Ceremony commemorating the 82nd anniversary of the Pian del Lot massacre

On Monday, March 30, a ceremony was held to commemorate the sacrifice of the twenty-seven partisans shot by the Nazis and Fascists at Pian del Lot. The official speech was delivered by Dario Disegni, President of the Jewish Community of Turin.
The full text is below:

PIAN DEL LOT – March 30, 2026

Civil, military, religious authorities, citizens, students,

As we do every year, as Liberation Day approaches, the Community joins the institutions, partisan associations, and the Armed Forces in movingly remembering the massacre that took place 82 years ago in this place, which has become a symbol of Nazi horror and barbarity. On April 2, 1944, just days before the execution of the members of the Piedmont Regional Military Committee, a large mass grave held the bodies of 27 young men, mowed down by gunfire, still alive and dying.

That terrible massacre of 27 young men, who were originally intended to number 50, was billed as a reprisal for the killing of a German soldier caught near the Umberto I Bridge, which connects Corso Vittorio to Crimea. In reality, it was a pre-planned and pre-ordained action to terrorize the city, culminating in the great roundup in the valleys, which was intended to finally defeat the partisan forces, already exhausted by hunger and the harsh winter. A terrible revenge, therefore, by the Nazi-Fascist commanders, surprised and alarmed by the unity of the general strike that broke out simultaneously in Turin and Milan, despite the arrests and deportations of workers.

One of the 27 massacred youths was Walter Rossi, nicknamed “Zanzara” (Mosquito) for his slight build. A nineteen-year-old Jewish partisan active in Val Pellice, where, too frail to fight, he became a nurse at the Pian del Prà hospital. In March 1944, he was captured after the enemy set fire to the hospital and forced to reveal the whereabouts of his comrades, who would otherwise have been burned alive. He was then transferred from Luserna prison to the “Nuove” prison in Turin and, after unspeakable torture, on April 2nd, transported along with twenty-six other youths to Pian del Lot, where he was forced to dig his own grave. The boys were hit by a hail of bullets; a few died instantly, many fell into the grave still alive and dying. But their executioners covered their screams and groans with earth. One of them survived: he was saved by a man who, after hearing machine gun fire, went unknowingly to the scene of the massacre. He heard moans coming from underground, and so he saved the sole survivor, hiding him in his home. Thanks to him, the mass grave, the other bodies, and the horrific story were discovered.

At the ceremony held here in 2013, the speaker to remember Walter Rossi was Massimo Ottolenghi, a partisan active in the Lanzo Valleys. He recalled the noble and moving speech given here in 1946 by Walter’s mother, Itala Ghiron, who said: “Now each of us has twenty-seven children to honor. For my part, I can only recall one. They called him Mosquito; he was a good soul. He had the unforgivable sin of being Jewish, and he had declared it, almost as a challenge, in response to those who had accused him of being a coward because he had not yet enlisted.” And he concluded with great bitterness: “There are no adequate words or thoughts to remember; there can only be silence. Today we are not yet worthy of speaking, of invoking values, of remembering these dead. We cannot bear witness if we have learned nothing from their sacrifice; we cannot bear witness if we have not understood that freedom and democracy, once achieved, must be defended.”

In a testimony given to ISTORETO in 2003, Massimo Ottolenghi wanted to compare the figure of Walter Rossi to that of another Jewish partisan, a young intellectual, horribly tortured and murdered by the Nazi-Fascists, Emanuele Artom. In his memory, every year a march is held, leading students from Turin’s schools from Platform 17 of Porta Nuova station to Piazzetta Primo Levi, where excerpts from his diaries are read to provide food for thought for the present and the future that awaits us.

Two great men, Walter and Emanuele, shared a frailty and weakness of body, but not of spirit. Massimo Ottolenghi had helped Walter with his studies to pass his high school diploma, while he had been Emanuele’s classmate for two years. He had then helped Walter’s parents, his wife’s uncles, trying to put them in contact with the Prosecutor’s Office, filing complaints himself to shed light on their son’s tragic story, but to no avail.

Allow me on this occasion to emphasize the important contribution of Italian Jews to the Resistance against Fascism and Nazi occupation: over a thousand joined the partisan formations as fighters. Numerous were also leaders of the National Liberation Committee, including Umberto Terracini and Emilio Sereni for the Communist Party and Leo Valiani for the Action Party. Throughout the War of Liberation, exclusively Jewish partisan units were never formed: those who fought did so in the national anti-fascist formations, within which the “citizenship pact” shattered by the racist laws of 1938 was effectively reinstated.

Many of these partisans died in combat, many were arrested and then killed in summary executions, while others were imprisoned or deported as political prisoners. However, the partisan choice for Jews carried an additional risk: those captured, if recognized as such, followed the fate of other members of the “Jewish race” in the Nazi extermination camps. This was the case for Primo Levi and two young Jewish women, Luciana Nissim and Vanda Maestro. The three were friends and together decided to join a partisan group in the Aosta Valley. They were arrested by fascist militias in December 1943. All three were deported to Auschwitz in February 1944. Primo Levi and Luciana Nissim survived the Holocaust, while Vanda Maestro sadly died in the gas chambers.

While Primo Levi’s story is widely known, for years those of many other Jewish partisans fell into oblivion, only to be rediscovered in recent decades thanks to the meritorious work of historians. Many of these stories are now available on the portal of the Contemporary Jewish Documentation Center “Jewish Resistance Fighters of Italy,” which will subsequently lead to a book by scholar Liliana Picciotto, due out in the coming months. The book will be previewed at the Jewish Community headquarters on Sunday, April 26, at 5:30 p.m., during an event celebrating Liberation Day, to which all citizens are invited.

The Liberation Day from Nazi-Fascist rule, which restored to Jews the rights of citizenship and equality that had been violently suppressed by the racist laws of 1938, is therefore a key moment in the long history of the Jewish presence in Italy, which has lasted over 2,200 years.

And the remembrance we renew each year of the sacrifice of the martyrs of Pian del Lot, as well as those of the Fosse Ardeatine and many other Nazi-Fascist massacres, far from being a merely celebratory moment, is therefore an essential occasion to reaffirm once again our commitment to pursuing the ideals for which they paid with their lives with determination and civic conscience, so as not to forget the atrocities of the past and to call for a constant commitment to the fight against anti-Semitism, racism and all forms of intolerance and for the inalienable rights of justice, equality and freedom.

DARIO DISEGNI