that dissolved into a mute signal. I look again at the figure stretching out his arms toward me. A nurse… tells me, ‘Look… that is your brother.’ I had not recognized him… In disbelief at such reality, I saw him in his livery of death. Attilio, a human skeleton: no more than 28 kilograms.»

Gallini was hospitalized in extremely serious condition at the Pordenone Hospital. When his mother asked the doctor what could be done to help him survive, he replied,
«Nothing, madam… It is like throwing an egg against a wall and hoping it won’t break.»
Attilio Gallini died after unspeakable suffering on 22 July 1945. Before his death, he managed to describe to Eugenio what he experienced and what he saw during his imprisonment in the Nazi camps, a direct and unfiltered testimony of horror.

Eugenio Gallini

From Attilio’s testimony to his brother Eugenio.

«No, Genio, it is right that I tell you what I saw, what happened. One day they took me into a large room with four or five furnace mouths, whose flames spread right out to the openings of the ovens themselves. The smoke and the stench that filled the crematorium room were unbearable. They laid me on a stretcher and I watched, stunned and filled with terror, what they were doing. The noise was infernal, because carts loaded with corpses kept coming in continuously, and the shouts of the prisoners who were pushing these bodies into those enormous mouths alternated with the furious orders of the German overseers.” I asked Attilio—somewhat hesitantly—why he was there. “Because they thought I was already at the end,” he replied. “But then,” I said, shuddering, though I did not dare continue. Attilio, sensing what I was thinking, looked me straight in the eyes and answered: “Yes, I would have been ready for…»

Family Register of the Gallini family.